Property Tycoon live auction game

🕐 min read

Lead a small team to conceptualise, design and build a fantasy sports app for property auctions

Property Tycoon live auction game
The overall feel of the project had a certain US President feel. Which we ultimately resented.

Overview & role

In one of our legendary REAio Hack Days in 2015, I was part of a small team looking in to my idea for combining the live, real-world appeal of fantasy sports with another famous weekend pastime for Australians: property auctions.

We had three days to sketch, design and build a web application to present back to the company. The team comprised three engineers and myself as designer & front end developer.

Our promo video for Tycoon I designed and edited. Hopefully this makes sense.

Problem & opportunity

There isn't really a problem to solve with gamifiying property.

But you should know, in Melbourne and Sydney the majority of homes are sold by auction: humans literally stand in the street opposite a home and bid in real time, ultimately entering in to a legally binding contract to purchase a property simply by raising their hand (it's pretty wild).

Group of people
The team that took on the challenge of building an addictive game in 3 days (spoiler: they did it).
Man conducting auction in front of crowd
For those outside Melbourne & Sydney, this is actually how we buy homes: in the street, in front of the home, by simply raising our hand and making a bid (image via Wikimedia Commons).

The other thing you need to know is Australians love property. I mean like crazy love looking at homes. Mostly online, something we effectionately refer to as House Porn. But they also turn out in droves for auctions. Everyone will go and have a look at homes in an area when they open for inspection.

Australian's also love to be an expert on all things property.

At every single event or weekend party, invariably a group will always be gathered around discussing house prices, the market, what's hot, the new growth suburbs.

With so much love for homes, speculating on property values and this weekend hustle to follow live auctions we knew there had to be a gamification opportunity.

Presenting to the big dawgs
Showing the final experience, focused on empowering users to quickly scan homes, tap to open a swipable gallery (most common request from our users) and the final sale interaction shown right.

Ideation & concepts

Being a hackathon we only had 3 days and I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. This was about validating an idea as quickly as possible with an audience. We sketched out a few ideas as a group:

We agreed to focus on a simple game play:

List of property cards in desktop
Putting together our pitch for the final presentation.
List of property cards in desktop
Example of our desktop interace which ironically was used more than mobile as colleagues set their listings at work on a Friday afternoon.

Prototype & testing

We simultaenously built the UI whilst we created the back end. Our goal was to validate with our colleagues the forthcoming weekend with actual data, actual auctions. We focused on building a simple, mobile prime interaction that minimised thinking and simply allowed you to play with few barriers to entry.

After testing a crude prototype with colleagues after the first day, we found they wanted two key addition features:

See more photos of the property, and also be able to find out info about the suburb. So we added a carousel of images and also a quick link to the suburb profile page.

Worth noting that I never mocked *any* of the screens. Everything was created in code, in browser

The visual style borrowed largely from the core REA UI library.

We pushed it live around midday on the Thursday night over several beers. I normally advocate for work life balance but every now and then I absolutely love hacking all night.
Chart showing consistent user retention
Our user patterns over the course of the seven weeks we ran the trial. We gained users each week but were able to grow new users and retain existing ones despite no new features and a $20 gift card for the weekly winner.

Impact & results

We launched it the Friday night of the Hackers Marketplace with more than 40 colleagues signing up. In subsequent weeks that number would rise to over 100, with new players joining and some dropping off yet our weekly active users remained roughly consistent despite no new features.

After 7 weeks of testing we shut it down after minimal feature enhancement and difficulty juggling our day jobs. But clearly we were on to something.

Despite not getting funded to make it production ready due to other business priorities, we were pleased to see the concept validated and come to life elsewhere, which you can see at Property Tycoon.