RealPage
COVID closed leasing offices overnight, and multifamily operators like Greystar had no way to renew leases at a distance. RealPage’s software had to carry them, and every lease that moved online added to a usage-based DocuSign bill. I led design on what started as a scoped UI refresh and turned it into a rebuild: one self-service flow for leasing and renewals, signing built in-house, and renters finishing on their phones.
What I walked into
RealPage’s clients renewed leases across a desk. COVID took the desk away.
Operators like Greystar had no plan for remote leasing. Renewals fell back to drop-off and the dated, fragmented digital flow inside RealPage’s software.
Nobody truly designed the renewal flow. It was accumulated. Forms scrolled for days, inputs repeated across screens, and agent and renter responsibilities tangled together on the same pages.
Two flows, one form
Agent and renter responsibilities shared the same surfaces, and no system logic decided what belonged to whom.
Fields without guidance
Nothing told anyone what mattered, what came next, or what they could skip.
Scroll as strategy
One unbroken form covered every possible scenario, whether or not it applied to the person filling it out.
The bet
The brief asked for a UI refresh, on a flow that still assumed an agent sat beside the renter.
Social distancing ruled out watching leasing teams work, so a researcher on my team ran interviews with office managers, agents, and renters, and we worked in generalities. It was the first research effort I wasn’t fully involved in, and RealPage’s mature practice made that work.
Two findings stood out. Leasing teams found renewals harder than new leases, because a renewal often meant raising the rent on a good tenant, a conversation they preferred face to face. Renters had to start from scratch, re-entering nearly everything they’d given to rent the place.
I chunked the flow into steps a renter could follow without that conversation, and split out the property managers’ tasks. Then I mapped every requirement across both flows, with the legal reason behind each, into one matrix. A new lease and a renewal ran the same process, and a renewal just needed less of it. So we built one self-service flow for both.
What a renewal needed
Every requirement a new lease asks for, sorted by what a renewal actually needed. The old flow asked for all 24.
- New lease
- Required
- Renewal
- Not required
Needed for credit and background checks.
Role-appropriate surfaces
Renter and agent flows split apart. Each person sees only their own work.
Clear priority, clear path
Outstanding items stand out, finished ones get out of the way, and the next step never needs guessing.
Contextual by default
The wizard surfaces only what applies. No irrelevant fields, no decisions that don’t belong to you.
The hard call
The better renewals worked, the more they would cost.
DocuSign billed by usage, so every fix for operators raised RealPage’s bill, and a renewal flow that worked would push volume higher still. The whack-a-mole was already worth an estimated $8M at the signing rate of the time.
So we built a very simple eSign MVP in-house. It took a tiger team and skipped a deep validation cycle, and it’s still in production six years later.
I ran it alongside the renewal flow. Treating both workstreams as one system let decisions in one settle questions in the other.
Signing, end to end
Six steps from reminder to signed lease, all inside RealPage.
The MVP stayed simple, but it still had to cover everything DocuSign used to handle off-screen: consent, signature capture, and confirmation.
Document queue
Lists every section of the renewal and flags the ones still waiting on a decision.
The renter lifetime
The matrix had a third column, and it outgrew the project.
Beside New Lease and Renewal, the matrix tracked what a renter’s profile could carry forward: 14 of the 24 requirements. Once leasing and renewals ran as one flow, that column stopped being a field list and became a question for the business. What does RealPage know about a renter across a lifetime of leases?
I worked with one of our researchers to flesh out the answer into a story the rest of RealPage could use. We mapped renting as five life stages, each with its own triggers, motivators, and constraints, and shared it out across the organization. It informed RealPage’s wider strategy for the full renter lifetime, and became the first version of its lifetime renter value.
Emerging independence
“I just need a place close to school, cheap, and with decent WiFi.”
- Typical life stage
- College student, vocational training, or early job market
- Often supported by family or loans
- Motivators
- Proximity to campus or work
- Flexibility and affordability
- Independence from parents
- Rental triggers
- Moving out for college
- First job or internship
- Roommate living to share costs
What it moved
Renters renew on their own time. Leasing teams stop chasing signatures. RealPage stops paying DocuSign for every lease that goes remote.
- 2020
Operators’ renewals drop to paper.
- Before launch$8MDocuSign spend avoided
Estimated at the signing rate before the renewal flow launched. The savings started immediately and compounded every billing period after, as remote renewals added volume DocuSign would have billed.
- In production24%Faster to complete
Time from starting a renewal to finishing it varied widely, since people often opened one and came back days later, but the average dropped 24%. Completion rates rose too, though fewer people moving during COVID likely helped.
- Validation51%Higher validation score
Research tested the new prototype against the production flow.
- Today
The renewal flow and the eSign MVP still run in production for operators and renters.
$8M estimated at the signing rate before the renewal flow launched. 24% is the average reduction in time to complete, measured in production.
I owned the end-to-end flow and the signing experience, so each of these numbers traces directly to that work.
What I’d do differently
Keep the MVP, measure what it saved leasing teams, and put a number on the renter lifetime.
The eSign MVP became production truth. I don’t generally advocate for that, but a baseline was infinitely better than none. Signing also carries legal requirements that dictate specific actions in a specific shape, so there’s little to optimize beyond what’s necessary. It’s a unique situation, and it may still benefit from a follow-up.
Follow up on the MVP
Legal requirements leave little room to optimize signing, but six years in production earns it a second look.
Benchmark the chase
Nobody measured how long leasing teams spent chasing signatures before launch. That improvement belongs to this work, and I’d want the number.
Model lifetime value
Work with data to put numbers to lifetime renter value, and build a model that focuses effort on the levers with outsized opportunity, the ones that used to get flattened into “renter.”
What held up
Six years later, the renewal flow and the eSign MVP still run in production.
The renter lifetime model informed strategy well beyond the flow it started in. Design moved upstream and stayed there.