On-Site Leasing
Discovery research that reframed a sales problem as a product problem, surfacing operational realities leadership had not anticipated.
Overview
This project began as a request from RealPage leadership to understand stalled sales of On-Site Leasing: a product with no new client conversions in the previous year. The prevailing assumption was that sales were hindered by how the product was packaged or bundled, not by the product itself.
The original ask was narrow: capture endorsements from new users explaining why On-Site was a better leasing solution than what they had used before. The intended use was promotional, to give the Sales team fresh narratives for a repackaged push.
The premise had a problem. Using the Implementations Complete Date report and validating with Sales Account Reps, I confirmed that there were no net-new client wins. Every recent implementation came from existing clients expanding into newly acquired properties. The comparative experience the product team wanted to capture did not exist and would not materialize except by rare turnover event.
I presented these findings to the product team and made the case for a different research direction: capture the current-state user experience from active clients instead. The product team agreed and committed to supporting participant incentives, which made recruiting viable.
What followed was eight weeks of structured discovery across six client sessions, surfacing the operational complexity of day-to-day leasing work and the gaps in both product design and organizational support that site teams were quietly absorbing.
Research Approach
Recruiting was the first real challenge. Client access was complicated by the absence of recent migrations, by client relationships owned across multiple internal contact points, and by an initial candidate list that included clients in active escalation or competing engagements with other RealPage products. Getting to viable participants required navigating all of that before a single session could be scheduled.
Phase 1: Cross-Functional Recruiting Coordination
I partnered with Sales, Solution Account Managers, Implementations, and the Insights Reporting team to identify participants who were actively using On-Site and available for research. Recruiting and incentives tracking was maintained in Microsoft Loop to give all involved teams shared visibility and reduce coordination overhead.
Target participants were site-level Community Managers and Regional Managers: the people doing the leasing work, not those approving or reporting on it. Their daily experience was the unit of analysis.
Phase 2: Moderated Client Sessions
Six moderated research sessions were conducted over approximately eight weeks. Sessions focused on live workflows and real task behavior, not hypothetical preferences. Participants walked through their actual leasing processes, surfacing the tools they used, the steps they repeated, the errors they caught, and the workarounds they had built into their routines.
Special attention was paid to moments of normalization: places where participants described friction in a matter-of-fact tone that suggested they had stopped expecting anything better. Comfort navigating a difficult process is not evidence that the process is working; it is evidence of adaptation.
Phase 3: Synthesis and Leadership Readout
Findings were synthesized across sessions and organized by theme, with attention to both the frequency and operational severity of each pattern. The readout was delivered to product leadership in March 2025, structured to surface client voice clearly alongside the operational implications of each finding.
Key Findings
Client experience reflected an operational system held together by the persistence of site teams. Leasing workflows required navigating a patchwork of tools, manual steps, and undocumented recovery procedures, with successful outcomes depending more on user determination than product design.
"This is clearly well thought out and professionally presented. Loved the structure of your research approach, key findings, and operational impacts. Will help us make better product decisions."
Synchronization Failures Were Universal
Persistent synchronization failures across integrated systems were reported by every client in the study. This was not an edge case or an isolated technical issue; it was a baseline condition that site teams had incorporated into their expectations of the product. Workarounds for sync failures were treated as standard procedure.
Data Entry Was Repetitive Across Platforms
The same information was entered manually across multiple systems at multiple points in the leasing workflow. No single system of record existed for prospect data. The redundancy created both time cost and error risk, as discrepancies between systems had to be caught and reconciled by hand.
ID Verification Created Disproportionate Friction
ID verification issues were described by multiple participants as among the most frustrating recurring elements of the leasing process. The effort required to support residents through verification, troubleshoot failures, and manage exceptions consumed time that site teams could not easily recover elsewhere in the workflow.
Affordable Housing Workflows Were Significantly More Complex
Participants managing Affordable Housing properties described compliance-oriented workflows that added manual review, approval, and documentation steps not present in conventional property management. On-Site was not purpose-built to support these requirements. The result was a product that served market-rate operations adequately and Affordable Housing operations poorly, without surfacing that gap in standard performance data.
System Status Was Opaque
Users frequently lacked clear visibility into where a workflow stood, what had been completed, what was pending, and what action was required next. The absence of legible system state meant that site teams relied on memory, manual notes, or repeated checking to track progress through multi-step leasing processes.
Normalization Concealed the Severity of Friction
Site-level users had internalized significant amounts of operational friction through low expectations and habituated workarounds. This created a measurement problem: satisfaction signals from users who have adapted to a broken process do not accurately reflect the product's actual performance. The adaptation was visible; what it was covering was not.
High Retention Was Masking Feedback Cycles
High resident retention reduced the frequency of leasing activity at many properties, which in turn reduced the frequency of reported friction. Participants who leased infrequently encountered problems less often and had less occasion to escalate them. Market-rate retention trends have been notably high since 2021, compressing turnover volume across the industry. If retention softens and leasing volume increases, the operational gaps documented in this research will surface more visibly and more urgently.
Impact & Reflection
The research readout was delivered to SVP, GM, and PM leadership in March 2025. Feedback was explicitly positive, with appreciation for the structure, clarity, and fidelity of client voice in the findings. The engagement reinforced the case for ongoing UX research support in operationally complex product areas, rather than one-off efforts tied to discrete sales or product moments.
What this project reinforced:
- The value of interrogating the premise before committing to a method. The original research request was built on an assumption that turned out to be empirically false. Catching that early, using existing data, prevented six weeks of recruiting effort aimed at participants who did not exist and findings that would not have served the product team's actual needs.
- The importance of cross-functional coordination in recruiting. Access to the right participants required active partnership across Sales, SAMs, Implementations, and Reporting. No single team had a complete picture, and no single outreach path was sufficient. Shared tracking in Loop was essential to keeping that coordination legible across teams.
- The diagnostic value of normalization. The most operationally significant findings in this study were not the ones participants led with. They were the ones embedded in matter-of-fact descriptions of how things worked. Surfacing those required listening not just for what participants said was a problem, but for what they described as normal.
- The risk of low-signal satisfaction data in low-turnover environments. When leasing activity is infrequent, product friction is infrequent, and the feedback that would surface it is infrequent. Research that relies on complaint rates or escalation volume as a proxy for product health will miss problems that are real but rarely triggered. That is a structural risk that became visible in this study and is worth carrying forward as a methodological caution.
Artifacts
The following materials were produced during this engagement:
- Research plan (PDF): scoped effort, approach, and goals
- Interview guide (PDF): framework for participant sessions
- Key insights overview (PDF): summary of shared or high-priority findings across sessions
- Full research readout deck: presented to SVP, GM, and PM leadership in March 2025
- Recruiting and incentives tracker (Microsoft Loop): cross-functional participant coordination log
Note: The research plan, interview guide, and key insights overview are available as public PDFs. The full readout deck contains client-identifiable material and is subject to NDA restrictions; it can be discussed and selectively shared in portfolio conversations.