NORBAN — Real estate tech and design
Helping people sell their homes with a real estate service they can actually love and trust.
Norban is a real estate platform that came to change the game. Considering only 6% of Swedes trust real estate agents — in a country where the love to buy, sell and dream of homes is bigger than anywhere else — the industry begs for change. And that’s where Norban comes in.
Above is honoured and excited to be a part of driving positive change, from vision to mission to launch. Together we started by creating a brand identity as fresh as the startup’s ambition. From there we designed and developed multiple touch-points — including app and web — to support a homeowner’s selling journey from beginning to end.
BACKGROUND
The challenge of a criticised industry
Behind every home being sold, there is a story filled with emotions — be that the happiness of a new family member on the way, or the difficulties of a divorce. This experience should be taken with care, but the industry standard is a stressful realtor-centric commission model that imposes an upfront lack of trust.
We had then a multifaceted challenge in front of us: How can we design an experience that relies less on the realtor, and leverages technology in order to optimise workflow?
How can we create a real-estate platform that increases trust and transparency to ultimately create a much better experience for all?
OUR PROCESS
Pushing the envelope
Norban, as a passionate and eager startup, gave us the green light to push the envelope. We investigated, designed, tested and iterated until we found the MVP sweet spot. In order to understand the selling journey, we interviewed home owners through in-depth interviews combined with journey mapping workshops. From there, the design and dev team worked closely together with Norban in iterative sprints, until we were ready to push the release button.
Solution
Norban is a full real-estate service that drastically stands out in the industry. It has a human approach to their brand, and focuses on transparency and collaboration.
Working from the unbelievably fresh and newly designed brand identity, we together created an app where sellers can put their homes on the market by themselves and make informed decisions along the entire journey of their selling timeline. We created the web market place where buyers can browse, follow and book viewings from listing pages (which are nothing like any other out there). Our team also worked on creating a back-stage infrastructure that enables the entire Norban team to assist the transactions, and communicate with buyers and sellers at every step of the way.
We hope Norban continue on to taking the work to even higher levels, bringing joy, comfort and profit to the lives of many.
To have a long-term partner that truly understands our needs, our customers’ needs, and our business model is crucial. Above offers the full range of skills needed to develop exceptional products and service — to have UX, UI, AD, and tech in one partner has been invaluable. The quality of the people that work at Above basically means that it’s easier to sleep at night.
— Norban
Impact
Norban launched as a hybrid real-estate agency on July 1st 2019 running full-steam ahead, with plans of selling homes in all major Swedish cities by 2020. It enables their real estate agents and support team to work on salaries, and not commission, so that each home can be sold thoughtfully and carefully.
Norban has gathered attention from major outlets in Sweden. portraying how this new player in the game is here to shake the snowball.
About Norban
Norban is a digital challenger startup, working in the Swedish real-estate industry. It leverages technology to enable sellers, buyers and agents to have a more transparent and efficient experience when buying and selling homes.
Capabilities
Brand design & strategy
UX design & strategy
App and web UI design
Front-end and back-end development
App & Service roll-out management