Responses by Drew Ungvarsky, CEO/executive creative director, Grow

Background: While online home searching revolutionized the real estate industry, the category hasn’t substantially evolved in the last decade. Home search websites all offer the same data, and the same, underwhelming experience—scan through countless pages of irrelevant results. Filter, refresh and repeat. We reimagined Homes.com with a stunning design, best-in-class user experience and multiple innovations that reinvent the category.

Highlights: An online search that is inspired by the way buyers search in real life conversationally—and not just with a zip code; the Snap & Search national visual search tools for homebuyers; the Homes.com Match and the HomeShare, where buyers can save, organize, share and discuss their favorite homes—all in one place.

Challenges: Home search sites are all driven by the same core set of home listing data. In seeking to differentiate the Homes.com experience, we sought new and innovative ways to analyze and interpret the data. This inspired us to use artificial intelligence, and to create a user experience that better mirrored the real-life search process.

Favorite details: We made the home search process smarter, faster, easier to organize, more personalized, more shareable and more mobile-friendly than ever before—all with a human-like search that thinks like you do.

Navigational structure: Instead of searching by city or zip code and returning hundreds of irrelevant listings, the home page offers a conversational approach—tell Homes.com what matters most, just as users would tell a friend or trusted advisor. Just like the real life home search, Homes.com Match allows users to specify “must have” and “nice to have” features and prioritizes homes accordingly.

Technical features: The user-facing portion of the site was built using React, a Javascript library and framework that allowed us to efficiently architect and reuse components for an extremely user interface-heavy application. The backend of the site is powered by an array of different languages and platforms but predominantly relied on Node and Solr.

Anything new: We discovered how influential edge cases could be to important user interface decisions.