Property Stories: Turning passive browsers into engaged buyers

Engagement

Retention

Shipped

Industry

Real Estate Tech

Client

Movoto Real Estate

Main Project Image

The Setup

In 2023, Movoto made a bet on video. Short-form content was dominating social media, and the hypothesis was simple. Bring that same immersive quality to listing discovery, and buyers would have a reason to stay longer and come back. But behind the metrics was something more human. This was the tail end of the pandemic, and many buyers were making life-changing decisions about homes they'd never physically walked through. The stakes for getting the digital experience right had never been higher.

Large Project Gallery Image #1

The Challenge

We launched Stories and ran an A/B test, users with Stories ON versus Stories OFF. The results were almost identical. No stat sig difference. On the surface, Stories wasn't working. But a flat aggregate can hide a sharper truth. Before accepting the read, I pulled the data apart by engagement.

What I Did

Users who actively engaged with Stories returned at a 68% weekly rate. Users who never saw it returned at 41%. Nearly twice as often. The feature wasn't the problem. Engagement quality was, and only 13% of users were actually using Stories. That reframed the work. Instead of designing a better feature, I needed to design a more compelling entry point.

I tested aspect ratios first, 9:16, 4:3, and 16:9, looking for the right format for real estate photography, which is inherently landscape. Engagement came back nearly equivalent across formats, so I made a judgment call. 9:16 felt most native to how users already consume vertical content. To solve the cropping problem the format introduced, I added pan and Ken Burns animations, turning a technical constraint into a cinematic experience. I also built sharing directly into the Stories view to deepen interaction.

The Outcome

Engagement with Stories grew from 13% to 40%. Post-launch Google Analytics confirmed what the stickiness data had been pointing at all along. 30% longer sessions. 20% more pages per session. Users who engaged with Stories became the app's most retained cohort.

The Tension

Not every user loved it, and that's worth saying. One user told us directly they didn't have time for a video slideshow. They were moving fast because good homes go quickly. Stories served the exploratory buyer beautifully, the one still dreaming, still open to being surprised. But the high-intent buyer in crunch mode had a different need entirely. That distinction shapes how I think about every project now.

What I learned

The A/B test that looked like a failure was actually pointing at something more important. Engagement quality predicts retention far more than feature exposure alone. A flat result isn't always a dead end. Sometimes it's an invitation to ask a better question.