Homebuyer Personas

Overview

Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group is an independent mortgage lender serving Virginia, North Carolina, and other markets on the East coast.

Time Frame: 6 months
Team: Data Analyst, Interviewer
My Main Roles: Project Lead, Interviewer, Researcher
Tools: Notion, SurveyMonkey, Zoom, Microsoft Excel

Understanding the Problem

While creating content and campaigns, the department lacked a reliable and realistic representation of our homebuyer audiences. The department assumed what the needs of the current and potential homebuyers were.

Process

Face-to-Face Interviews

Conducted Zoom interviews with 10 homeowners (friends and family) over a 2 week period. We analyzed the qualitative data to see commonalities and pain points – first-time homebuyers wanted a more hands-on approach throughout the mortgage process. While more experienced homebuyers typically focused more on getting the best rates and closing on time.

Surveyed Homeowners

After interviewing 10 homeowners, I was able to identify pain points and wanted to expand upon those findings. So, I surveyed over 100 people in our various markets over the course of 2 weeks using SurveyMonkey. I asked each participant a set of 39 questions.

Analyzed Data

The team analyzed the data to extract trends, commonalities, and similar pain points. We were able to create a clearer picture of who our users were because of demographic and baseline questions:

What is your job title?
How would you describe your credit?
How many times have you gone through the mortgage process?

We looked at our goal-oriented and barrier questions to better build out and understand the behaviors of our users:

Why did you get your most recent mortgage?
How challenging were specific aspects of the mortgage process (like applying for the mortgage, collecting necessary documents, and understanding closing costs)?

Built Base Personas

This information helped us noodle on the needs for different persona types and if there were any universal needs that could be addressed for all persona types. At this point, we had broken out the personas into four homebuyer types:

First-time Homebuyer
Younger Experienced Homebuyer
Older Experienced Homebuyer, and
Refinancer

For example, our First-time Homebuyer shaped out to be a healthcare professional who wants to find an affordable mortgage, so they can stop renting. Low monthly payment is a bigger priority over other monetary factors. Their biggest factor in getting a home loan is not knowing much about the mortgage process and mortgage eligibility requirements.

Next Steps

We planned to use this information from the survey and informal interviews to launch into conducting in-person or virtual interviews with our current customers or potential customers in the market. After presenting our baseline persona work, the project lead executive leadership’s work on customer journeys and internal company structures and processes.

Outcomes and Takeaways

Created 4 baseline personas based on the types of homebuyers in order to understand how the department can better attract and interact with our customers. The results mainly resonated and confirmed our assumptions. We were able to influence the creation and emphasis on important resources for the borrowers like a Mortgage Documents Checklist which was mentioned across the first-time homebuyers and the experienced homebuyers in our interviews and survey results.

We also were able to make incremental improvements to the website and other areas from the results:
- highlighting our awards and reviews more prominently to help build more trust with our users
- building out a glossary of terms