Mobile Experience · REIT
Mobile App for Leasing & Living
The first single-family rental app in the industry — designed to make searching, touring, and living in a home feel like one product, not five.
At a glance
Context
Invitation Homes — a $13B publicly-traded REIT and the largest single-family rental operator in the US — needed a mobile experience that could support both sides of the journey: prospects searching and touring homes, and residents managing life in their home.
Existing touchpoints were spread across the website, third-party tools, and legacy flows, leading to inconsistent patterns, unclear expectations, and avoidable support contacts. Leadership wanted the app to reflect the company's strategy as the leading single-family rental brand — but there was no unified product vision, no shared component library for mobile, and limited in-house experience shipping high-quality native experiences at scale.
Constraints
- 01
Two-sided product — prospect search/tour and resident daily-use — inside one app, without one side eating the other's clarity.
- 02
Web experience was live and well-adopted; app and web could not drift into different mental models.
- 03
Design team of two designers plus shared PM and engineering partners — MVP had to ship in five months.
- 04
No existing mobile pattern library; native patterns had to be built while shipping the launch product.
Approach
Defined the end-to-end mobile product vision
Partnered with product, marketing, and operations to define a clear narrative: search, tour, lease, and live in your home in one place. Framed how the mobile experience should complement the website, not compete with it — and identified the core jobs to be done at each stage (prospecting, applying, move-in, everyday living).
Designed the highest-leverage journeys first
Led design for search, saved homes, self-tours, application entry points, payments, and resident services. Residents can move between app and web without relearning basic interactions or getting stuck in different mental models.
Extended the web design system into mobile
Defined navigation, layout, and interaction patterns that felt native to iOS and Android while staying structurally aligned with the web ecosystem. Right-sized the first release with engineering to avoid one-off 'special' screens that would be hard to maintain.
Embedded with engineering to ship — not just spec
Design worked directly with mobile engineers in backlog grooming, technical spikes, and design reviews to de-risk complex interactions like self-tours, map search, and account actions. Iterative prototypes and feature flags got working builds in stakeholders' hands quickly.
“Consistently strikes the balance between meeting business requirements and demonstrating empathy. Her ability to connect the dots ensures everyone understands the bigger picture and works toward a shared goal.”
Artifacts
Outcome
Delivered iOS and Android parity with the web experience, established the resident mobile pattern library, and grounded the app in the operational realities of leasing at scale.
5-star iOS rating with 1,000+ reviews. Downloads up 31% post-launch, App Store views up 265%, and 96% positive response on the move-in checklist experience.
Beyond the numbers: internal understanding of what the app is for — and how it fits into the broader Invitation Homes product ecosystem — improved dramatically. Future teams could extend the app without fragmenting the experience again.
What I'd do differently
I'd stand up a shared mobile design system as a named 1.0 earlier. We got to a coherent pattern library by shipping — but codifying it as a versioned product a quarter sooner would have paid back in every subsequent release. The org was ready to invest before I asked them to.
§ End of case 03