Putting People First: Why Resident Experience is Now the Most Important Part of Real Estate Development

User experience (UX) design is a well established field. A UX designer’s job is to make a product or service usable, enjoyable, and accessible. Most of us are familiar with this idea from the apps and websites we use every day.

We’ve all been to websites that are absolutely incomprehensible. We’ve also been to websites that are sleek, intuitive to use, and fun to spend time on. The difference in these digital experiences is the result of user experience designers guiding the development of the product.

Weirdly, an equivalent role does not exist in the field of real estate development. This is in spite of the fact that (for now, at least) humans spend 100% of their time in some kind of physical environment. And the way the built environment is configured has a profound impact on the health and quality of life of the people who live in that environment.

So the built environment determines how happy we are, how healthy we are, and how much money we have, yet I’m telling you that absolutely no thought is put into how its design affects the people who live in it?

Yep, that’s exactly right.

Traffic engineers study how well roads move cars through a city.

Structural engineers make sure buildings don’t fall down.

Land use attorneys charge thousands of dollars to decipher an arcane zoning code only to tell you that you cannot, in fact, open a coffee shop in your neighborhood.

The list goes on through what feels like a never-ending stream of specialists and consultants.

But - and please pardon my French - what about the fucking people??? The people who actually - I don’t know - MAKE UP A CITY? The people who live and work in a place every day? Who’s looking out for them? Who’s thinking about how all these other things come together to make life enjoyable or, more often, miserable for the people who live somewhere?

Guess what - the people are the only thing that matters. If life sucks for the people who live somewhere then it doesn’t matter how sleek the architecture looks or how many cars per day drive on the road. If it doesn’t provide a good life for the people who actually live there, it’s a failure.

What Lead to This Unfortunate State of Affairs?

We have professionals to design buildings. We have professionals to design the electrical and plumbing systems of those buildings. We have professionals to make sure there are no toxic substances in the soil. We have professionals who calculate how much sewage your building will generate. We even have professionals who tell you which trees to plant, where to plant them, and how much to water them.

We have professionals to do everything, it seems, except think about how well an environment will suit the people who live in it.¹ Why is this the case?

Maybe part of the problem is that “Resident Experience” is too broad of a topic. Someone designing a place that’s great for humans would need to be well versed in architecture and urban design to design public and private places that are enjoyable for people to spend time in.

But they would also have to be well versed in finance to make sure they can provide those spaces at a price that people can afford. And they would have to be well versed in transportation and how it relates to the rest of the city to make sure people can access daily needs by foot, bike, or other means. Maybe this doesn’t exist just because that combination of knowledge is rare in an individual developer?

Nope, not buying it.

The idea that Resident Experience Design doesn’t exist simply because it would require a generalist rather than a specialist doesn’t do it for me.

Here’s the actual reason Resident Experience Designers don’t exist: they’ve never been needed.

The case for a User Experience Designer in a digital product is obvious. Let’s say you have two e-commerce websites that do roughly the same thing: sell stuff online.

One of the websites hires a user experience designer to make it fast, easy to navigate, and frictionless to check out. The finished product looks like this:

The other doesn’t hire a User Experience Designer and looks like this:

What’s going to happen? More people will use the one that offers the best experience. Over time it will grow, and the other one will shrink and eventually die².

This is about as intuitive as it gets. The product or service that best delivers on a customer’s needs will be the one that, over time, serves more customers and grows. The product or service that doesn’t successfully give people what they want will struggle to survive.

Real Estate Only Recently Became a Free Market

Weird as it may sound, real estate has never been subject to the competitive pressure I just described.

Historically, it didn’t matter if real estate was well suited to the people who lived there, because individuals weren’t really the ones making decisions about where they lived. Most people’s lives were determined by the needs of their employer.

If your company said you had to live in Houston, you packed up and moved to Houston. You maybe had a month or two to find a house, but your main focus was on finding a place to live in that particular city at an acceptable commute to your office and maybe in a decent school district for the kids. That was it.³

And guess what? If your employer decided they now need you in Sacramento, you packed up and moved to Sacramento and repeated the house search there.

In either case, what housing you ended up with was less a function of your preference and more a function of where your employer happened to be located. Developers and homebuilders could get away with building things that were bad for Residents because the Residents weren’t making the decision about where to live: their employers were.

So that’s the real reason that the field of Resident Experience Design doesn’t exist: it never mattered. Developers could build anything and it would be leased or purchased. Not because it was what people wanted, but because they had to live there. Until now.

Do You Smell That?

The absence of any kind of Resident Experience Design is simultaneously a tragedy and the largest opportunity that exists in the field today.

Three years ago, tens of millions of people woke up and realized they can work from anywhere. It suddenly didn’t matter if their employer was in Houston. They could live in Houston, or they could just as easily be in Miami or Amsterdam. Nearly overnight, real estate developers became subject to the exact same competitive pressures as every other industry.

Most of them just don’t realize it yet.

Real estate developers can no longer ignore the needs of Residents and be successful. Quite the opposite, actually. The better they understand and deliver on the needs of Residents, the more successful they will be. So real estate developers must now adapt and become more like - well - a real business. You know, the kind that actually has to provide people what they want at an acceptable price.

For developers, the competition is no longer the other apartment buildings in the city they build in. The competition is every existing and potential unit of housing in the country.

This will be a new golden age for Residents as developers compete to offer the best Resident Experience.

Now What?

A new theme of this blog is that so much about the real estate industry will have to be completely reinvented going forward. Many of the development practices that worked in the past will not work going forward. And many of the practices that will work going forward do not yet exist.

It’s up to us - you and me and the others reading this blog - to invent those practices.

I submit the creation of the field of Resident Experience Design as a needed first step in that direction. Next post, we’ll look at how we could actually define and measure what a great Resident Experience looks like.

Until next time,

Joel

P.S.

You may notice that I’ve recently made a change in the blog to be a little more “themed” in the direction of the future of real estate. Do you like the change? Let me know by commenting or replying to this email!

1. Some people might argue that the role of Resident Experience Designer should be taken up by the developer of a project. Maybe in theory this is true, but I have not seen a single instance of a developer who, from the beginning, prioritized the Resident’s daily life and explicitly made design decisions, financial decisions, or any other kind of decisions in accordance with what is best for the Resident over the long term. Of course, much of it simply comes down to incentives. Most developers don’t care what the end product is like for the Resident because they sell the building as soon as it’s complete.

2. Or limps along for decades and is somehow still around? I guess now it’s retro!

3. Of course that wasn’t it! There is nuance here, and this isn’t how every household made location decisions. You could go in the opposite direction - decide on a city and then find a job that fit your skills. But this was less common, and usually meant a less than optimal match. For example, if you were a finance specialist, you would be leaving wages on the table by living in Nashville instead of New York. But overall the job → city path was the strongest force determining where people lived.