Agencies lost their consultants. I built the renewal system that replaces them, and the engine that lets it scale.

The story in 60 seconds

Problem

Consultant coverage for agencies spending under AED 24K a year was withdrawn during the regional conflict. They had to commit a year’s budget unassisted, on a screen where the offer was split across stacked discounts.

The pivot

Client conversations suggested customisable plans would drive engagement. As the market stabilised, agencies cared less about flexibility and more about finishing quickly; only 2 in 6 built their own plan. So we shifted to reducing friction.

Key decisions

Built the commercial back-office (Contract Engine) before adding screens. Kept exclusivity nudges within plan selection, behind a dedicated consent step. Led with a recommended plan, with Build your own replacing the consultant callback.

Trade-off

Plan selection carries one additional consideration, so the value of exclusivity can be compared across plans.

Result

Plan selection rose from 46% to 80% of agencies who open their renewal plans, and from 20% to 78% of those go on to sign. Shown as rates, because the pool of eligible agencies changes every month.

The shift

From calculating an offer to choosing a plan

↔

BeforeAfter

BeforeCompareAfter

• –Values on the recommended plan reduced from 9 to 3; offer rules per plan from up to four to one.
• –The current contract is shown above all options as a reference point.
• –The consultant callback was replaced with a self-built plan, priced in real time.

Context

Renewals depended on a consultant

PF Expert is where real estate agencies manage their listings and their yearly contract with Property Finder. They buy credits each month and spend them to publish and promote listings, so renewals drive recurring revenue. When a contract ended, a business consultant guided the agency through the renewal. The renewal screen itself ended with “Your Business Consultant will reach out to you as soon as possible.”

How a renewal used to work

When the regional conflict began, smaller agencies came under significant financial pressure, and some closed. Consultant coverage for agencies spending under AED 24K a year was withdrawn, leaving them to commit a year’s budget on a screen that had been designed to be explained by a person.

Click “Learn more”

Standard plan breakdown×

Early renewal and PF Expert exclusive bonuses apply for the full contract duration. Relief offer of 5,000 bonus credits applies only for the first 3 months.

Relief and promotional offers

SourceCredits/moDuration

Relief offer+5,000First 3 months

5% early renewal offer+1,000All 12 months

10% PF Expert exclusive offer+5,000All 12 months

Credit breakdown

Flex credits10,000 credits/mo

Bonus credits1,000 credits/mo

Total credits10,100 credits/mo

Close

Self-serve completion reached 9%, against a 20% target.

More than half of agencies left before choosing a plan, and four in five of those who did choose one never signed. They weren’t rejecting the offer; they were struggling to work it out. A relief offer applied for three months, an early-renewal bonus and an exclusive bonus each applied for twelve, and the totals sat in a separate table.

The constraints

• –Every offer was hard-coded into the screens, so each new offer meant a design and engineering rework.
• –No researcher was available, so I ran research myself while supporting two squads.
• –The performance data needed for personalised recommendations wasn’t available that quarter.
• –The same flow had to work in five markets, from AED to QAR with VAT.

The tension

Commercial was used to shaping each offer freely, so a structured model felt like a loss of control. But every bespoke offer required a design ticket, an engineering build and another rule for agencies to interpret. The flexibility Commercial valued was the main obstacle to scale.

Workshop

Aligning on what to automate before designing

Before any design work, I ran an internal workshop with Commercial, Engineering and Product, the teams accountable for renewals. The objective was to establish how far we could reduce human intervention, and to agree where a person still added value. We worked through four “How might we” questions, generated more than 50 ideas and prioritised four by vote.

Automated versus human-assisted

Automated

Renewals and auto-renewals, upgrades and top-ups, AI suggestions, new business sign-up, onboarding, returning clients and credit carry-forward.

Human-assisted

Payment issues, contract termination and downgrades, temporary account holds, replacement contracts, parent-to-child account mapping.

Upgrade signals the platform already holds

The signals a consultant relied on to open a renewal or upgrade conversation were already in the platform. The system could read them directly:

New roles and requirements in the journey

Without a consultant, the user’s role became significant. Decision makers can sign and renew; admins cannot. I introduced a path for admins to recommend a plan, so the same journey ends in a purchase for decision makers and a recommendation for admins. Stakeholders also asked for every bonus and discount to be displayed.

Workshop outputs

Each “How might we” question was explored on its own board. The notes are the team’s contributions; the key themes are my synthesis.

Prioritised ideas

The fourth, a burn-rate upgrade prompt, reframes a retention risk as a growth opportunity. It shipped as part of Upgrades.

The pivot

We bet on flexibility. Agencies wanted to finish.

Our first hypothesis came from client conversations during the conflict. Agencies under financial pressure told us they wanted to reshape their spend, so we expected customisable plans to drive engagement, and treated Build your own as a headline feature.

Hypothesis

Customisable plans would drive engagement. Agencies under pressure would want to build their own renewal rather than repeat last year’s package.

What changed

As the market stabilised, agencies cared less about flexibility and more about completing the renewal quickly and with confidence. In testing, only 2 in 6 agencies used Build your own; the other 4 chose the plan we recommended.

New direction

Reduce friction instead of adding choice. Lead with one recommended plan, give every plan the same few variables, move the detail to just before signing, and keep Build your own as the answer when nothing fits.

That shift shaped every decision that follows, and it shows in the funnel: the biggest gains came at the stages where agencies used to stop and calculate.

Decisions

Two decisions that shaped the redesign

What shipped

Less to work out at every step

When no plan fits

Agencies whose needs did not match any plan were the clearest test of self-serve, and the point where earlier versions relied most on a consultant. Each version of the screen handled that case differently.

1. Before relief

   Q1 2026

   A full column directing the agency to request a call back from their consultant.

   Need another option?

   If you can’t find what you are looking for, you can request a call back.

   Your Business Consultant will reach out to you as soon as possible to discuss further.

   Request a call back

2. Relief launch

   Q2 2026

   Reduced to a banner, but still dependent on a consultant many agencies no longer had.

   Need another option?

   If you can’t find what you are looking for, request a callback and your Business Consultant will be in touch.

   Request a callback

3. My redesign, live

   Q3 2026

   The agency configures its own plan and sees the price immediately.

   ?

   Don’t see a plan that fits?

   Build your own plan and choose the credits that work best for your business.

   Build your own renewal plan

A callback remains available as a fallback, but the primary path is now self-serve.

Five changes to reduce effort at the point of decision

1. 1 of 5Comparable plansMaintain, Grow and Accelerate show price and price per credit side by side, with at most one bonus line, so relative value is clear.Addresses the clarity gap.
2. 2 of 5Visible urgencyA generic “act now” banner became a tiered incentive: 15% at 150 days, 10% at 90 and 5% under 30, with the agency’s current position marked.Same incentive, clearly communicated.
3. 3 of 5An option when no plan fitsAgencies enter the credits they need and the price updates. It serves the minority who want control, without a callback.2 in 6 agencies used it in testing; the rest chose the recommendation.
4. 4 of 5Friction where it is warrantedAgencies would not opt into exclusivity without understanding it. PF Edge has a dedicated step, a plain-language trade-off and a required acknowledgement.Research finding 3.
5. 5 of 5Full transparency before signingMonthly credits, invoices and required documents are presented immediately before signature.The detail from the former “Learn more” pop-up, shown at the relevant moment.

Upgrades

Growing between renewals, on the same model

Upgrades let an agency add credits mid-contract instead of waiting a year. Because offers already lived in Contract Engine, upgrades launched in Q3 on the same packages and patterns as renewals. No new offer logic, and nothing new for agencies to learn.

RenewalsUpgrades

Pre-built plansBuild your own

Admins told us they care about what an upgrade delivers, not its size as a percentage. Build your own already uses credits and AED; the fixed tiers still lead with “Upgrade by 10%”. Reframing them around outcomes is the next iteration.

How I worked

Research every cycle, alignment before build

Exploring before committing

I explored three ways an agency could choose a plan, then recommended a hybrid: recommended plans as the primary path, a self-built plan as the alternative, and a single consistent checkout.

Research, and how I used AI

I ran 10 client sessions myself across Emerald and Sapphire agencies. I used AI to cluster session notes into themes, then reviewed and refined them myself, and built working simulations to test on live calls, so agencies responded to real pricing rather than static mock-ups. The research produced six findings, each with a design response. Decisions on which findings to act on, and what to gate, remained mine.

The most significant finding reframed the brief: agencies could use the product; what they lacked was confidence in the offer. The findings and responses are below.

Ownership

Me

Every renewal and upgrade screen and state, the PF Edge journey, five market variants, the Contract Engine admin structure, and all 10 research sessions.

The team

The PM owns the business framing. Engineering built Contract Engine and the flows. Commercial owns package values and country terms. Consultants keep downgrades and other high-stakes cases.

Outcomes

Results and attribution

Since the conflict quarter, conversion has grown steadily at every stage of the renewal journey. The largest change came after plan selection: agencies who choose a plan now go on to sign.

Understanding the renewal funnel and measurement approach

Unlike a traditional conversion funnel, the renewal journey operates on a rolling eligibility window. Agencies become eligible at different points, as their contracts approach renewal, so the number entering the journey changes month on month. A fixed customer base would misrepresent it.

To keep comparisons consistent, I use a standardised cohort of 1,000 eligible agencies to illustrate the conversion rate at each stage. The rates come from our analytics; the cohort size is for illustration only.

What I claim

In a standardised cohort of 1,000 eligible agencies, plan selection rose from 460 to 800 and signed renewals from 90 to 620, and the improvement has held since. The redesign removed the steps where agencies had to stop and calculate.

What I don’t

The market stabilised over the same period, which helped. And because the renewal pool changes every month, I report stage ratios, not absolute volumes.

What’s next

Showing each agency what matters to them

Contract Engine already puts every agency in a customer group, by market, segment and client type, and each group gets its own offer. The next step is to use what the platform knows to explain the recommendation itself.

Also on the list

Read the live results

Report Emerald and Sapphire against their targets, with plan mix and overall renewal rate beside them.

Bring the decision maker in

Admins often need the owner’s approval. Let them share a renewal without leaving the platform.

Validate the new markets

My research covered the UAE only. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt each need their own sessions.

Reflection

What I’d do differently

I’d spend much more time understanding what else my clients use, from other portals to the other Property Finder products they already buy, and how we could stack Property Finder’s offering differently. The journey may not need to look like this at all.

With more time, I’d explore a stackable version of Build your own: the agency chooses a base plan with no benefits revealed, then adds benefits one at a time, seeing what each one adds. It’s a complex proposition, and Commercial has turned it down once. I’d still like to explore it.

I’d also agree how to measure every trade-off before it ships. We kept PF Edge in plan selection on purpose but never tracked how agencies responded to it, so Decision 02 is still a judgement, not a result.

What I’d keep