HeyImmo

Feb 2025 – Oct 2025 • Your Real Estate AI Assistant

The Challenge

ImmoScout24 is Germany’s leading property platform, helping millions search, buy, and sell. The challenge was to offer more than listings — to provide a digital companion that supports users throughout the entire process of finding, living in, or owning a home.

My Part: After the initial designs by Sebastian Schwinkendorf and Paul Befort, I took over as UX Owner — preparing the designs for handover and evolving the project in close collaboration with the Web and App Product Managers. My main focus was on the interface rather than the LLM itself, though before the Quality Team was established, I also provided feedback on tone, wording, and response quality.

 

Problem 🔥

Traditional search tools focused on listings alone and lacked real-time guidance, while advice across the housing lifecycle (renting, buying, owning) remained fragmented and costly.

Solution 💡

We launched HeyImmo: a free, AI-powered assistant integrated into the ImmoScout24 app and website, built on deep property-domain data, offering personalized support across all user segments — renters, buyers, owners.

Ask me anything about real estate

HeyImmo allows users to ask anything — including context-specific questions based on the page they’re on.

It performs AI-powered searches to deliver tailored answers, provides relevant product recommendations depending on the user’s situation, and includes transparent sources for added credibility. Information is presented clearly through various mark-up and users can give feedback to help refine the experience.

Speak to me

HeyImmo supports voice input for a quick, hands-free experience. Using a familiar UI pattern like WhatsApp or ChatGPT, users can simply tap the mic and speak instead of typing.

Decrease Perceived Loading Time

Response times from HeyImmo ranged between 15–30 seconds, especially when a web search was required. While the tech team worked to reduce load times to the 3–10 second standard, we also needed a UX solution to improve perceived performance.

We addressed this through three measures:

  1. Transparency: Displaying what HeyImmo is doing, e.g. “Checking further sources” or “Looking for properties.”

  2. Paraphrasing: Showing an initial, rephrased summary of the user’s input to create instant engagement.

  3. Delight: Adding a colorful spinner to make waiting feel lighter and more dynamic.

History & New Chat

The History feature lets users access, continue, or delete their previous HeyImmo conversations. To enable this functionality, users need to be logged in — ensuring their chats are securely saved across devices.

For non-logged-in users, we display a short value proposition and guide them to sign in. Once logged in, users can view past chats, start new ones, and manage their conversation history with ease.

 

Takeaways

  • Embed Acceptance Criteria in Figma: In the beginning of the project, tickets were worked on despite being empty & not refined. My usual workflow of writing AC’s for tickets was not sustainable, due to limited capacity compared to amount of teams. Adding ACs next to the designs while working on then would ensure details, interactions, and animations are captured.

  • Use a FigJam board as a UX & UI Improvement backlog: Screenshots and visual notes makes improvements are faster to prepare & easier to graspcompared to half written tickets – these can be created later by Product or Engineering, as soon as topics are prioritized.

  • Chaos Can Resolve Itself: Even when workflows feel disorganized, things often work out in the end.