Cloud CMA Resets UI to Drive Usability and Growth

WAV Group has known the founders of W+R Studios long before they broke away from eNeighborhoods and founded the company. The partners have invested their lives and careers in developing real estate software that makes a difference. Cloud CMA was their first product—mobile friendly, easy to use, beautiful CMA reports. They launched at a time when building a CMA on your phone or tablet was impossible. They took a mobile-first approach and were able to drive market adoption with impressive speed.

Funny anecdote: One of the best products from their days at eNeighborhoods was Wyldfyre CMA, the market leader in allowing agents to build CMAs with data across multiple MLS markets. Cloud CMA has spread like wildfire for sure. My favorite feature of Cloud CMA is the ability to send an email to Cloud CMA with a property address in the subject line, and get your CMA emailed back to you in less than a minute. No login required. I also like the feature that allows you to automate the process of sending a CMA to past clients every month.

Since W+R Studios launched Cloud CMA, the company continued to listen to the market and launch additional apps for real estate that carries the company's mantra – mobile first, easy to use, and fast. Their additional products are Cloud Streams and Cloud Attract. Cloud Streams is a listing alert system that notifies clients when new or updated listings match their home search. Cloud Attract is a marketing tool for lead generation that delivers an instant CMA to consumers that's beautifully branded to the broker and agent.

Old User Interface

The old user interface was intuitive and easy to use. The primary navigation tabs across the top give agents quick access to the key features of CMA applications – CMA, Buyer Tour, Property, and Flyer. Recent activity allows the agent to scroll though their past reports and quickly access it. Notice all of the colors – black, different shades of green, orange, shades of grey. Visually, even though this layout was clean by comparison to many competitors, there was a lot going on.

New Design

As you can see from the new design, the functionality is the same. They dropped the "Cloud CMA" product name. They eliminated the tabs, but the functionality is in the same place. They made the UI of the reports tiled and allow the agent to take action like view PDF, play slideshow, or share the report quickly. Noticed that they changed the name "Recent Activity" to "Recent Reports," because that is what they were displaying – reports, not activities. I am not a big fan of the Scale icon because it is repetitive. If it showed the report cover, then it makes sense. This tile system is often called Kanban and can leverage photos to drive user recognition fast if executed correctly in design.

It is all very nice stuff.

Support and Cross Sell

We all know that agents typically only use about 20 percent of the features of software. The way to drive deeper adoption of features is to constantly educate the agents inside the product. Cloud CMA does this with the two articles that you see herein – the Facebook article and the photography website article. To the right of those articles is in-product marketing that supports their other products – Cloud Stream and Cloud Attract. I presume that agents who subscribe to these services will see a single sign-on link that will launch them right from within Cloud CMA. Of course, another important feature is connecting with the customers. Here you see a note from Frances with an offer. But it can also be leveraged for support.

There are many choices for CMA tools in real estate. The one that you choose will depend on the individual needs that you have as an agent, or for your brokerage. We strongly urge clients to take a fresh look at competitive CMA vendors every few years to make sure that the tool you are using now has the best set of features for the best price with the best support.