The real estate sector is evolving beyond the buying and selling of assets.The way people search for, choose, inhabit, and use spaces is changing, driven by new habits, usage models, and experience expectations.
Today, the value of a property is no longer perceived only through its physical features, but also through how it is accessed, managed, and experienced day to day.
In this context, strategic design helps rethink the relationship between asset, service, and experience, enabling organisations to create clearer, more distinctive, and more relevant propositions.
This means working on the real estate customer experience, real estate customer journey design, and the development of proptech solutions.
Challenges and pain points in the real estate sector
The real estate sector faces challenges that affect both decision-making and the experience that follows:
In real estate, much of the value is built after the decision has been made.
What can strategic design bring to the real estate sector?
The sector’s main challenge is not only selling assets, but making the value of the space and the services around it tangible.
Strategic design helps address this challenge through an integrated perspective, connecting research, strategic definition, and solution design.
We work with organisations to help them:
Understand how people make decisions about spaces and what they truly value
Make buying or renting processes clearer and easier to understand
Design experiences that support users throughout the entire journey
Define and structure added services that increase the perceived value of the asset
Improve the experience of using the space through services and management
Align product, service, and experience to create coherent propositions
Rather than working only on the asset itself, we approach real estate as a system where space, service, and experience are deeply connected.
If you are working on any of these challenges in the real estate sector, we can help you analyse them in more detail and identify where the main opportunities lie.
When a real estate company needs strategic design
An organisation typically needs this approach when it:
Wants to improve the customer experience in real estate
Has complex buying or rental processes
Is looking to differentiate its assets
Wants to develop added-value services
Needs to improve the user experience of the space
How we work
We address real estate challenges by combining research, strategy, and design as part of a continuous process, not as isolated phases, in contexts where the experience of deciding, using, and managing a space is deeply interconnected.
Our process is structured around five key moments:
01
Understanding the context
02
Research
03
Strategic definition
04
Solution design
05
Iteration and implementation
How this work takes shape in the real estate sector
In our work with organisations in the real estate sector, these approaches take shape in projects that directly impact both customer experience and asset value.
For example, we work in contexts such as:
Improving the experience of searching for, evaluating, and deciding to buy or rent
Simplifying complex processes to make them clearer and more transparent
Designing added services that increase the perceived value of the property
Defining more complete usage experiences in residential or commercial assets
Integrating services such as maintenance, cleaning, or shared-space management
Connecting the real estate product, services, and user experience
Each of these projects is approached with the understanding that the value of real estate is not defined only in the transaction, but in the ongoing experience of the space.
We have worked on these kinds of challenges through strategic research, experience design, and value proposition definition across different real estate contexts.
Our approach
At Ikigai, we work from a strategic and systemic design perspective, understanding that the real estate sector is not limited to physical assets, but is part of an ecosystem involving:
Spaces
Services
Users
Operators
We apply Life-Centered Design principles, expanding the focus beyond the user to consider the impact of solutions on:
People and their usage experience
Organisations and their business model
The built and social environment
This allows us to design more relevant, distinctive, and sustainable propositions.
