The New Products We Built in a Pandemic

Singapore Nov 20, 2020

Expanding from coliving to living and lifestyle platform meant we needed to build, in a user-centric manner - pandemic or otherwise.

As I write this, there's nothing left unsaid that still needs to be said about how businesses have had their strategies and plans completely upended during this unprecedented daunting year. We, like many others had been cresting on a high from 2019 and were bullish about all the great things we had roadmapped to achieve in 2020.

A seismic shift in our strategy involved growing from coliving to living and lifestyle platform. This involved adding new consumer-facing services like Hmlet Furniture, Hmlet Interiors and Hmlet Listed as well as business-facing products to our repertoire. We would no longer be building and fine-tuning products just for members, but needed to expand our offerings also for landlords and internal business teams - while driving digitisation across our business.

Our evolution to living & lifestyle platform includes a suite of new product and service offerings, one of them being Hmlet Furniture.

In spite of the immense challenges we faced across the year, we revamped our website and mobile app in line with Hmlet’s latest brand, launched a landlord portal to onboard listings in a scalable manner, built a data warehouse as well as property management system to grow our data analytics and digitisation capabilities. While the challenges were exacerbated by a raging pandemic, our team was able to switch to remote-first and keep up an impressive execution momentum.

These milestones have been instrumental in our transformation to a living and lifestyle platform. We are excited for you to experience the new and fresh digital Hmlet experiences, and hope you enjoy your physical stay in our spaces too.

Our Spanking New Website
Our new website was built to make the home search easy - regardless of whether you’re in one of the cities we’re located in, or in some far flung country finding a place to stay in preparation of a big (and often difficult) move.

It's love at first site with our new tech optimisations and user-experience enhancements.

To create a platform that could serve the demand and supply side of our business, we rebuilt from the ground up.

Our new website accommodates an upgraded tech infrastructure for content to be served via a new Content Management System (CMS), eliminating inefficiencies involved in delivering the most up-to-date information on our website. We set up to collect detailed information from filters and user navigation patterns to better understand the needs of our users (while respecting privacy concerns). All this contributed to building a website that is highly performant, data-driven and packed with features for our tenants and landlords.

Our Landlord Portal
Keeping in mind our supply i.e. listings - property agents and landlords are also experiencing an upgraded landlord portal. We’ve levelled up our internal administrative features such as improved viewing of key contractual information, online listings onboarding, analytics and more - to provide landlords with a more holistic view of their properties’ performance as well as to make listings management more efficient. Within the portal, we also enable landlords to subscribe to furniture rental or interior design services, all part of Hmlet ecosystem, to improve yields on their properties.

Our Member App And Shop
Our members are at the core of creating great experiences. This means our exclusive member app was also revamped to improve the rental and coliving experiences for our members. With our enhanced member app, we introduced seamless payments, in-app direct messaging amongst members, a help hotline, newsfeed, the ability to set up self-renewal payment and a benefits marketplace featuring over 150 affiliate partners. Being a Hmlet member truly has its perks.

A Hmlet member exclusive

As we draw to the close of a trying year, I would like to applaud the tenacity of our team in delivering these products under such remarkable circumstances. The uncompromising principles of attaining market competitiveness, premium product quality and service excellence - remain unwaveringly at the heart of our team's effort, pandemic or otherwise.

PS/ We're planning ahead for 2021 - if you've got ideas on features, offerings, don't hesitate to reach out to us at technologyservices@hmlet.com!

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Pramodh Rai

Product & Technology at Hmlet