All case studies

REALTOR.ca · Oct 2025 – Jul 2026

Turning Canada's #1 real estate site into a revenue platform.

Led the team on creating 3 net-new revenue streams. Designed from zero, without destroying existing UX. 
Shipped and live on www.realtor.ca 

Role
Lead Product Designer
(player-coach)
Team
Jr. Product Designer, Product Designer, Sr. Graphic Designer
Partners
Product, Marketing, Legal, BSA, Engineering, RBC, TD Insurance
Platforms
Desktop + tablet + mobile Web;  Tablet + mobile App;
English + French
  • 633Mvisits in 2025
  • 2B+listing page views in 2025
  • #1real estate website in Canada
  • 3net-new revenue lines, all live

The problem

Huge audience and no real streams of income.

In January 2025, REALTOR.ca became its own company: a taxable subsidiary, still fully owned by CREA, with a mandate to find revenue beyond membership dues.

It had the audience. The catch: every new revenue surface had to live next to someone's home search journey without destroying trust, cluttering listing page, or competing with existing path to a REALTOR®.

Question that started it all…

“Where can new revenue-generating experiences live without hurting UX and overall flow?”

The solution

3 revenue streams, designed from zero, all live on www.realtor.ca 

Mortgage, with RBC.

A Mortgage Options page with a direct path to RBC; Mortgage Hub guide: Learn → Estimate → Prepare → Explore.

Lives in: Mortgage Calculators

Insurance, with TD.

A bilingual TD Insurance CTA on every listing page, for residential and commercial properties.

Lives in: listing page, below the description

REALTOR.ca map search on a laptop, with an ad placement along the bottom of the map

Advertising, built in.

Ad placements across site's busiest surfaces. None of them existed before.

Lives in: homepage, map, listing page

Impact

What it added up to.

  • 3net-new revenue lines, live on Canada's #1 real estate site.
  • 2national partners launched publicly: RBC (Jan 2026) and TD Insurance (Jul 2026).
  • 1step to the lender: we removed the in-between page from the hub to RBC.
  • ↑A stronger team.
    I coached my designers to be more confident in their skin and thinking process, throughout every step of this messy journey.

How we got there…

5 phases, from vision to real life.

  1. 01DiscoveryPhased the “big vision” into shippable steps.
  2. 02Initial wireframingPlaced revenue where it helped, not where it shouted.
  3. 03AdaptAdapted when the market moved: RBC acquired Pinch.
  4. 04Staying groundedProtected trust over partner branding.
  5. 05IterateShipped, measured, iterated.

01 · Discovery

Phased the “big vision” into shippable steps.

Product wanted a full mortgage marketplace. We broke it into 5 phases, from an embedded rate with lead capture to a full lending marketplace. This allowed us to ship value early and learn before over-investing.

  1. Phase 1MVP: embedded rate + lead capture
  2. Phase 2RBC pilot: native offer page
  3. Phase 3Compare multiple lenders
  4. Phase 4Mortgage Hub: guides, tools and offers
  5. Phase 5First-party lending marketplace

02 · Initial wireframing

Placed revenue where it helped, not where it shouted.

70% of users drop off before scrolling past the first screen, so placement was the core decision. Insurance had to be visible without competing with the mortgage link, which earned more.

  • Next to the price. Everyone sees it, but it competes with the mortgage link.
  • Below the listing description.
    About 70% of users drop past this point.
A REALTOR.ca listing page, with two candidate spots for the insurance link marked: A next to the price, B below the listing description
Two of the spots we weighed for the TD Insurance link on a listing page.

03 · Adapt

Adapted when the market moved.

Mid-project, RBC acquired Pinch Financial, our multi-lender partner. The “compare many lenders” premise disappeared.

Instead of keeping a multi-step flow built for choice, my team pushed to remove the in-between page and send people straight to RBC.

Before

  1. Mortgage Hub
  2. Page built for choosing a lender
  3. RBC

After

  1. Mortgage Hub
  2. RBC

04 · Staying grounded

Protected trust over partner branding.

Both partners asked for custom buttons in their brand colours (RBC blue, TD green) with logos inside. We leaned back onto our branding guidelines: one-off branded buttons would look out of place and risk reading as spammy.

When TD said its logo was too small, we sized it to match the existing RBC logo and gave them options that met both their brand guide and ours.

Asked for

Buttons in each partner's own colours, logos inside, styled unlike anything else on the site.

Shipped

Standard design-system components, with partner logos sized consistently next to them.

05 · Iterate

Shipped, measured, iterated.

  • 3 test variationsMortgage link clicks went up while the Mortgage Options page click rate dropped, so we tested three versions.
  • Version 1.2Exit-survey feedback moved trust signals into boxes and removed a hero image showing a “4.5%” rate that could mislead people.
  • Tested with real peopleLayouts were validated with unmoderated tests on usertesting.com.

My role

Leading others

My role was strategy, alignment and quality control, not pixels. I coached my designers to have confidence, present to stakeholders. I also checked every claim we made to users for accuracy and inclusive language. Finally I stepped in hands-on when timelines got tight.

Looking back

What I'd do differently.

Set up a shared metrics dashboard from day one. We iterated on live data, but it lived in meetings rather than in the team's documentation.

Building something that needs to earn and keep trust?

Let's talk Next: Modernization plan