Assemble

Housing affordability in Australia has been declining since the 1980s. As more and more of us move to metropolitan areas, buying a high quality home in an Australian city is becoming increasingly out of reach for many of us.

Assemble is a housing company on a mission to design new ideas for a better, fairer housing system. They offer a unique purchase pathway, designed to support residents to own a home. Through it, people can rent one of their apartments for up to five years while they save a deposit, with an option to buy anytime within the five year period.

Assemble came to us at a key growth turning point. They were scaling from 150 homes to 3,000. However, there were some barriers to residents entering the pathway.

We worked with Assemble to uncover the resident experience, and develop recommendations that would ensure each project was occupied by purchasing residents.

We ran design research with 45 people including current, former, and prospective residents. We learned about their hopes, pains and experiences through conversation, usability testing, and co-design.

Assemble’s purchase pathway had been designed around the challenge of saving enough money to buy a home. We discovered the challenges that people are experiencing in the housing market went well beyond this. People were struggling with rapid rises in rental agreements, a sense that the goalpost of home ownership were always shifting, and anxieties about buying from ‘dodgy’ developers. They described the home buying experience as ‘absurd’.

We mapped the end-to-end, 5+ year journey that residents would go on with Assemble, identifying opportunities for improvements at each stage of the experience. Based on our findings, we undertook a significant evolution to the customer strategy—who they serve, what they offer, how they communicate their value, and the channels they use to reach them.

We used this as a basis to reimagine the customer experience, developing a new marketing campaign and digital experience that helps residents explore Assemble’s apartments and pricing model. We developed a new platform—‘Imagine less. Experience more’—that deliberately challenged the absurdity of the housing market.

This platform came to life in the digital experience, where we stayed true to a strategy of transparency—giving people the information they want, where other property developers would hide it.

We also built a thoughtful calculator, designed to help people do the “back of napkin” maths to figure out whether Assemble was right for them.

Simplicity and an intuitive experience were the cornerstones of the calculator, to encourage users to explore and experiment with the options available and help them imagine themselves on the purchase pathway.

By deeply understanding the challenges people are facing in the property market, we were able to make adjustments to Assemble’s model to deliver on their vision for a better, fairer housing system.

The launch of the new campaign and website contributed to growth in applications, leading to significant interest.

“The launch of the new campaign and website has already resulted in more informed and qualified people coming through to our sales team. People can clearly understand our purchase pathway and are ready to take the next step.” — Sophie Rzepecky, Assemble’s Head of Brand