Vobahome: Helping homeowners figure out which product fits their situation, before they talk to anyone.

The client asked for a visual refresh. The actual problem was a broken qualification funnel.

Vobahome is a Volksbank subsidiary offering homeowners 60+ a portfolio of real estate monetization products: partial sale, sale-and-leaseback, equity release, immediate sale, and others. Each product serves a genuinely different situation. A homeowner who wants to stay in their property has different needs than one who needs liquidity quickly. The products are not interchangeable.

The website treated them as if they were. Users landed on vobahome.de, saw a list of products, and were expected to figure out which one applied to them on their own. For an audience navigating a significant financial and emotional decision, often for the first time, that was too much to ask.

We had already built the subdomain pages for Teilverkauf and Rückmietverkauf. When vobahome came back, the brief was narrow: update the main site sections to match the visual design of the subdomains. No structural changes. No rethinking of the funnel. I pushed back before we started.

What the sales team already knew

Before defining anything, I asked to talk to the people who spoke to customers every day: the lead generation team responsible for calling back every incoming submission. They were the ones delivering bad news when a lead didn't qualify. They heard the frustration directly.

What they told me was specific. A consistent pattern of people filling out the form who were nowhere near a fit. Common property types or financial situations that disqualified immediately. Customers who had already gone through the process emotionally, decided to move forward, and then got a call that walked it all back.

The funnel was generating volume, not fit. And the sales team was absorbing the cost of that mismatch in every callback they made.

Traffic was fine. The acquisition flow was optimized for submission, not for matching. A user who wasn't eligible for any product could submit a form and become a lead. A user who qualified for three products arrived with no signal about which one they actually wanted.

My diagnosis: the funnel was asking users for their data before it had given them anything useful in return. The order was wrong. And fixing it wasn't just a user experience improvement. It was the fix the sales team needed, even if they hadn't framed it that way.

The product: qualify first, collect second

The core idea was a guided questionnaire that matches users to the right product based on their actual situation, before they submit any personal information. At the end, they see which products fit and, critically, why the others don't.

The inputs driving the routing logic: property type, estimated value, monthly disposable income, remaining debt, year of construction, floor space, plot size, and postal code. Each one contributed to a deterministic output: which products the user qualified for, and a location score based on their postcode.

The location score is worth explaining. Not every postcode is equally attractive from a business perspective. Some areas carry higher property value potential and better conversion economics for vobahome. We implemented a point-based scoring system where the postal code produced a score that fed directly into the lead record in Salesforce. When a lead arrived, the sales team could see the location score alongside the routing result immediately, without looking it up manually.

The full lead record included the products the user qualified for, the product they expressed interest in, the location score, and all the property inputs. Sales managers were no longer working from a blank form. They were working from a structured profile.

Designing for the actual audience

The ICP briefing from vobahome was specific: homeowners 60+, often making a significant financial decision for the first time, frequently navigating it alone or with a partner. That constraint shaped almost every design decision.

Font sizes went up. Information density per page went down. The funnel was broken into short, focused steps. Tooltips explained financial terms this audience might encounter for the first time.

We ran user testing in German with recruited participants matching the target demographic. The findings shaped the results page: illustrations alongside the product cards, a comparison table for side-by-side evaluation, and distinct result states for one, two, three, or four matching products. A user who matched no products saw a clear explanation of why, with a prompt to speak to an advisor rather than a dead end.

Where I was wrong

My initial instinct was to show users their results before asking for their contact details. Give value first, collect information second. A user who had already seen their matching products would be a better lead.

The sales team pushed back. They wanted the contact form earlier. We ran both versions.

My worry was that moving the form forward would spike drop-off. It didn't, or not by enough to matter. Because we had reduced the total number of steps in the questionnaire, the penalty from an earlier contact form was smaller than I expected. We shipped the earlier version.

What made it work was the patch endpoint. After submitting contact details, users could still express their product preference, which triggered a Salesforce update appending the product choice to the existing lead record. The sales team got contact information early and still received a complete profile once the user finished. The learning: the order mattered less than I had assumed, and the reduction in friction across the whole funnel compensated for the earlier ask.

The outcome

The funnel launched in December 2025. Measured against January 2025 with identical ad spend, leads increased by 40%. Every lead arrived pre-populated with property data, routing results, and a stated product preference. The sales team presented it at their field sales review and specifically called out the routing logic as an improvement over the previous approach.

The real win was upstream: the leads that weren't a fit stopped becoming leads at all.