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

The situation

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 problem was that 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 that is often navigating a significant financial and emotional decision for the first time, that was too much to ask.

Our relationship with vobahome started earlier. We had already built the subdomain pages for Teilverkauf and Rückmietverkauf. A few months later, I pitched them something bigger: rebuilding the main homepage and building a new acquisition funnel from scratch. The goal was to turn vobahome.de into a proper entry point for users who didn't already know which product they wanted.

The real problem

The funnel was generating volume, not fit. Leads were arriving at the sales team with no context about what the user actually wanted or whether they qualified. Sales managers were manually checking location scores and eligibility criteria for every lead before they could act on it. That was wasting time and reducing the quality of every conversation they had with a prospective customer.

The issue wasn't traffic. It was that 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 was eligible for three products arrived with no signal about which one they were actually interested in.

My diagnosis was simple: the funnel was asking users for their data before it had given them anything useful in return. The order was wrong.

What I built and why

The core product 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. Only then do they make a choice and become a lead.

That inversion changed everything about the funnel's job. Instead of capturing anyone who clicked a button, it was now qualifying users before they reached the sales team.

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

The location score deserves specific explanation because it was one of the more technically interesting decisions. Not every postcode is equally attractive from a business perspective. Some areas carry higher property value potential and better conversion economics for vobahome. We built 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 immediately see the location score alongside the routing result, without having to look it up manually. That alone was a meaningful reduction in pre-qualification work.

The lead data included: the products the user qualified for based on the routing, 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.

The audience constraint

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 influenced almost every design decision.

Font sizes went up. Information density per page went down. The funnel was broken into short, focused steps rather than long forms. Tooltips explained financial terms that a younger audience might know but this audience might not. The wording avoided financial jargon wherever possible.

We also ran user testing in German with recruited participants matching the target demographic. The findings shaped the results page specifically: adding illustrations alongside the product cards, including a comparison table so users could evaluate their options side by side, and creating 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.

What I owned

I pitched the full scope of this project, defined the product strategy, ran weekly syncs with Lisa (our client POC) and Thomas (CEO), managed the Salesforce integration requirements, and oversaw delivery from concept to launch.

The Salesforce integration was complex. Leads were submitted via a custom REST API with JWT authentication. The routing result, location score, and customer wish field all needed to populate correctly on the lead record. We worked with SalesFive (vobahome's Salesforce partner) to build a patch endpoint so the customer's product preference could be updated after the initial lead submission, allowing us to separate the routing submission from the product selection. That required coordination across three parties: our dev team, vobahome, and SalesFive.

I also defined the partner funnel as an extension of the main funnel. Partners could embed the funnel with a URL parameter that attached their partner ID to every lead submission and displayed their logo. The results page was simplified for the partner context to reduce confusion about where to direct questions.

Key decisions

The most significant decision was to show users their result before asking for their contact details. It went against a conventional lead generation approach where the contact form is the goal. The argument for it was that a qualified lead who understood why they were a fit was more valuable than a higher volume of unqualified submissions. Vobahome's sales team agreed.

Separating the routing submission from the product selection via a patch endpoint was a technical decision that had real product implications. It meant the system could record what products the user qualified for independently of what the user actually expressed interest in. That gave the sales team two pieces of information: what was possible, and what the user wanted.

Designing distinct result states for each combination of matching products (one match, two matches, three matches, four matches, no match) was more design work than a single results page would have required. It was the right call. A user who sees "you qualify for two products, here's why the other three don't apply" has a fundamentally different experience than one who sees a generic results screen.

The outcome

The funnel launched in December 2025. Lead quality and information depth improved significantly from day one, with users arriving to the sales team with pre-populated property data, routing results, and a stated product preference. The +40% uplift in leads was measured against January 2025, the equivalent month before the redesign, with identical ad spend.

The client's internal sales team responded positively when the funnel was presented in their field sales review. The design and the routing logic were both specifically called out as improvements over the previous approach.