Projects
Baytu Realty
Turning a short brief into a product, in a room with four people.
Role: Senior Product Designer (UX/UI), Independent
Scope: Discovery workshop, roadmap, user flows, wireframes, end to end product design, UI library
Platform: Cross border property investment, desktop and mobile
Client: London based, selling UK, Greek and Turkish property to Turkish buyers
Overview
Baytu Realty sells property in the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey to Turkish buyers, mostly as an investment rather than as a home. Prices are in sterling. The return that matters to the buyer is rental income converted back into their own currency.
The company had been running conventionally up to that point. Relationships, phone calls, advisors. This was going to be their first website.
That last fact shaped everything. There was no analytics history, no previous version to learn from, no support tickets, no user feedback of any kind. Not a case of research being out of scope. There was nothing to research.
I led the UX and UI. I ran the discovery workshop, produced the roadmap and user flows that came out of it, worked through wireframes, got the concept signed off, and designed the product across desktop and mobile. I also built a small UI library to hold it together.
The brief I was given at the start was one page.
Four people in a call
The workshop ran remotely over Google Meet, working in Miro and moving into Figma as things firmed up. Four people: the owner, his partners, and the PM who brought me in.
That last seat mattered more than it sounds. The PM came from a development background, and he was there specifically to price things as they were proposed. So when an idea went up on the board, the question of what it would cost to build got answered in the same conversation, not two weeks later in a rejection.
That changed the nature of the session. Nothing was scoped out afterwards, because nothing unaffordable made it onto the board in the first place. The roadmap that came out was not a wish list that then had to be negotiated down. It was already the buildable version.
Bringing evidence into a room that had none
With no data of their own, the alternative to research was not guessing. It was looking hard at markets that had already solved this.
The reference I kept coming back to was funda, the Dutch property portal. A mature market, a mature product, and a set of conventions that exist because they have been tested by millions of people over years. Not to copy, but to argue from. When you have no evidence of your own, the next best thing is somebody else's, held up honestly.
That is how the decisions got made. I brought benchmarks, we worked through what applied and what did not, and the owner approved what fit his vision of the business. The workshop produced the structure of the site. Everything that followed was built out from it.
The hardest question on the site is not about the property
The idea I pushed hardest for was a financial calculator sitting inside the property detail page, alongside the photographs and the description.
For this audience the difficult question was never whether the flat was nice. It was whether the numbers worked. Someone in Turkey buying a flat in Staines is holding a price in sterling, a rental yield in sterling, a mortgage rate, a service charge, a renovation estimate, existing debt of their own, and a currency they actually live in. Those inputs do not resolve in your head.
Without the tool, the only person who could answer that question was the advisor, and the advisor sits on the selling side. The calculator moves the answer from their mouth into the buyer's hands.
It takes gross annual income, other income, existing loan debt, other debts, monthly service charge, estimated renovation, interest rate and borrowing amount, and it starts with a currency selector, because the currency is not a detail here. It is the whole point.
Drawing a line I was not asked to draw
Directly above the calculator sits a statement that Baytu is not an accountancy or tax advisory firm, that the figures are indicative, that buyers should do their own research, and that the company is not liable for outcomes that differ in practice.
Building a tool that helps someone decide on a leveraged cross border purchase puts you close to a line you do not want to cross. The disclaimer is not legal decoration. It is the thing that lets the tool be useful and honest at the same time, and it belongs next to the inputs rather than buried in a terms page.
Two sides, not one audience
The site serves buyers and it serves the people listing property, and the workshop treated those as separate products sharing a shell.
On the buyer side: membership, saved favourites across both listings and articles, a personal profile, and a contracts area where approved agreements and the data protection notice live. On the listing side: a separate login route for portfolio owners, an advisor application form, and advisor profiles that carry their own portfolio through the site.
The login screen shows the split most plainly. Two tabs, member and portfolio, at the very first step.
