Overview
Background: BiggerPockets is the leading online community for real estate investors, with 3M+ members using the platform to learn, connect, and grow their portfolios. Pro members get access to premium tools — including Market Finder, designed to help investors evaluate markets for investment potential. After years of stagnation (the data hadn’t been refreshed since 2024), the team decided to rebuild Market Finder from scratch.
Problem: Market Finder lacked the depth and credibility that serious investors needed to act. It was also narrowly scoped to the acquisition phase of real estate investing — useful only if you were actively searching for a new market to buy in.
Solution: Launch Market Insights, a rebuilt and expanded version of the feature that lets Pro members search, browse, and filter 350+ U.S. markets — then dive into in-depth market reports powered by fresh data and LLM-generated insights.
Scope
Goals: Replace an aging feature with a more useful, credible one. Serve investors at every stage (not just acquisition), and give Pro membership a compelling flagship feature.
Team: I worked closely with our senior product designer and product director, conducted user interviews to validate our design and content direction, and collaborated with our engineering and investing teams on the report architecture.
Timeline: March - June 2026 (ongoing)
Process
Feature name: The team had been calling this "Market Finder 2.0" internally. I advocated for renaming it “Market Insights” — not just to signal an update, but also to reframe the purpose of the tool. "Insights" works whether you're in the research phase or already invested in a market and tracking it over time. The name change was approved and became the foundation for all subsequent messaging.
User research: I conducted user interviews with existing Market Finder users to understand how they actually search for and evaluate markets. Two things came directly out of that research: (1) we prioritized market discovery over search in the UI hierarchy, because most users didn't arrive with a specific market in mind; (2) I reframed the product messaging from "choose a market" to "build your shortlist," which better matched how investors actually think about this phase of their process.
Report architecture: I audited 200+ available data points from various providers to determine what should be included in the MVP market report and how it should be organized. I landed on 50+ key points, grouped into logical sections with clear headers, labels, and tooltips and written to be scannable and jargon-aware.
LLM prompting, evaluation, & refinement: I developed the system message and prompts for the LLM powering the text-based sections of the market report. To reinforce the differentiated value of a BiggerPockets AI product versus a generic LLM, I branded the sections (“BiggerPockets Summary,” “BiggerPockets Insights,” and “BiggerPockets Verdicts”) and refined the prompts to produce outputs that aligned with our brand voice, investor audience, and editorial standards.
Gating strategy & copy: Since Market Insights is a Pro-only feature, I helped determine how much and what content free members could preview, and wrote the dashboard state for free members — a high-stakes conversion moment where the copy needed to convey the value of Pro without feeling like a hard sell.
GTM messaging guide: After developing the content strategy and UI copy for Market Insights, I developed a go-to-market messaging guide for cross-functional stakeholders to ensure a cohesive, compelling narrative across the funnel, from our podcast reads to our paid ad placements.
Deliverables: Market Insights home
Page subtitle conveys the tool’s expanded use cases. Filters and market cards (populated with placeholder content here) reflect user research insights about our users’ most-valued criteria.
Deliverables: Report preview with upsells
Upsell modal (triggered when the user clicks a filter) leads with the contextually relevant benefit.
Overview tab: Overall BiggerPockets Grade and two key metrics are unlocked as carrots. Price-to-rent ratio, determined to be a unique selling point, is locked — along with individual BiggerPockets grades and our overall market summary.
Additional tabs: Headlines and metric labels are visible, but all actual content is locked.
Deliverables: Full, multi-tabbed report
Overview tab helps users make a go/no-go decision on a market, with top-level metrics and our overall market summary.
Additional tabs are labeled to accommodate both beginner and experienced investors. Each tab contains 2-3 sections, each accompanied by a BiggerPocket Insight, and rolls up into a BiggerPockets Verdict.
Each of our 50+ metrics has an accompanying tooltip to expand on abbreviations and explain potentially unfamiliar concepts and calculations.
Deliverables: LLM prompts
I developed a working system message, along with prompts tailored to each section type. The outputs I evaluated with Claude cleared the must-pass criteria (namely accuracy) — but, despite my brand personality and tone rules, they still failed the quality dimensions: every sentence was densely packed with jargon and clearly written by AI. These insights — which give the product feature its name — would be difficult to take in quickly, especially for a beginner investor.
I decided to go further, uploading transcripts from BiggerPockets’ Real Estate Investing Podcast featuring Dave Meyer — our Head of Real Estate Investing and arguably the voice of the brand. The results were far more user-friendly and consistent with our editorial content:
Deliverables: GTM messaging guide
Using the UI copy I had written, I developed messaging and sample copy for product marketing purposes, accounting for audience segmentation and channel-specific needs.
Results
Market Insights is still underway and slated to launch in Q3 2026 — results to come!