# HouseSigma "Move Readiness" — concept prototype **Built by Corey Brown · July 2026** **For:** HouseSigma, VP, Product application **Live prototype:** https://coreywbrown.com/lab/housesigma-move-readiness/ **Status:** Unlisted concept. Not affiliated with or endorsed by HouseSigma. The listing, address, and agents are invented sample data; the tax, land transfer, and mortgage math are real. --- ## Why this exists HouseSigma's VP, Product process is a Builder Challenge: take a real problem from their domain, analyze it, design a solution, prototype it, and present. So rather than describe how I would approach the role, I did the challenge unprompted. I picked the clearest gap in the product I kept hitting as a user and built it. Show, don't tell. ## The problem HouseSigma is the best consumer real estate product in Canada because it shows sold prices. It has won growth, engagement, and retention. The business, though, is the brokerage, so the whole company depends on turning a huge, free, daily-habit audience into transactions. There is a structural tension in that. Real estate is a once-in-seven-years transaction, but HouseSigma has built a product people check every week. Millions watch their own home's value and a neighbour's listing. Almost none are transacting this month. Enormous engagement, near-invisible intent. And the tools on a listing page do not close that gap. The mortgage calculator and the cash flow analysis both assume the down payment is already sitting in a bank account. For a move-up buyer it is not, it is locked inside the home they are standing in. The cash flow tool is really an investor's tool. Nothing in the product models a move, which is two linked transactions, and every hidden cost lives in the space between them. ## The insight For a homeowner, the real question is never "what is my house worth." It is "can I have the life I am picturing, and what would it take." The aspiration comes first. Selling is the enabling action, not the hero. And the thing that actually stops a move is rarely affordability. It is liquidity timing. A deposit is due in certified funds within 24 hours of an accepted offer, weeks before your own sale closes. Most move-up buyers have the equity. They just do not have it liquid at the moment they need it. That is the anxiety a good agent talks you through, and the product leaves you to figure out alone. ## The solution **Move Readiness**, a surface that lives on the listing page, right where intent is highest, above the existing calculators. A homeowner tells it about the home they own now, and it works out what it would take to own this one, from the deposit on offer night through to the monthly payment. A four-step wizard, pre-seeded so it can be clicked through in under a minute, but calculating live: - **Your current home** (searchable, or entered by hand, valued at the listed price, the estimate, or a custom number). - **Your offer** (price and deposit). - **Your financing**, a down payment slider from 0 to 100% of the purchase price. It defaults to rolling the entire sale in, which is what most movers actually do, and a marker on the slider shows exactly where the sale proceeds run out, so it is instantly clear whether the move needs money the house alone cannot provide. - **The report**, structured as the real moments cash is needed: what your sale turns into after both agents are paid, where every dollar of the purchase price comes from, the deposit on offer night against the zero available from a sale that has not closed, closing day, whether it all balances, and every month after. Each section can be edited in place. Because it models both sides, it surfaces the costs no single-transaction tool shows: the seller pays both agents' commissions, Toronto charges land transfer tax twice, and the mortgage insurance premium carries its own provincial sales tax due in cash at closing. The commission math shows HouseSigma's 1.5% listing fee against the standard rate, so the product's own arithmetic makes the monetization case. And the conversion is earned, not demanded: only after the report gives the user confidence does it offer the two enabling actions, listing the current home with HouseSigma to fund the move, and booking a viewing of the target. ## Why it maps to the role The role owns product across consumer, brokerage, and AI-native experiences, and holds the number on user growth, engagement, retention, monetization, and consumer experience. Of those, monetization is the one with real headroom, and this is a monetization play that does not cost engagement, it creates it. It reaches the sideline watcher, the user currently worth nothing to the brokerage, and converts them into someone with stated intent and the confidence to act. That is top-of-funnel monetization, not another engagement feature. It is also the growth engine I ran at theScore, pointed at a new audience: take a large, free, daily-habit base and convert it into transactions by giving people a reason to tell you what they want. ## How it was built - A single self-contained HTML/CSS/JS file, no framework, no backend, dropped onto a faithful reproduction of a HouseSigma listing page so the surface reads as native. - The math is real and verified: Ontario and Toronto land transfer tax at 2026 bracket rates, CMHC premium tiers with Ontario PST on the premium, the Canadian semi-annual mortgage compounding convention, and a funding reconciliation that always balances borrowed plus cash to the purchase price. - It is deliberately honest about its limits. A closing "what this cannot know" section names bridge financing for a sale-purchase timing gap, sale risk, income and approval, and it states plainly that it runs on illustrative data. For a company whose stated value is evidence over assumptions, overclaiming would have been the wrong build. ## What I would do next with real data - Prefill from the user's actual watched home and HouseSigma's own estimate, and reason over real comparables and days-on-market, so the timing read comes from the data moat rather than a slider. This is where it stops being a calculator and starts being AI-native. - Trigger it from watch behaviour. A homeowner watching six four-bedrooms in one neighbourhood has already stated a goal without filling in a form. - Make "goal set" the activation metric. It is the leading indicator that predicts a transaction, and the product has no equivalent event today. - Test the honest verdict against conversion. Telling someone the truth builds the trust the brand is built on, but the tension with short-term transactions is real and worth measuring.