BidBy
Making judicial auctions legible enough to bid on
Every year, more than €1,000M in Spanish real estate goes to judicial auction and nobody shows up. The assets aren't worthless. They're illegible: a line in the official state bulletin, with almost no information or documentation. BidBy wanted to fix that. We helped them define the product and design both sides of it.
The problem behind the brief
After the financial crisis, banks sold their bad-debt portfolios to investment funds, packages of €300M or more, sometimes 30,000 properties bought blind at a steep discount. Part of those assets must be sold through judicial auctions. When an auction goes empty, the fund loses time and money, and the asset goes back into limbo.
The brief was a marketing tool. The real problem was trust: no one bids on what they can't understand.
Three roles, three incentives
- Investment funds: owners and analysts, often abroad, very detail-oriented. They want assets sold and reports they can trust.
- Servicers: the companies that operate assets for the funds and earn their bonus only when an asset sells. They need leads, visibility and measurable campaigns.
- Private investors: experienced professionals with savings to invest, who don't know how the official bulletin works and need guidance to judge risk and return.
Designing for one of them at the expense of the others would break the model.
The decisions
- Narrow the scope first. We dropped a fund-to-fund marketplace idea to focus on the two sides that create the value: getting assets seen, and getting them understood.
- A back office for funds and servicers to publish and manage assets, boost the ones that matter, buy qualified leads and report results, answering their biggest frustration: marketing efforts that are neither clear nor measurable.
- A marketplace for private investors that translates legal and technical information into plain language, with indicators of risk and opportunity, and the professional services needed to actually take part in an auction.
What we delivered
Context research, user personas, a market benchmark, the business model and hypothesis, user stories and a glossary of the domain, plus interactive prototypes for both sides: investor onboarding, listings and asset detail; fund dashboard, asset creation, boosting and lead purchase. All backed by a style guide ready for development.
What it could become next
Reliable asset data, clear roles and measurable outcomes are the foundation for anything built on top: smarter valuations, automated risk scoring, or AI that only works when the information underneath is clean.
We don't just fix what's broken, we imagine what the product should become next.
