Realtor.com® has added to its team: Deepak Thakral, senior vice president of Product Development; and Steve Grove, vice president of User Experience Design, the News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc.-operated company recently announced. Both Thakral and Grove report to Chung Meng Cheong, chief product officer for realtor.com.
“We are pleased to welcome Deepak and Steve to the team,” says Cheong. “Deepak’s rich product and engineering background and Steve’s marketplace expertise are critical in helping realtor.com create a seamless, cross-platform experience informed by consumer needs that will enable them to move confidently through every step of their home journey.”
Thakral is responsible for leading the professional experience for agents and brokers on realtor.com, encompassing listing search results and display features, advertising, branding and lead generation, profiles for agents, brokers and teams, as well as dashboard
management. Thakral also drives the company’s media advertising experience across mobile, web and desktop platforms, including realtor.com’s integration with the News Corp global advertising network as well as site-specific advertising.
“Realtor.com has a unique set of audiences with a wide range of interests and needs, from buying, selling, owning and remodeling a home to securing a mortgage and home insurance,” says Thakral. “I am excited to explore ways of optimizing that ecosystem and helping our customers deliver to our consumers the resources they need at their specific juncture of the home journey.”
For real estate professionals, Thakral’s team helps to ensure that the world-class experience on realtor.com delivers unparalleled branding, advertising and lead solutions to market themselves and their listings to the more than 50 million users who visit realtor.com on average each month, and helps empower professionals to manage their presence on realtor.com easily and efficiently.
Thakral’s experience in both product and engineering roles brings deep expertise in the engineering stack as well as across advertising technology, lead generation and mobile monetization. He spent the past four years in Silicon Valley startups, including at Chartboost, a monetization platform for mobile game apps powering more than 300,000 apps. Prior to Chartboost, Thakral spent six years in product management and ad platforms at local marketing solutions provider YP. Thakral holds an MBA from the University of California – Los Angeles Anderson School of Management, a Master of Science (MS) in Software Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Mechanical Engineering from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore.
Grove leads the realtor.com user experience design team, working to connect consumers with real estate professionals by creating a cohesive, cross-device experience spanning the full home lifecycle. Grove’s role focuses on accelerating the development of product designs and the company’s end-user experiences.
“I see a lot of opportunity in improving the online home-buying experience,” says Grove. “After spending much of my career developing marketplaces and connecting different types of people together through software, I am looking forward to creating an even better realtor.com user experience for homebuyers, agents and brokers.”
Grove brings not only strong user experience and marketplace expertise, but also product and business prowess, informed by his experience as one of eBay’s first designers and as part of the design team at Oracle. Most recently, he led user-centered product and design teams for GoPro, Alibaba, as well as the marketplace startup Plastic Jungle. Grove holds a BA from San Jose State.
For more information, please visit www.realtor.com.
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