Real estate sales automation software development
Itransition designed and developed an automated real estate sales solution consisting of an admin console and a mobile-friendly cross-browser website.
Challenge
The customer is a global leader in consumer financing and real estate asset management, with hundreds of large investors and banks as corporate clients and 600,000+ individual clients.
The company provides loans secured by real estate around the world and has acquired financial assets and loan servicing platforms across the EU. At some point, they accumulated a lot of mortgaged property through debt collection which they wanted to sell. First, they used third-party systems to do it but were unsatisfied with high commission fees and decided to build their own solution for selling real estate.
In legacy real estate systems, operations such as filling in property information were performed manually by the admins. The customer envisioned a web portal solution that would automate these tasks and thus release an innovative product to the market.Â
The customer wanted to outsource design, UX, and development to a trusted vendor, so they sent out requests for information and selected several candidates to review their demos. At the presales stage, Itransition’s designers and developers created a sophisticated demo of the future solution and provided time and cost estimates. As a result, the customer chose Itransition for our expertise in the real estate sector and ecommerce solutions, our mature approach to product documentation, and the positive experience they had with us during the presales stage.
Solution
We designed and developed a real estate sales solution that consists of an admin console for managing real estate information and a cross-browser mobile-friendly website for selling available property.
The solution’s admin console is for the customer’s representatives. The console allows users to create customized filters, manage properties as well as accompanying documentation and images, archive properties, create featured properties, and send notifications to users.
The customer-oriented website allows users to search for real estate, reach out to the company’s representatives via a contact form, display results from Google Maps, switch to different languages, set custom filters, and search for real estate using predefined criteria, such as price range, geolocation, and property type. The website is GDPR-compliant and observes the European Union privacy rules. To cater for mobile device users, we developed the mobile website version with responsive layouts.
The customer didn’t provide any brand book so Itransition’s designers drew inspiration for the real estate sale solution’s design from their corporate website. Our team created a style guide to ensure brand design consistency, and 80% of the design demos we found their way into the final product.
Process
Itransition’s geographically dispersed team was located across the UK and multiple EU countries. We worked in two-week sprints, presented product demos at the end of each, and discussed goals for the next sprint.
During the initial meetings, the project team explored the customer’s vision for the platform and created the Statement of Work (SoW) document that detailed the list of features. When the SoW was signed, Itransition’s business analysts elaborated platform requirements to make the development process smooth and aligned with the project schedule and budget.Â
In the end, we fulfilled all the obligations outlined in the SoW, developed and tested all the agreed features, and delivered the application to the customer. The customer’s teams, in their turn, tested the application fully, verified its integration with their other systems, and accepted our work.
Technologies
We suggested Angular for building the solution’s web version because of its extensive out-of-the-box functions, easy code maintenance and bug detection, responsiveness, and modular architecture.
We created a custom feature for loading data from the customer’s Microsoft SQL database, where they store information in multiple languages about mortgaged properties, including property ID, images, documentation, real estate experts’ contact details. We equipped the feature with the autocomplete function that helps admins to fill in real estate descriptions with suggested options, doubling the speed of the process. Besides, we synchronized and imported all the legacy data from their database to the new system.
When a property page is created, the system stores its accompanying data into a property ID folder, containing attached documents and image folders. For large file storage, we implemented a cost-effective and easy to scale storage solution based on Azure Blob and customized its out-the-box features for data copying and storage.
We applied Azure App Insights for collecting and analyzing telemetry data from the customer’s environment. In addition to out-of-the-box event counters, we customized the app to track certain user interactions. Those events are visualized using standard App Insights charts and graphs. The delivered insights helped our team improve app performance and user experience.
We enabled admin console authentication with Azure SSO and integrated it into the customer’s current Active Directory. User permissions are managed via Azure App registration.
We selected Autofac as a library for dependency injections and used a .NET library Fluent Validation to create validation rules for injecting data into the database. We leveraged SendGrid as an email service to communicate with customers. Our developers chose OData as the protocol for sophisticated search requests.
The solution is integrated with AroTRON, the customer’s system which stores data for autoloading.
To build automated tests, our QA experts chose xUnit and AutoFixture AutoMoq for the application’s server side and Jasmine for the client side.
Following the customer’s requirements, we hosted the solution in their Microsoft Azure instance.
Results
Itransition designed and delivered an automated real estate sales solution comprising a mobile-friendly property sales portal and an admin console, which allowed the customer to launch a new line of business. The solution ensures 2x faster real estate data input and enables the customer to sell properties to customers around the world.
