Client

Based in the USA, the client is a provider of real estate and rental services. The organization aims to facilitate access to vital information about property and mortgages for buyers, sellers, renters, real estate agents, etc., as well as help them make deals while ensuring data security.

Background

The company had a property listing website that provided information about homes and mortgages across the USA. With the view of expanding its influence in the country and increasing revenue, the customer wanted to transform its portal into a fully-fledged real estate marketplace platform.
However, as the solution was created about a decade ago, the technology stack was completely outdated. As a consequence, it was hard to extend the system, performance issues disrupted the user experience. Additionally, a software product was a monolith, which also resulted in complicated maintenance.
Collaborating with Arateg, the organization strove to migrate to advanced modern technologies and implement new functionality.

Project goal

The primary objective was to convert a property listing website into a real estate marketplace platform that would bring together buyers, sellers, homeowners, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and property managers.
For this purpose, the client needed to add features such as mapping, geolocation, property viewing on 360° panoramic images, data analytics, online payments, and more.

Project duration

6 months

Team

2 backend developers, 2 frontend developers, 2 UI/UX designers, a quality assurance engineer, project manager, business analyst.

Technologies

TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Photo Sphere Viewer, Highcharts, Storybook, webpack, ESLint, Python, Django, AWS, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon S3, Amazon EKS, Elasticsearch, Docker, Bitbucket Pipelines, Firebase, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached, SendGrid, Apollo, GraphQL API, Google Maps API, Google Places API, Braintree API, PostgreSQL.

Solution

Our team embarked on the project by collecting and analyzing the customer’s requirements. During this stage, our software experts identified top-priority features, chose a technology stack, and created an implementation roadmap.
Employing Bitbucket Pipelines, we set up a continuous integration (CI) / continuous delivery (CD) pipeline across test, deployment, and production environments. Thanks to this, our engineers managed to speed up the marketplace development process while deploying new features on a regular basis.
By using best practices of test-driven development (TDD), we prevented the possibility of performance issues while enabling high availability.

During the project, our team solved the following challenges:

  1. A real estate marketplace platform had to feature the highest level of scalability to maintain a growing number of users and ensure ease of maintenance.
    Our software developers decomposed a monolithic system into microservices, a set of loosely coupled and independently deployable services, each built around a certain module or feature.
    With this software architectural style, we achieved scalability and ease of maintenance without the need to rewrite the whole product when introducing new features or customizations.
    Our team containerized microservices using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service that offers all the required tooling for application scaling and load-balancing. By employing this fully managed tool, our software engineers enabled portability and improved the efficiency of cloud resource utilization.
  2. It was crucial to provide the security of sensitive data and privacy of deals made via a marketplace website.
    Our marketplace development team elaborated a user role management system with granular data access permissions. To further enforce security, we delivered two-factor authentication and data encryption of files shared via the system.
  3. The loading of heavyweight 360° panoramic photos might have an adverse effect on performance.
    By utilizing the Photo Sphere Viewer library, our software engineers made it possible to instantly load and view heavyweight panoramic images. The migration to the AWS technology stack also contributed to increased performance.
  4. To boost user engagement and facilitate online deals, it was essential to enable a variety of secure payment methods.
    Aiming to satisfy the needs of all parties, our developers suggested integrating several payment gateways. After analyzing the customer’s business needs, we decided to use PayPal and Braintree that provide compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
    Thanks to this, a marketplace platform offers a range of payment options, including:
    • credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, etc.)
    • digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Secure Remote Commerce)
    • bank directs (SOFORT, GiroPay, iDeal, Trustly, etc.)
    • Venmo
    • ACH Direct
    • PayPal Credit
    In order to achieve security, Braintree contains features such as CVV (card verification code check), AVS (Address Verification System), and 3D Secure. PayPal, in its turn, contains AVS and a PayPal Key security code, which is similar to CVV and CVS.
    Furthermore, both payment gateways utilize artificial intelligence to timely identify and block suspicious activities, this way protecting against cybersecurity risks.
    To ensure seamless operation of the system, our engineers made various customizations when implementing this functionality. For instance, when customers see the message “Not enough funds”, it is important to ask them to choose another payment method. Our team covered all scenarios of this kind, involving “a card is blocked”, “a card is expired”. etc.

Features of an online real estate marketplace platform

Our team built an online marketplace for real estate services that allows for searching the property, monitoring prices, and making deals. The website has the following functionality:
  1. Registration and authorization
  2. User profiles
  3. Property listings
  4. Search across multiple filters and categories
  5. Property viewing on 360° panoramic images
  6. Email, in-app, and browser notifications
  7. Neighborhood details including restaurants, grocery stores, parks, and coffee shops
  8. Online payments
  9. Data analytics
  10. Visualization of property price changes
  11. Report generation
  12. An admin panel for real estate marketplace owners
  13. Two-factor authentication
  14. Data encryption
  15. Role-based data access control
Furthermore, our online marketplace developers implemented a monetization strategy via transaction commissions, premier services for running ads, and sale of advertising space.

Result

Cooperating with Arateg, the customer converted a property listing website into a comprehensive real estate marketplace platform by migrating to a modern technology stack and implementing new functionality. At the moment, the system serves more than 100,000 users in the USA.

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