The task of the project was to develop a web-based property management solution, to be sold to letting companies and estate agencies. It included redevelopment of the previous real estate ecommerce solution, PHP / MySQL-based, into a more scalable, fast and user-friendly portal to be used by both tenants and agents.
According to requirements, Itransition developed a membership-based portal to view what properties are available and sold in the UK. After the analysis Itransition analytics proposed a completely new solution with original design and a set of new functional modules. The new web solution was developed with the ASP.NET / MS SQL technologies, which addressed the requirements for scalability and speed capacity. The functional modules included automatic notification about updates on new estate offers, advanced real estate management / real estate pieces search, detailed agents statistics, mailbox section (the storage of automatic site notifications), content / meta-data editor, etc. The professional low level architecture supported multiple users (landlords/tenants, agents) to correspond with the Customer’s requirements.
The first beta version of the solution was ready in 1.5 months after the development start. In a month after the beta the work continued with the application uploaded to live location.
The solution is integrated with a wide range of third party services, such as:
- Online postcode database/ geo-data providing centre;
- Online mapping tools;
- Automatically updated sitemaps for Google indexation;
- PDF generation component;
- Graphical charts creation, etc.
System highlights
- Advanced property finder including email notifications about new available properties to rent, found against the tenant’s requirements;
- Complex address lookup to search for offers within a chosen region by zip code and by an easy form fill-in procedure;
- All registered properties automatically listed on popular UK online maps such as http://www.ononemap.com/;
- Content and meta-data management module featuring formatting tools to keep site information dynamic, what is very important for SEO;
- Residential Rental Price Index – using this section each site visitor can view the rental price index dynamics for the defined period of time per selected region (town/ county/ country);
- Graphical data visualization enables to visualize all statistical information as graphical charts for better comprehension;
- Thousands of towns, agents, tenants and properties initially imported into the system database
Technologies and Tools Used: .Net Framework 1.1; C#.NET, MS SQL 2000; IIS; RUP, MS Project, MS Visual SourceSafe, IBM Rational Clear Quest
Efforts: 12 man-months
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