Innovative Rental Management Solution for Centralized Lease Operations

Business challenge

Our client is an Israeli tech startup that has made a splash in the global real estate market with their groundbreaking property management platform for vacation rentals. In response to the blazing growth of the short-term rental industry worldwide, the company has been investing heavily in their real estate management software adding new functionality and booking channel integrations. Recognizing the potential of AWS cloud computing, the rental company chose AWS as the hosting environment for their cloud infrastructure.

To keep up with the influx of new customers and bolster their leading market position, they decided to look for an extra hand to meet their increasing development needs.

Our client’s contacts introduced Intellias as a trusted software vendor offering proven expertise in SaaS and cloud development. Based on their compelling recommendations, our client chose us as their long-term engineering partner to extend their team of AWS cloud software developers. We have committed to a close collaboration with our client to reinforce their technological capabilities with intelligent dedicated teams of experienced software engineers.

Solution delivered

Though we started small, working as an extended team, Intellias AWS engineers soon became an indispensable part of our client’s technical department. Our experts now account for about 25% of all engineers involved in platform development.

We’ve been supporting our partner in all organizational transformations they’ve undergone in the past two years. Over that time, their cloud-based vacation rental solution has evolved into a solid lease management platform, leading the company to a major transition from startup to enterprise.

The current system acts as a proxy between online lodging marketplaces and enables property managers to supervise all their rental listings, booking channels, reservations, properties, and operations. Equipped with advanced automation tools, this solution minimizes the manual effort required for routine short-term rental operations by providing generic replies to guests, handling prices, responding to guest inquiries, and more. The platform’s robust reporting capabilities include creating detailed summaries of check-ins, payments, and cancellations, as well as customizing reports to meet specific needs.

Intellias dedicated teams provide exceptional expertise in the development of the real estate property management software, helping our client retain their current customers and reach out to new rental businesses around the world. Our main contributions lie in creating integrations with external partners and implementing new functionalities.

Direct integrations with leading rental services

Our backend engineers are now working on integrating the platform with the world’s top booking channels, including Airbnb, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, HomeAway, Agoda, and Expedia. In addition to onboarding new online travel agencies and third-party solutions, we’re also optimizing existing integrations. This optimization entails transforming the monolithic application into microservices solution supported by the AWS cloud platform. The new scalable microservices architecture reduces the complexity of the application, making it easier to add new features and adopt new technologies.

Centralized channel manager dashboard

The channel manager is a central location from which property managers can distribute their listings and handle reservations across all channels. The unified dashboard pulls all bookings and pushes updates to each of the user’s channels, avoiding the need for users to switch from platform to platform and account to account. The dashboard instantly synchronizes all changes with the multi-calendar to block off times reserved through other sources and prevent double bookings.

Our team improved the responsiveness of the dashboard by making the user interface informative, consistent, and attractive regardless of the browser or device. Intellias engineers also performed a massive rewrite of the frontend application from AngularJS to React, which has resulted in more maintainable code that’s easier to test and reuse.

Smart messaging

Synced with listing data from across all platforms, the unified inbox is a single destination for all guest communication. This smart messaging tool consolidates all inquiries from different sources (booking channels, email, SMS) in one manageable place.

The archiving and filtering capabilities of the smart messaging tool enable property managers to use saved responses to typical guest inquiries, archive conversations to focus on the most urgent requests, sort messages by categories, and apply higher priority filters.

Multi-calendar

The multi-calendar feature centralizes the view of all reservations across different websites to keep track of all changes and avoid overbookings. All adjustments made on the multi-calendar will automatically appear across all channels that the property manager has synced with the platform.

Currently, we’re assisting our client in transitioning to a new suite of Airbnb functionality and are working on the newly launched integration with HomeAway. These are critical building blocks of our client’s business that will continue to further the company’s expansion in the global market and trigger significant revenue growth.

Intellias teams are also deeply involved in the business processes of our partner’s organization, helping to devise strategies for product development and rollout. Our client has found an exceptional cultural match with Intellias, leading to a strong partnership built on trust and win-win outcomes. One of our teams was named the most agile team within our client’s entire organization for being the first to transition from Scrum to Kanban. Our experts have set up an effective and dynamic Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) process to speed up the delivery workflow.

Business outcome

Our collaboration is full steam ahead. We have integrated numerous travel metasearch engines into the vacation rental management software and will continue to scale our client’s business by expanding their portfolio of travel booking partners. Given the positive results our client sees from outsourcing their engineering challenges to Intellias, we’re expecting to extend our collaboration to other technological and business areas.

In particular, as our client pursues their move to the enterprise market, we’re bringing our cooperation to an entirely new level. Intellias has become a strategic engineering partner for this innovative tech company, and we are now implementing the functionality required for the enterprise transition to come to fruition.

The services we provide help our client:

• Onboard popular booking channels and offer more potential commercial wins to their customers
• Reach new rental businesses around the world while retaining existing customers and strengthening their commitment
• Sustain their competitive advantage in the global short-term and vacation rentals sector with an advanced feature set, an enhanced responsive UI, and improved scalability
• Free up their management and engineering resources for R&D activities on promising business opportunities
• Acquire talented teams that deliver on time and on budget