Real Estate Software for Investors and Tenants to Create Added Value

Business challenge

The real estate industry is on the brink of a new evolutionary stage brought about by emerging technologies. In response, a French real estate fund decided to step up with value-added services for their customers and investors. Additionally, rapid business growth prompted our client to optimize property administration and regulation of the legal relationship between tenants and landlords.

An increasing number of investors wish to make property more sustainable by leveraging technology. To meet this demand, our client planned to open broader opportunities for investment with brand-new accounting software for real estate investors. Their project stakeholders wanted a new application to form the basis for a remote monitoring and maintenance system that could later evolve into digital twin software and support the fund’s strategy of adopting advanced technologies.

Market research revealed that existing solutions either did not cover our client’s business needs or were extremely outdated. Given this, the fund decided to develop custom accounting software for real estate.

As our client was looking for a reliable technological partner with broad expertise in real estate software development, object-oriented design, and microservices architecture implementation, Intellias was an excellent choice to meet their needs. Also, due to pressing time constraints, they needed a vendor capable of setting up a team and starting development as soon as possible.

Solution delivered

Minimum viable product

To provide timely and quality services to our client, we gathered a team of backend engineers who support the client’s core team in developing a minimum viable product (MVP) from scratch. Addressing the company’s most persistent need, the MVP focuses on optimizing accounting and documentation processes that must align with French real estate property rules and regulations.

For example, contract terms significantly depend on whether a property is furnished. Using the system that Intellias is developing, it’s possible to keep track of all assets in place to make sure a leased unit meets the requirements for a particular type of contract.

The application allows users to create a lease or rental contract directly in the system using templates. After signing in to an admin portal, a property manager or landlord can set contract start and end dates, assign contracting parties, set a price, and attach scans of related documents. After checking data for consistency and completeness, the system provides a clear list of missing information. Once a contract is filled in and signed, the user can download it as a PDF.

On top of that, the admin portal lets property managers effortlessly navigate tenant data, including contact information, personal data (as per GDPR requirements), and data on the rented property. This simplifies the tracking of invoices, debts, and payments. Also, managers can create invoices for entire buildings or specific services, tenants, and leased units and send them to tenants automatically as PDF files.

The system also provides tenants access to personal accounts where they can check contract details, download invoices, see their payment histories, report issues, and get announcements about scheduled facility maintenance. When a tenant reports a problem through a personal account, the property manager can see this report in the admin portal. The manager can then create a work order and assign it to an employee or contractor. After fixing an issue, a service provider can send an invoice to the property manager or directly to the tenant. Hence, the facility administration system helps to efficiently solve property maintenance issues.

Microservices architecture

As of now, our collaboration with the client is in full gear. Intellias engineers are developing, maintaining, strengthening, and improving the microservices architecture of the web-based application. Some of the essential functions carried out by microservices are:

• storing and modeling data about real estate objects and tenants
• creating rental contracts and converting them to PDF
• storing documents
• aggregating data requests to the back end and sending responses to the front end
• building graph relations between entities to speed up request processing.

The connections between landlords, tenants, and rental properties are what matter most for the facility management system. Since the entity relations take priority in the graph database, we use it to develop our client’s accounting software for real estate. Moreover, the graph database the Intellias team is building will stay flexible and performant as the client’s data volume grows. It will also evolve in step with the rest of the application’s functionality and changing business needs.

Future functionality

Realizing how significantly emerging technologies impact their business, our client plans to extend their property management system with Internet of Things (IoT) components and implement a connected buildings platform. Moving from reactive to predictive maintenance is among the core benefits of IoT in facility management. IoT systems allow building owners and managers to track and control all systems in a building such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), elevators, water supplies, and fire alarms. Our client’s connected building platform will also allow for reading utility meters and transferring meter data to a central database for billing, troubleshooting, and analysis. As a result, energy use will be more sustainable.

Intellias expertise in energy and utilities software can help our client implement innovative solutions in their business, gain a competitive advantage, and bring more value with real estate software for investors.

Business outcome

Disruptive transformations are impossible without optimizing core business processes. The new property management platform we’re working on will help our client make their company future-proof and innovation-ready. The system brings a significant level of automation to the client’s business flows including for regulating legal relationships, signing contracts, accounting, communicating, and solving maintenance issues.

Intellias is developing this real estate platform in a way that lays the groundwork for remote monitoring and maintenance system. Powered by an extensive set of tools and IoT connectivity, the platform makes our client’s buildings smarter, more sustainable, and more attractive to investors.