Online data room portal for real estate properties

The story of the project dates back to 2008, when one of our clients and partners came to us with the idea to create a website builder with a range of different templates and options to edit website interface and content.

A working prototype was ready within a year and the next step was to adjust the product to the real estate industry needs. This shaped the main development priorities to include the speed of website creation, minimizing the time to make it ready to be published online, extended options of data security and commercial information access control, eye-catching template design and compatibility with different browsers and devices, reliability and usability for administrators, as well as the ability for agents to handle urgent requests from the users right away.

We developed the project from scratch, and during 10 years of its existence updated the architecture twice to meet actual load, security and scalability requirements.

Initially the product is a website builder, allowing to select a template and create a site on it in a few clicks. Content management is implemented with a range of versatile elements (e.g. texts, images and slide-shows, embedded videos, document containers, feedback forms etc) that can come in handy to populate the website pages. A preview mode is available while working on the site to check how the users will see it. At the moment the site is published, an SSL certificate is automatically generated for it, and a separate domain can optionally be acquired and pinned at any moment.

The system has several layers of data security implemented along with the options to limit/control user access to the published data. The access control system is integrated into all modules of the product. For example, there are three different models of user registration on a website.

User access can optionally be restricted for the whole site, for some individual pages or for the particular document containers. User's actions are logged and available to the client in the form of autogenerated statistics.

Documents are an important part of the data room sites, so the clients can make them downloadable (as long as the user's access level allows it, of course) or available only for viewing/familiarising (such documents can also be provided with watermarks). The system does not impose any restrictions on the volume of downloadable data. The storage is organised via AWS S3 service.

The customer support team joined the developers to meet all the requirements of the real-estate industry clients regarding the portal's usability, design quality and minimizing the time from task assignment to the site going live. The team helps with all kinds of tasks and issues, from creating a new site and populating it with content to solving any technical problems, with an average task completion time being less than an hour.

A mobile business application is available for the clients to manage user access to the sites, track user activity and send notifications of the sites' updates.

Estatecreate has been a significant player on the UK real estate market for more than ten years now.

Having a relatively small development team (2 Java back-end developers, 1 front-end developer, 2 designers, 3 customer support engineers) the project managed to reach impressive performance:

over 6000 active websites

100+ real-estate agencies

2000 active editors and agents

The product is currently in support status. The next development cycle is always planned depending on the customer feedback and new market requirements.

The main actual priorities of the project development include, for example, extending the multilingual interface support in order to expand service coverage beyond English speaking countries, introducing digital NDA signature services for commercial information access management, amplifying the mobile version of the portal.