Case Study

KPI platform for professional real estate agents

Spotkanie kierownika projektu z zespołem w celu ustalenia kolejnych rezultatów platformy KPI

The client

 

162x185_logo_imovirtual 1

 

Industry
  • Technology
  • Founded in 2011, in Portugal
  • Part of the OLX group and recognised as one of the leading brands in the industry
  • Over 300,000 properties in Portugal

 

Challenge
  • This project aimed to develop a KPI platform to provide a better user experience for professional real estate agents and gather the most important information for them in real time.

Solution

From an architectural point of view, the main challenge was to create a structure capable of handling huge daily amounts of data, while maintaining its integrity and resilience, since there is a very small hourly window to recover this data in the event of a disaster.

The solution involved the use of Microsoft Azure Data Factory, programmed to ingest raw data and subsequently transform it in two ways:

  • Sending part of the data to Microsoft’s main relational database, Azure SQL Server;
  • Sending the remaining data to the non-relational database Azure Cosmos DB.

However, that was only part of the challenge. In order to meet expectations and control such a volume of data, the application would need to achieve a high speed when made available to the client. This speed was achieved by using techniques such as in-memory cache.

The cache policy takes into consideration that after the user accesses the platform for the first time, most of its data becomes available in memory and all subsequent accesses do not require the database, making the response highly efficient.

From a security point of view, Imovirtual has strict access and validation rules. In order to deliver this project in production, penetration tests were performed and the solution was adapted to the security policies, by using security vaults to store secrets, passwords and connections to the database.


Important numbers

  • Daily data import:
    800,000 records
  • Total amount of data stored:
    250,000,000

Note: the daily imports are large in relation to the total amount of data stored, however many tables are crunched daily and recreated. For this reason, the total amount of data stored is not proportional to the daily imports.


Methodology

Scrum methodology.


Technologies

  • NET6
  • Microsoft Azure Cloud
  • Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
  • Microsoft Azure SQL Server
  • Microsoft Azure Data Factory V2
  • Microsoft Azure Key Vault
  • Microsoft Azure Storage Account

Results

Professional real estate agents now have at their disposal a complete platform where they can see all the statistics of their listings.

It’s a detailed analysis based on indicators and graphics of historical data, allowing decisions to be made based on performance. It is also possible to obtain the history of payments and investments, as well as official reports of the real estate market per region.


Time and resources

3-months project. The team included:

  • Project Manager
  • Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer
  • 1 Back-end Developer
  • 1 Front-end Developer
  • 1 Technical Lead

Architecture

Arquitetura macro 1

Arquitetura macro 2

 


Images of the application

Homepage:

Página inicial

Ads performance:

Performance por anúncios

Overall performance:

Performance global

Featured investments:

Investimentos em destaque

Overall quality of the ads:

Qualidade global de anúncios

Payments:

Pagamentos