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Comprehensive Real Estate Platform

Dealink is a unique brokerage management platform tailored to contemporary market demands. It combines interfaces for brokers and retailers, streamlining deal management and enhancing organizational collaboration. This platform stands out by facilitating efficient transactions and interactions between different user types, emphasizing a seamless, integrated experience.

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Client's Objectives

Enhancing Product Quality and Reliability: To enhance the overall quality and reliability of the Dealink platform, ensuring high user satisfaction and building trust in this Brokerage Operations Platform.

Accelerating Time-to-Market: To streamline development processes to enable quicker release of new features and updates, keeping the platform competitive and responsive to market trends and user feedback.

Reducing Operational Costs: To optimize development, testing, and deployment procedures to reduce time and resource expenditure, thereby lowering operational costs and freeing up resources for innovation.

Building a Scalable and Sustainable Platform: To create a codebase and infrastructure that are scalable and sustainable, allowing for easy adaptation to future growth, user demands, and new technological developments.

Minimizing Risk and Enhancing Security: To establish robust deployment and testing protocols to minimize the risks of bugs, security breaches, and system downtimes, ensuring a secure and stable platform.

Challenges

Legacy Project architecture improvements challenge

Transitioning a legacy project to a new architecture presents significant challenges, primarily stemming from the complicated data structure of the existing system. This complexity makes it difficult to streamline information management, resulting in inconsistencies throughout the project. Moreover, the control system is overly complex, adding another layer of difficulty to the transition process. Additionally, recurring bugs during feature additions highlight underlying issues in the codebase that have not been fully resolved. These unresolved issues lead to inefficiencies and increased development time, further complicating the transition.

Striking the Right Balance: Prioritizing Critical Features with Minimal Refactoring

Balancing feature implementation with time efficiency poses a perpetual challenge in project development. There's a constant struggle to implement necessary features swiftly while maintaining high quality. This challenge underscores the necessity for more efficient project management and development practices. Such practices are essential to meeting business objectives without overstretching available resources, ensuring sustainable progress and success.

Team Transition and Knowledge Transfer

The challenge involves smoothly transitioning the project responsibilities from the current development team to Visual Craft's specialized team. This process entails not only a change in personnel but also a significant transfer of knowledge, skills, and ongoing project nuances.

Solutions

Optimizing Data Management and System Efficiency

Streamlined Data Management: Simplified and aligned the data management system to boost clarity and efficiency, all while minimizing major code alterations.

Comprehensive System Analysis: Conducted a thorough analysis of the system to uncover and address foundational weaknesses prior to implementing any new architectural changes.

Improved Information Management: Streamlined how information is utilized and managed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the system.

Simplified Control System: Enhanced ease of use and maintenance by simplifying the control system, thereby improving overall system performance.

Optimizing Data Management and System Efficiency

Strategic Prioritization and Agile Development

Balancing feature implementation with time efficiency poses a perpetual challenge in project development.

Our solutions:

Implemented Feature Prioritization

Utilized a systematic approach to prioritize features based on client needs, business impact, and complexity, employing methods like MoSCoW to focus on essential features first.

Agile Development Practices

Implemented agile methodologies to enable iterative development, facilitating quicker delivery of key features in small, manageable increments without compromising quality.

Utilizing MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Approach

Developed and released a minimum viable product comprising only the most essential features, accelerating deployment and gathering user feedback for future development guidance.

Regular Client Consultations

Engaged in frequent consultations with the client to ensure alignment with their expectations and needs, directing efforts towards the most crucial client requirements and avoiding unnecessary work.

Product Design and Features Development

With our team's extensive industry experience, we've implemented innovative strategies to design user-centric features. Through the application of design thinking methodologies, we've actively engaged in the process of ideation and validation, guaranteeing that every new feature we develop aligns seamlessly with the needs and expectations of our end users. These are the key features our team worked on:

Advanced Reporting System for Brokers and Agents

Feature to view, configure, and save customized reports.
Brokers can create, edit, save, and manage reports with specific columns and filters.
Agents have view-only access to reports with limited functionalities like printing and exporting.
Implementation of a 'Configure' button for brokers to customize report fields.
Functionality for sorting, adding columns, and applying various filters in reports.
Saving and managing customized reports for future reference.

Enhanced User Permissions and Roles and Robust Contact Management in Deals

Different permissions and functionalities for brokers and agents on the report page.
Brokers have extensive control over report configuration and management.
Agents have restricted, view-only access with limited actions.
Feature for agents to add contacts to deals and manage their roles.
Automatic notifications and registration invitations sent to added contacts.
Different levels of deal visibility and access based on user roles and invitations.

Efficient Financial Management and Deal Grouping and Management

Ability for brokers to record, manage, and track all incoming and outgoing payments.
Features for managing escrow deposits, agent deductions, and commission payments.
Detailed financial reports with options for assigning payments to specific deals or refunds.
Grouping deals with the same address for streamlined management.
Contextual actions and visibility based on the grouped deal status and user roles.

Solution for Testing and Deployment process issues

The development team, faced with numerous challenges, showcased their expertise by adeptly addressing them through the implementation of a series of strategic steps.

Actions Executed:

Optimized Deployment Process

The team devised and executed a correct and optimized deployment process. This ensured consistency, reliability, and efficiency in the release and management of new software updates.

Agile Methodologies Adoption

Agile methodologies were embraced for development, enabling flexibility and iterative progress. This approach facilitated timely adjustments to meet evolving project requirements.

Integration of Project Management Tools

Project management tools were seamlessly integrated into the workflow. This enhanced tracking and collaboration among team members, fostering seamless communication and coordination.

Establishment of Dedicated Testing Server

A dedicated testing server was set up to facilitate rigorous testing. This provided a controlled environment for testing new features and updates.

Formalization of Testing Protocol

A comprehensive testing protocol was formalized, encompassing both automated and manual testing strategies. This ensured thorough evaluation of code quality and functionality.

Innovative solutions

Email and Document Management Solution

Developing a comprehensive system that integrates unique email address generation with user account management, along with a sophisticated document management system in the Dealink platform was one of the challenges as our team should focus on the following set of components to implement this feature:

Unique Email Assignment: Generating a unique email address for each user based on their name, with an indexing system for duplicates.
Email Integration with User Types: Ensuring different user types (agent, broker) receive appropriate email addresses and display them correctly in various sections of the app.
Document Management in Inbox: Handling incoming documents, particularly PDFs, with various statuses (Pending, On Hold, Assigned) and actions (view, change status, delete, assign/reassign).
The complexity lies in ensuring seamless integration, user-friendly interfaces, and maintaining data integrity and security throughout these processes.
Applications and Benefits

Dynamic User Profile Integration

Implement a system that automatically updates user profiles and the Inbox with the new email address upon account creation or access level change. Ensure that these email addresses are displayed appropriately based on user roles.

Email Integration with User Types

Ensuring different user types (agent, broker) receive appropriate email addresses and display them correctly in various sections of the app.

Advanced Document Management System

Create a robust inbox system capable of receiving, categorizing, and managing documents.

Google's Catch-All Mailbox incorporation

To enhance the Inbox feature in Mydealink, the development team utilized Google Workspace's advanced email services. This integration provides robust email functionality, essential for the unique email assignment and document management system within Mydealink.

By implementing these solutions, Dealink can efficiently manage user accounts and documents, enhancing the overall functionality and user experience of the platform.

Project Timeline

Step 1

Project Transition

Step 2

Refactoring

Step 3

New features development

Step 4

Testing and Deployment

Step 5

Support