The real-estate field – and its next-of-kin construction industry – is always an indicator of the economic health of a city, region, or country. Cities where property prices are growing are considered more attractive and valuable for living. Regions and countries that want to boost their economic growth and attract investments commonly spark the construction and real-estate industries.
So far, everything sounds like a fairy tale, but now we’re going to make a twist in this story: numerous real-estate agencies, design companies, and construction enterprises face heavy obstacles along the way.
And just like that, similar to our contribution to finance-disrupting fintech projects and health-tech platforms, the masterminds behind BrightMarbles Group have helped several renowned real-estate players improve their services or build them from scratch.
Our business philosophy goes high above sheer software development and code. While we do admit that such skills are invaluable in today’s global biz market, we have a dream – similar to that of Martin Luther King, only in tech – to win over projects that both improve people’s lives and generate revenue. The exquisite entourage of business professionals we’ve gathered supports this claim, as we offer our clients numerous extra services, on top of building software and apps.
So, when we blended our softdev expertise with building or improving real-estate platforms, we got first-class, user-friendly products.
But let’s cut a long story short and get to the gist of our property-enhancing business endeavors.
The Global State of Homeownership
The housing problems that younger generations are facing in developed countries have become a burning issue in many communities. The ratio between the annual median salary and the property cost has been deteriorating in the last four decades. In an analysis published by The Guardian, it’s been reported that the average single-family home in the US through the 1990s cost three times than the median annual household income. By 2005, this ration increased to five times, only to drop down to 3.6 times after the 2008 real-estate bubble burst. Ordinary home seekers didn’t see any significant benefit from this drop because the depression kicked in, leaving many people jobless or with lower salaries. Fast forward to the post-pandemic US property market in 2022: the price of an average single-family home in the US is now 5.6 higher than the median annual household income.
The situation in the European Union, the Far East, and many other parts of the world is similar. What’s more, in developing countries we’re witnessing a trend of severe social differences. Here, a small percentage of well-off people can afford buying several properties, while middle-class and working class employees can hardly afford buying a single home – the one where they would live with their families. The latest layoffs in the tech field make things more difficult for such X-geners, Millennials, and Zoomers.
BM Insight: BrightMarbles Group is actively working on improving people’s lives, through meaningful projects. In terms of the real-estate market, various alternatives are emerging: business projects aiming at enabling people to buy a home, initiatives that reduce construction costs for investors (thus potentially reducing end prices for buyers), and platforms that make property research more efficient. In the rest of this article, we’ll showcase some of the projects we’ve worked on, which our skilled tech, design, and marketing professionals have made a difference.
Building the Real-Estate Innovation
The real-estate industry is rapidly transforming with the integration of cutting-edge technologies. BrightMarbles is at the forefront, leveraging AI and machine learning to revolutionize property search algorithms and market trend predictions, offering more accurate valuations, personalized searches, and advanced analyses. Additionally, by incorporating big data analytics, IoT, and sustainable building practices, we deliver innovative solutions that exceed industry standards, ensuring our clients stay ahead in a competitive market. These integrations are just examples of how we are continuously pushing the boundaries to drive success for our clients.
In the following lines, we’ll illustrate our work on three ground-breaking real-estate innovations: Anyone, Greenlite, and Savills. Since our inception in 2016, we’ve participated in numerous software and mobile app development projects
Anyone (Should Afford a Place to Live)
Services: Team Augmentation; Consulting; Backend Development; Frontend Development
Anyone.com is a Dutch company aiming at making homeownership more accessible in the Netherlands through their buyer-friendly Anyone Mortgage system. One of their interesting ideas is to allow people to own a share of a property, not necessarily the entire place. It’s a valuable concept for both home buyers and real-estate investors.
BrightMarbles and Anyone started working together when the latter wanted to launch their MVP platform. Our company stepped in, and we’ve built a trust-based partnership, mostly due to our ability to adapt to their needs and upscale/downscale our team in accordance with the Anyone’s needs.
Our tasks included building an easy-to-use signup platform with all-inclusive real-estate listings. These features had to be integrated with the domestic cadastral data. Also, we had to find a way to ensure the necessary multimedia upload capabilities, to help home seekers and realtors showcase their properties. The client needed a property search engine, as well, so that potential customers could do research on their own.
During their comprehensive user research, Anyone figured out that their platform should contain improved communication channels for realtors and simplify the contract-signing procedure. Hence, we built special realtor pages for listing management and inquiries, as well as for scheduling viewings, which eased their work flow and boosted their online visibility.
Such elements would increase Anyone’s performance when compared to their competitors.
Another successful milestone in this project was implementing innovative UX design features, such as seamless identity verification and login features, together with smooth signup and interactive maps. All these elements allow home seekers swiftly explore homeownership options and mortgage calculations.
Finally, we’ve implemented all the necessary compliance features, so that the entire Anyone.com platform is compliant with the Dutch legal and regulatory requirements. From data protection to cybersecurity features, the entire website infrastructure meets the domestic compliance framework.
Swift Construction Permits with Greenlite
Services: Team Augmentation; Software Product Development; Backend Development, Frontend Development, MVP development
Greenlite is an innovative platform for architects, engineers, real-estate investors, and business owners. What’s inventive about it is cutting down the construction permit approval time from months to weeks through their state-of-the-art software solution.
In most developed countries, construction entrepreneurs typically go through a strenuous, time-devouring process of obtaining construction permits. The Greenlite crew came up with an idea of carrying out all the dirty work regarding administration on behalf of construction companies.
Our collaboration with this company was based on daily communication and Agile development – which we’ve been applying in all three projects described here.
Our augmented team worked closely with Greenlite’s in-house software squad to stay in the loop all the time. Hence, we’ve been able to build and deliver a future-proof product, founded on cutting-edge technologies in real-time.
In addition to software development, the Greenlite management realized they could use an extra hand in product management, so we expanded our collaboration into product development and delivery.
Here are some of the products of our fruitful collaboration:
- Faster permit approvals. Through the cutting-edge project dashboard, project management suite, and project review tool, Greenlite’s clients get probably the best tech service in the niche, completely directed at their benefit and frictionless operations. For instance, the centralized map allow for instant project status updates, so that Greenlite can constantly pinpoint the project bottlenecks and speed up approval procedures. The streamlined workflows let users align their resources, tasks, and deadlines with permitting demands, thus avoiding delays and completing their construction projects on time. For project reviewers, we’ve developed integrated commenting elements, as well as features for handy documentation management and milestone tracking.
- Improved transparency. The Greenlite platform has gathered diverse stakeholders, so now they can exchange information and get the service they need through intuitive collaboration tools. Also, real-time updates and automatic notifications removed information roadblocks, keeping all the stakeholders updated.
- Lower permit-issuing costs. The simplified, more efficient workflows and single-point communication reduces overhead costs and resource spillage.
Savills – Tradition that Breathes Invention
Services: Team Augmentation; Software Product Development; Mobile App Development, UX and UI implementation
Savills is one of the most recognizable and oldest real-estate service providers. Having been catering to realtors and home buyers for 160+ years, this seasoned property entity has more than 600 offices across the globe in more than 60 countries.
When the Savills’ managers approached us, they needed a solution to integrate large data chunks related to corporate office space and a B2B software app with a sleek and cutting-edge UX and well-known UI.
Our main task was to develop a robust and all-inclusive search and filtering features, adapted to the existing API. It was a demanding project, regarding app data organization and management.
We managed to develop a custom multi-level into a responsive, interactive real-estate tool, based on React and NodeJS stacks, combined with the Google API. In this improved version, users could see pinned office locations on a map, with all the necessary information thereof. They could also mark a large number of required filters, searching for property locations based on their relevant criteria. The Savills leads and customers could now – and still can – carry out their searches in a much faster and more customizable way than before.
While tradition was the bit that Savills brought to our collaboration, inventiveness was our part of this productive partnership. We mobilized our tech expertise, market research skills, and niche knowledge to build a modern, easily navigated and visually enticing real-estate platform. Originally aimed at the town of Utrecht, the Netherlands, it was soon expanded to include different towns and cities around the world where Savills conducts its operations.
Conclusion
Our company is keen on sharing the vast expertise, experience, and agility we’ve gained over the years. We’re here to shine like a tech beacon, implementing projects that combine the latest tool stacks with world-changing initiatives. From remarkable projects we’re working on in the fintech and health-tech industries, to solutions enhancing project management, to the real-estate platforms above, and much more, BrightMarbles Group is turning programming into something more important: tangible products that will shape the world of tomorrow.
Contact us if you want us to turn your ideas into such products and we’ll arrange a discovery workshop to illustrate why we’re the best choice for real-estate projects: https://brightmarbles.io/contact/.
About Author
Pavle Bobic is a resident content marketing strategist and business writer at BrightMarbles Group Holding. A long-term holder of master’s degree in the English language and literature and once-teacher, he has been producing content in biztech, IT, fintech and eCommerce since 2013. His expertise drills deep into the correlations between information technology, business development, and financial technology, with a pinch of SEO on the top.