Business Challenge

The client, one of the top 3 enterprises on Swiss classified ads market, required to reorganize and improve its existing real estate classifieds portal (http://www.immoclick.ch). The marketing information system of the portal enables the users to reach the target group amounting for 99,000 visitors weekly, who in turn generate around 1 million pageviews monthly. The portal was originally developed on ColdFusion platform, unable to provide high supportability and flexibility. Thus, the decision was made in favor of rewriting the system from scratch on the Java platform with appliance of the most up-to-date technologies.

Technology Evaluation

Right from the beginning, the customer was considering two options: applying PHP, preconditioned by the company’s existent know-how and practical experience in the above mentioned technological field, or applying J2EE as a modern object-oriented technology and enterprise-level platform.

Having conducted technology evaluation, Intellias suggested rewriting the portal in Java. Usage of this development platform would enable the Project Team to meet customer’s requirements concerning increased supportability, scalability and performance. Utilizing the advantages of Java as the enterprise platform, the solution provided for relative simplicity of implementation as well as possibility of integration with existing ERP software.

Following Intellias recommendations, the customer has decided in favor of Java platform.

Project Description

The redeveloped platform for real estate classifieds provides reliable, easy to use and maintain system, open for changes and integrations and introduces more advanced service offerings for portal visitors. The system stands out for a number of distinctive interactive features, therefore facilitating collaboration between users, visitors and administrators.

Advantages to owners of properties:

• Advantages to owners of properties:
• One-stop publishing and management of advertisements/classifieds
• Upload of floor plans, images and videos associated with particular properties
• Geocoding of properties’ locations by means of GIS subsystem
• Support of the whole spectrum of real estate (housing, business objects, new constructions, investment objects, holiday properties, WG rooms, parking lots, ground)
• Flexible online payment system and ordinary invoicing
• User-friendly interface for managing properties and payments
• Overview of ad publication statistics
• Management of advertisement keywords and analysis of their performance
• Real estate agencies support (batch import of existing ads/classifieds, facilities to organize several employees managing classifieds on behalf of the agency)

Benefits to real estate seekers:

• User-friendly front-end web interface
• Extensive search functionality
• Search agent (provides facilities to subscribe for notifications about new properties by email according to user-defined criteria)
• Possibility to aggregate other similar databases of properties (both Swiss and European)
• Creation and management of favorites
• Send to friend option (email, SMS, MMS)
• Online estimation of properties
• Interface for banking systems (calculation of mortgage options)
• Visualization of properties’ locations on the map

Administration:

• Extensive functionality for managing users, properties, ads, payments
• Tight integration with other systems (i.e. Swissclick billing system)
• Content import via RSS feeds from external providers
• Advanced statistics on ads, classifieds, promotions (tracking of click-through rates)
• Custom mini-sitemap for Google-crawlers to improve SEO-friendliness
• Data protection from unfriendly crawlers

White labeling solution allows other real estate agencies to benefit from the integration of Immoclick’s functionality (search properties and display search results) into their sites.

Import/export functionality:

• Data import from other sources (friendly systems and real estate agencies with automated data provision)
• Supports 4 main import/export formats adopted in German-speaking countries
• Import processing capacity - up to 20,000 properties at a time for a given agency
• Supports both local and remote FTP/HTTP servers

In Focus - GIS subsystem:

• Based on Google Maps API and PostGIS platform
• Visualization of properties on the map while browsing search results or property details
• Interactive on-the-fly geocoding of properties when they are submitted through the user interface or batch imported
• Search properties within range of X km distance or Y minutes drive from the specified point

Benefits to the client

• Extensive front-end and back-end functionality
• Tight integration with other existing enterprise-level systems
• Linkage to other databases, systems and content providers
• Ultimate interaction with real estate agencies and other partners
• Increased revenue generated by the optimization of ad publishing management

Project Architecture