Time to market
Reduced time to market from concept to MVP ready in 20 weeks.
Feature completion
Delivered 100% of ‘must have’ and 75% of ‘nice to have’ features and functionalities within the MVP within 20 weeks.
Completely customisable
Demonstrated high levels of tenant customisation, with 15 estate agents able to utilise configurable features to tailor the application to their specific needs and branding requirements.
iamproperty is a property technology company that partners with estate agents to offer market-leading solutions designed to help accelerate agents’ success. These include the UK’s largest residential auction service, iamsold and the UK’s first end-to-end digital client onboarding and conveyancing solution, movebutler.
Having noticed that many estate agents share a common challenge - the absence of a tailored market appraisal process, leading to missed opportunities in discussing optimal sales methods with vendors, iamproperty wanted to create a digital valuation tool to support best practice for compliant market appraisals, providing a method for estate agents to learn more about vendor circumstances, enabling them to suggest the most appropriate method of sale, ultimately increasing sales via modern method of auction.
iamproperty needed a partner to design and develop an ‘Alpha’ working version of a digital valuation tool at pace that could be trialled with a defined group of estate agents quickly and used with real clients to test market viability and understand how to move the product forward.
Using our process ‘The Path’, we started the project with an in-depth planning, analysis and discovery (PAD) phase which enabled us to explore the product’s requirements whilst scoping the project and gathering user and business requirements. The digital valuation tool needed to be a dual use tool, intended for both vendors and estate agents, so we had to create a multi-tenancy application that would allow each estate agent to operate their own customisable instance of the application.
After defining the functional and non-functional requirements of the application, we created user stories to describe the ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ for both vendors and estate agents with these shaping our approach to project.
When it came to design, our initial approach was to deliver a proof of concept (POC), offering a thin slice of functionality across the entire application. This would allow the engineering team to fail fast in terms of identifying issues as early as possible when it came to delivering the base engineering for the multi-tenancy structure. However, the PAD phase identified that some requirements of the application had evolved, therefore we pivoted our approach to develop a minimal viable product (MVP) that included more integral functionality that was essential for testing the market viability of the tool.
Using Agile principles, we developed a progressive web app (PWA) that made the best use of cloud technology to allow us to focus on developing features and business logic to deliver the MVP quickly. Detailed sprints and time-bound iterations allowed us to adapt quickly to changing requirements such as providing a comprehensive suite of data analytics and reporting functionality to users and a high-level of customisation to estate agents.
The make-up of the application was four-fold including a lead generation tool designed for vendors to conduct initial research on the sales options available to them whilst providing leads for the estate agent to follow up on, an ‘in the room’ interface for agents to discuss the different sales options available to vendors, an admin tool for iamproperty admins and estate agent admins to configure the tool via their own customisable instance and a notification journey to drive interaction with both vendors and agents at key touch points throughout the lead generation and in the room journeys.
Shared services provided the underlying infrastructure of the multi-tenancy application whilst also enabling a high level of tenant customisation for each estate agent by offering flexible configuration, essentially enabling agents to ‘white label’ the application.
As part of a strategic programme of modernisation of iamproperty’s technical estate, our tech stack selection prioritised cloud-native solutions for optimal performance and cost efficiency. By leveraging AWS solutions, we ensured scalability and robustness for the MVP whilst the architecture empowers users in creating and managing domains while maintaining stringent security measures across multiple domains. This approach embraces a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, facilitating seamless scalability and enhanced user experiences.
By pivoting from an initial POC to a robust MVP, our software delivery team delivered a fully-fledged scalable solution that the customer could take to market and test within 20 weeks followed by a 4-week warranty period. What was initially envisioned as a preliminary exploration evolved into a comprehensive product, poised for scalability into an enterprise application for the property technology sector.
Embracing Agile principles and leveraging the latest cloud technologies, we engineered a solution that met the changing requirements, providing a platform that can seamlessly integrate for future enhancements.
The MVP will enable iamproperty to test market viability with confidence, ensuring they can scale the product accordingly with flexibility for future development.
Time to market
Reduced time to market from concept to MVP ready in 20 weeks.
Feature completion
Delivered 100% of ‘must have’ and 75% of ‘nice to have’ features and functionalities within the MVP within 20 weeks.
Completely customisable
Demonstrated high levels of tenant customisation, with 15 estate agents able to utilise configurable features to tailor the application to their specific needs and branding requirements.
Future scalability
Built a scalable solution capable of handling increasing user loads and data volumes, with the ability to support an unlimited user base.
The best of AWS
Leveraged the best of AWS services as a pay-as-you-go model to ensure the application was capable of scaling with growing user numbers.
AWS Well-Architected
Adhered to the AWS Well-Architected Framework to create a robust and reliable platform that achieves operational excellence.
Accessible, as standard
The digital valuation tool is compliant with WCAG AA accessibility standards.
