Our customer’s goal was to create a service that allows users to search and obtain information about available properties on the real estate market in Israel. Special focus was on user interface and maps integration to provide for a user-friendly and convenient search process. Onmap wanted to simplify the real estate search and monetize quickly.
OnMap
Business challenges
Technical challenges
- Define what technologies to apply and what kind of architecture meets the requirements of the business. They had to match a number of criteria: flexibility, scalability, perspective, a strong and developed community.
- Integrate a map service that would allow a user to promptly search by individual regions on the map
- Integrate a geocoding service to work with a huge quantity of addresses in Israel where new streets and addresses appear quickly.
- Automate various searches based on saved criteria.
- Multilingual support (Hebrew, English, Russian, French).
Key results
- Built a project with microservices architecture.
- Based microservices on an npm module: separate services for analytics, geocoding, and mailings
- Deployed all infrastructure in Docker containers on AWS using ECS.
- Developed the ability to select polygons on the map for filtering results by city or neighborhood boundaries. Also added the ability to draw custom boundaries on the map for filtering.
- As new streets and addresses appear quite often in Israel, Google services don't always have up-to-date information on addresses. We developed our own geocoding service that supplements Google's service.
- Developed SmartAgent, which checks for new listings based on saved search criteria on a daily basis and sends emails with relevant offers.
- Created sections for professionals where a company profile can be added for construction companies, carriers, mortgage companies, interior designers, lawyers, real estate appraisers, and real estate agencies.
- Gradually added the ability to publish and search for commercial real estate and new buildings.
- Added a section for international real estate for publishing and searching for properties outside of Israel.
- Developed a range of paid features - various promotions for advertisements, packages for realtors, and lead generation.
Our achievements
- We have developed our own unique geocoding service, which has reduced costs for third-party services by three-fold.
- Adapted API to help large Israeli advertisement aggregator websites to promote OnMap's advertisements additionally thus contributing to customer’s monetization.
