ACCENTRO Real Estate AG is the market leader in housing privatization in Germany. A large part of the customer base is made up of private investors who purchase properties from ACCENTRO as an investment. Such investments are associated with important metrics. For example, real estate is compared based on location, market price, possible return and price development. Excel tables are often used for this, but maintaining and creating them is laborious and error-prone. For this reason, there was a need for a more efficient software solution to this problem. A clear real estate comparison site should be created for private investors. In collaboration with the Cheil agency, we poured the requirements into an intuitive web application called PropRate.

Cheil initially developed a concept for this. For us it said:

Get the developed concept and user interface running as a web application. To do this, we first evaluated the feasibility. First, basic features and functions had to be identified in order to develop an initial product (MVP) in coordination with our project partner. It was important to sensibly combine the implementation of the features with the user experience (UX) developed by Cheil. This guaranteed quick implementation with a focus on quality and also enables the use of the latest software technologies in the future.

Using the draft developed by Cheil, we delivered the MVP in five sprints. Within these five weeks we delivered the entire software architecture, developed the core features and already carried out test runs. The special thing about this is that we worked particularly closely with our project partner on this project. The daily exchange with Cheil throughout development enabled a direct culture of cooperation between UX and development specialists.

At the core of this project are efficiency and user-friendliness: PropRate combines both better data processing and a clear and intuitive user interface. Instead of laborious, manual work, the user is offered an automated solution. For example, website scraping allows data such as the property purchase price to be pre-populated. With just a few clicks, relevant properties are assessed with PropRate and the most important comparative values are clearly displayed. Nothing stands in the way of potential investments. In the future, the planned AI will completely take over the comparison process and thus find the right property without any effort for the user.

The challenge in implementing this project was to develop a stable, scalable application with a good look and feel, while also being lean and in a short time. Our solution: The AWS Amplify Stack. Equipped with this set of tools and services, we got off to a quick start without compromising on quality. The web application is a modern mix of GraphQL, Nuxt and VueJS. The complete API is generated automatically. All we had to do was write a GraphQL schema. Everything else happens on its own. Because AWS Amplify generates an AWS AppSync application including access rights and authentication off-the-shelf. In addition, a DynamoDB is set up in parallel.
‍
The deployment including the Ci/CD pipeline is also virtually automatic. Every commit in the master is automatically built, tested and then deployed. This composition enables high development speed. Tailwind - our favorite CSS library - works in conjunction with VueJS to ensure perfect modularity and flexible reusability of the individual components. This also guarantees 100% flexibility and individuality in the look and feel. This foundation opens up quick and easy implementation of future features. One of these will be assessment using machine learning!