LINK, a New England real estate listing and reporting service, engaged Quoin to re-engineer its core web-based application for brokers and real estate professionals. An established service provider with a devoted client base, LINK sought to modernize its technology platform while continuing to support end-users during this transition. Quoin works closely with client stakeholders to understand the business objectives and provides incremental redesign and implementation of a fully-responsive mobile and web application.
LINK is a real estate listing and reporting service with a long and successful track record of supporting real estate professionals in Boston, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard. Led by its founders, the company prides itself on a customized user experience driven by in-depth knowledge of their markets - setting LINK apart from the other multiple listing service (MLS) providers. Their business relies on a comprehensive and easy-to-use web-based application that provides subscribers with features and functionality tailored to each market. This SaaS product allows brokers to easily manage the entire sales process – creating, searching, filtering, and comparing listings to share with their clients.
In response to demand for a mobile solution, LINK began a comprehensive overhaul of the application. The objectives for this strategic rebuild included an upgraded user experience, fully responsive design, new search capabilities, and other enhancements to support end-users. In addition, LINK would migrate the application to the Microsoft Azure platform to realize improved availability, security, and performance. However, this transition to a re-engineered application and platform was complex and distracted the company from its focus on its customers. A new CTO with extensive experience in the real estate technology sector, Tony Mastroianni, engaged Quoin to support this strategic effort.
We responded to this challenge by deploying a project team that included a project manager, visual designer, and software developers. Our initial effort was a focused process analysis, design, and rapid development to support a critical release for end-users. After helping LINK meet this milestone, we have worked to establish a regular process of design and incremental release as part of the CTO’s development roadmap. Our team focused on re-designing their user interface and building new features, so that Link’s superior listing data and market statistics could be better absorbed and managed by its clients.
We created a new main dashboard that allowed brokers to search across an expanded list of property parameters tailored to each location, such as neighborhood, building, and more. This new page also contained features to streamline realtors’ workflow, such as generating ‘properties to watch’ based on their data and integrating advanced print and export functions.
We focused on ensuring that the mobile solution also offered an equally engaging and intuitive visual design; end-users can access the same rich search capabilities and interactive workflow on a hand-held device that they can on a desktop screen.
As a critical step in the project, Quoin engineers incrementally re-engineered and built a hybrid architecture (see below figure), composed of both the C#/.NET legacy system and a new JavaScript application. Re-built features, such as Search and Results, were implemented in React JS and Node.js, but must communicate with the legacy application and the Microsoft Cosmos data storage service in order to be rendered.
