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Organizations Involved

Multi-platform real-estate app powered by Decoupled Drupal

Clasifika is an upcoming housing startup from Panama connecting buyers and sellers in the real estate market. We helped Clasifika with product consulting to build an MVP backlog, used Design thinking to rapidly test ideas with real-world beta users and finally delivered UX optimized and high-performance web and mobile app both powered by Decoupled Drupal as the backend.

About the project

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Requirements

Connecting buyers and sellers in the real estate market.

  • Platform for property dealers in Panama and property buyers across locations to connect
  • Dealers app and Buyers app with a common backend i.e Drupal
  • Web application in Angular JS
  • Android and iOS app development
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Our Approach

Discovery (Product Consulting)

Decoupled Drupal

QED42 and Clasifika together built the MVP backlog for the product to prioritize stories with high value and low cost. Clasfika’s founder engaged real-life stakeholders from his network to fill out surveys that helped us understand buyer and seller problems in high detail. After receiving 100’s of responses to our surveys, evaluating the cost to benefit of we soon realised that the following features were going to be critical for the product:

  • Buyer and Seller verification
  • Real-time communication between buyers and sellers
  • Capturing a high amount of data about properties
  • Bulk import of properties from excel / MLS systems
  • Mobile solution for inventory management
  • Decision Driven Search System
  • UX/UI to be a key differentiator

Designing the Product

Thanks to our discovery, we had a lean and crisp backlog for the MVP and a lot of clarity on what we were building. Our next task was to design the product and test our solutions, some of the key guidelines for the design team were:

  • Action-based UX
  • Component-based design for elements to be reusable across web and mobile
  • Minimalist Design with a focus on important actions
  • Design for performance

Decoupled Drupal

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Solution

Capitalizing on Drupal’s restful architecture, we designed the next-gen real estate platform for connecting buyers and sellers.

Following were the key highlights: 

  • Real-time verification of profiles to ensure 100% authenticity.
  • Flexible integrations to import databases of multiple formats, sources
  • Human assisted AI chat platform for instantaneous conversations and conversions.
  • Publisher oriented mobile app design to intuitively manage listings

A next-gen real estate platform for connecting buyers with sellers with:

  • Verified Buyers
  • Bulk import of property database
  • Chat-based contact centre to have conversations with potential buyers
  • Mobile App to easily publish and manage listings

Decoupled Drupal

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Building Clasifika

Our tech stack included the following frameworks and systems:

  • Decoupled Drupal - CMS and REST point provider for various functionality.
  • Angular - Web application consuming data from Drupal and other services.
  • Ionic - Hybrid Mobile app for Android and iOS with Drupal as functionality Backend.
  • Firebase - Realtime Database to power buyer and seller chats.
  • Elastic Search -To power faceted and geospatial search queries from the web and mobile app.
  • External XML Feeds - Property data from third-party XML feeds was synced to Drupal periodically.
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Why Drupal was chosen

Looking at the product and UX needs of Clasifika, we opted for a distributed architecture of third-party systems backed by API first Drupal deployment also known as Decoupled Drupal for the following reasons: 

  • API first/Restful architecture
  • Rapid development

  • Structured content management of property listings

Multi-platform Real estate app powered by Decoupled Drupal

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • We leveraged JSON:API specs via the JSON API module to connect with multiple content-types using a single request.
  • Custom Indexer and sorting algorithm for Elastic Search and leveraged elasticsearch_connector Drupal module for stock integration.
  • Angular Web application directly queried Elastic search to bypass Drupal bootstrap for high performance.
  • Multi-threaded Migration to speed up syncing of a huge amount of data coming from XML feeds.
  • Component Driven Design and Frontend to share UI elements between Angular and Ionic e.g. we could use the chat directive built for ionic in Angular with some CSS adjustments.
  • Stateful Publishing workflow on mobile allowing for data to persist across screens and allowing the users to save their progress as a draft.
  • Frontend Code Reusability and Best practices - We followed Angular best practices for making our codebase reusable using directives and services for common functionality.
  • Analytics - Tracked user journey using custom events.