Agentfolio

Agentfolio is a powerful collaboration tool for real estate agents and their clients. It provides a web and mobile workspace where all people involved in a home search can look for and discuss property listings in one place and in real time.

  • mobile app
  • Web development

History

The story started in 2009 when Matthew and Susan Daimler were searching for an apartment in New York and had a rather frustrating experience with their broker. They were struggling to cope with a heap of messy emails, and there was no handy way to organize their home search and communication.

Matthew, who had recently sold his successful online travel project SeatGuru, saw a new business opportunity here. The home search was obviously too complicated to be managed via usual email clients and he decided.

After shaping the initial vision and scope for the project, Matthew went in search of a team of software engineers to implement it. He looked through several options and picked the Anadea team. After shaping the initial vision and scope for the project, Matthew went.

  • Matthew Daimler
    Matthew Daimler
    Co-founder
  • Susan Daimler
    Susan Daimler
    Co-founder

StartUp: Apartment Sifter

Matthew called his project Apartment Sifter and provided the first look and feel of the application. The core idea was to aggregate and store property data - cost of an apartment, its location and size - from the web in a “folio.” All users had to do was to add an URL of the desired estate to the folio. In its turn the folio pulled all necessary information and grouped it into a handy comparison table.

The main technical challenge at that stage was to extract and arrange property data from multiple external sources. The sources supplied information in different forms and formats, e.g. the data could be stored in XML files or provided by API. Besides, users were able to add listings directly from the web. The application worked as a scraper - scanned a web page for apartment details, added it to a database and checked the existing database for duplicate entries.

After 3 month of hard work, the application was first released to the public under the name Buyfolio.

The project had a very dynamic nature. Matthew was studying the real estate market and experimenting to identify an optimal set of features for his application. The development team had to keep up with the frequently changing requirements and promptly switch from one task to another whenever Matthew asked for that.

The first team assigned to that project consisted of Sergey Ischenko and Denis Barushev. Later Ivan Rostovsky replaced Denis Barushev and kept on development with Sergey. Our engineers chose Ruby on Rails as a framework suitable for projects requiring constant modifications and shifting of priorities. The agile development approach, followed in Anadea, also helped our team to achieve the needed level of flexibility and development speed.

Buyfolio

The first version of Buyfolio was already a good tool for home buyers and got a positive response from users but it was far from reaching its limits. The application could considerably grow the customer base if it had access to a massive real estate database, owned by NYC brokerage firms. Therefore, it was decided to direct our efforts on the development of functionality useful to brokers and agents.

The new scope of the project required adding a lot of new features and a larger team. Since that time 5 engineers - Dmitriy Dordovskiy, Alexander Rjazantsev, Pavel Mizonov and Anastasiya Yevstyunicheva headed by Andrey Mashkov - took up the work on Buyfolio.

  • Agentfolio: home
  • Agentfolio: learn more & sign up
  • Agentfolio: search listing
  • Agentfolio: property overview

The development team was highly responsive to customer feedback. Lots of ideas suggested by brokers and home buyers were turned into innovative user-friendly solutions and included in Buyfolio. Because of a clear focus on clients’ needs and usability, the application was gaining popularity very quickly.

  • Refined real estate information.

    We did a lot to improve the quality of home listings, complete information about building features, fix inaccuracies and errors.

    UI design.

    Every element of the application was designed with strong intention to give brokers and their clients a great user experience, make it intuitive to use.

    Memory aid.

    The application remembered viewed properties, prevented adding duplicates, asked for reasons if users rejected listings and saved their comments.

    Team support for brokers and clients.

    Brokers and home buyers could link other people to a folio. Search shared folio which helped to eliminate the duplication of efforts.

  • Flexible integration with web listings.

    Unlike other home search apps, Buyfolio allowed users to import properties from various sources.

    Keeping track of multiple properties.

    Buyfolio stored clients’ search criteria and notified them about price or status changes and new properties matching their saved searches.

    Advanced search.

    The application provided advanced search capabilities that let users search homes by very specific criteria, e.g. whether pets are permitted, co-purchasing is allowed, etc.

    Real-time conversations.

    The application provided communication tools for real-time discussion of property listings available via web and mobile.

Before and after

Agentfolio: before and after

Zillow’s Acquisition

Agentfolio: Zillow’s acquisition Buyfolio had a huge success in New York, after just one year in business over 2,000 agents signed up to use it. The large potential of Buyfolio’s collaboration tools was noticed by Zillow, the leading U.S. based real estate marketplace. On October 31, 2012, it was announced that Buyfolio was acquired by Zillow. This deal was an important step in Zillow’s strategy of expanding its suite of services for real estate professionals and home buyers.

Zillow's acquisition of Buyfolio was a remarkable milestone for both of them and for the Anadea’s team as well. Despite the transition of ownership to Zillow, the project was still managed by Matthew and Susan Daimler and our engineers carried on the development process but it initiated the following exciting changes in the project’s life:

  • Zillow's resources and support opened up opportunities for faster growth and innovation.
  • The project went beyond New York City and gained a nationwide scale.
  • The application got a new name - Agentfolio.

Agentfolio

In June 2013 Agentfolio was officially released in the new shape. The first markets to launch Agentfolio were Chicago, Boston and New York City. With time, the national expansion of the service involved also Phoenix, San Francisco, San Diego and other cities.

  • Buyfolio: folio
  • Buyfolio: search listing
  • Buyfolio: news feed
  • Buyfolio: leads
  • Buyfolio: notes
  • Buyfolio: Home

The most thrilling challenges overcomed by our team on the way to Agentfolio’s successful release were:

  • Integration with MLS and region-specific requirements.

    The application was initially focused on NYC real estate, which is entirely different market from the rest of the country - no single MLS, high demand for rentals, etc. We had to re-arrange NY property data in accordance with MLS, used by brokers in other U.S. cities. Besides, home-hunters in different regions have varied needs and wants. We adjusted our system to let users search by criteria significant for their region's housing market.

  • Exponential growth of database.

    The size of property database and the number of users were boosting with every new area covered by Agentfolio. There was a need to improve the database performance and capacity grately. We restructured the application and improved the database in multiple ways. One of major changes was switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL which allowed us to gain higher throughput and scalability.

  • Complementing Ruby on Rails with Scala.

    We extracted the data processor, a part of the system responsible for digesting and arranging the listings data, into a separate application and developed it in a fast and modern language Scala. That option allowed us to scale application and the data processor independently. Now the whole system can consume up to 200,000 houses per hour and it is not a limit.

There were lots of other innovative engineering solutions that let us improve the performance of the system and meet the tough requirements of the U.S. real estate market.

The achievements of our software engineers were accomplished by an excellent work of our designers. The head of our design team Mikhail Bilenko, and his colleague Elena Syvokobylska put a lot of efforts to create a very clean and intuitive interface for Agentfolio. They have managed to organize diverse property data into handy views so that users could easily see and compare housing parameters. More than 100 mock-ups have been drawn for internal sections and behaviors of the application. Besides, they have made an incredibly user-friendly design for iPhone, Android and iPad apps to help agents and home buyers keep in touch on-the-go (for more info about Agentfolio's mobile apps read this article).

  • Agentfolio mobile: about
  • Agentfolio mobile: listings to review
  • Agentfolio mobile: messages
  • Agentfolio mobile: property details
  • Agentfolio mobile: listing actions
  • Agentfolio mobile: location
  • Agentfolio mobile: map
  • Agentfolio mobile: folio
  • Agentfolio mobile: sign in

Team and Technology

  • Dmitriy Dordovskiy
    Dmitriy Dordovskiy
    Team leader / RoR
  • Dmitriy Kiriyenko
    Dmitriy Kiriyenko
    RoR/Mentor
  • Dmitriy Malyk
    Dmitriy Malyk
    QA team leader
  • Andrey Kutejko
    Andrey Kutejko
    Universal developer/Mentor
  • Pavel Mizonov
    Pavel Mizonov
    RoR
  • Anastasiya Bakuta
    Anastasiya Bakuta
    Front-end
  • Mikhail Bilenko
    Mikhail Bilenko
    Creative team leader
  • Alena Syvokobylska
    Alena Syvokobylska
    UX/UI
  • Andrey Chekhomsky
    Andrey Chekhomsky
    RoR
  • Andrey Romanov
    Andrey Romanov
    Java/Scala
  • Anna Gritsay
    Anna Gritsay
    QA - engineer
  • Anton Tsapov
    Anton Tsapov
    RoR
  • Eugene Shelest
    Eugene Shelest
    RoR
  • Alexander Rjazantsev
    Alexander Rjazantsev
    RoR
  • Vitaliy Ananichev
    Vitaliy Ananichev
    RoR
Site address:
Agentfolio.com
Release date:
Spring 2011
Technologies:
Ruby on Rails
Scala
AWS
 
Clojure
Sidekiq
PostgreSQL

Customer’s Impression

Agentfolio receives a very positive feedback from industry analysts and users. Matt Cohen, chief technologist at estate consulting mentioned Agentfolio in his blog:

This is a cool tool which Zillow acquired late last year, and the only active product on the market that I am aware of to acknowledge social buying. [...] This is a big deal folks. Tools like this continue to chip away at the value of everything from the prospecting functions of the MLS to the relative usefulness of having listings on agent or MLS websites. It’s time for folks to recognize that it’s not important just to have the listing content – it’s about making it useful.

The earlier versions of the application had many loyal supporters as well. One of them - Nile Lundgren, president at Dallien Realty, gives the following insight into Buyfolio on his website:

Buyfolio.com has proved extremely successful for me and my buyers in terms of searching, organization, and communication. The founder of Buyfolio, Matt Daimler is a friend of mine and I’m proud to see his work help buyers and brokers alike navigate the complicated sales process here in NYC.

Finally

All those upgrades made it possible for Agentfolio to handle a great number of simultaneous users from all over the U.S. and bring valuable technological advancements in the home search process. As of the beginning of 2014, the application covered 24 MLS city areas and reached an impressive scale:

  • 7.000 brokers and 32.000 home buyers signed up for the service

  • Almost 40.000 folios have been created

  • The property database stores over 2.000.000 home listings and up to 1.000.000 of those listings are updated every day

  • 15-20.000of new homes are added into the database daily.

Agentfolio has passed a long way from a small NY based application to a large nationwide real estate solution. The Anadea team has been providing the technical support to the project throughout its entire life and we look forward reaching new heights with it.

The expertise of our software engineers was growing along with the application scale. We have polished our skills in Scala and other state-of-the-art technologies and gained a valuable experience in development of massive solutions for data processing and collaboration.

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