Raven wanted to build a platform for real estate agents in the US that would allow them to match their listings with buyers with or without having those properties listed on the local multi listing services (MLS). The service would allow realtors to gauge demand without having to disclose that a property is on sale and earn double-side commissions by matching their own buyers with sellers.

The client was looking for a development partner who could build their platform end-to-end. They wanted a solution that when built for one MLS could then be extended to over 900 different MLS across the country.

Raven required Tintash to bring our own expertise and co-create the whole platform in the best way possible. We stepped in to provide end-to-end solutions covering the whole range of their use cases.

Our agile development team comprised iOS and Android developers, web backend and frontend engineers, a UAT engineer, and a project manager. This team worked closely with the client’s US-based product team, including their CEO and CTO, to continuously translate product requirements into a working software.

Tintash kickstarted development by evaluating all the initial product requirements and locking in a scope of work with the Raven team. However, two weeks into the project, the client started changing the designs and product requirements. Our team worked closely with them to quickly adapt engineering and incorporate all the incoming changes.

Working in two-week sprints, our team started delivering shippable product increments after the end of just the second sprint i.e. four weeks. This agile development afforded the client  invaluable customer feedback every two weeks based on which we were able to rapidly iterate  and make improvements to the product.

As an example, during the project’s Alpha phase, the product was heavily focused on catering to the real estate agents. Upon receiving early customer feedback, Raven’s product team quickly realized the need for making a customer-segment pivot. Once there was recognition that their target audience included brokerage firms, our development efforts were expanded to include that segment’s needs as well.

Similarly, further customer feedback validated the need for building an end-consumer-facing dashboard of the product. Allowing buyers and sellers to browse through the listings inventory and specify their requirements would reduce matching time and help real estate agents and brokerage firms close deals faster.

Towards this end, our team built a frontend to match the fidelity of Raven’s major competitors, Zillow and Remax. This alone brought in a whole new wave of real estate agents to the platform and improved Raven’s prospects of onboarding and partnering with brokerage firms.

Once the initial product requirements were delivered and some degree of product/market fit was achieved, we entered the product’s Beta phase. At that point, the client was majorly focused on user adoption and reaching out to brokerages to get their buy-in on the platform. During that phase, our team worked on scaling the initial success with one MLS and few brokerages to multiple MLS and many brokerages.

We built features such as AWS Lambda functions for syncing MLS data, providing a cost effective solution for keeping the state of all sellers up-to-date in the system. By automating the process of onboarding a new MLS, we managed to reduce the required engineering effort from a couple of weeks down to just a few minutes.

As a result of those efforts, any registered real estate agent in the US simply needed to accept an invitation from Raven and all of their listed properties were automatically populated on the platform. Plus, the system generated matches with prospective buyers.

We also opened up the platform to include other user bases — title representatives and lenders — in a bid to get them to act as advocates and help improve adoption rates. The strategy worked great overall and yielded the desired results. By providing custom views to both title reps and lenders around their agent network, we were able to further drive growth and adoption in new geographical markets.

Towards the end of the project, as we neared completion on the product front, Raven targeted a budgetary reallocation from product to business development to focus more on increasing the platform’s adoption. To help our client achieve their strategic objectives and maximize their ROI, Tintash gradually ramped down its team size over the next quarter and worked on solidifying the platform so that it could function without any oversight.

To this date, the platform runs without a single developer. The backend codebase has 100% test coverage. Tintash continues to provide maintenance support to the project in instances like new iOS version, policy changes by AWS, or framework deprecations, along with minor polishing and bug fixing on a need-only basis.

Constant client communication and feedback was an integral part of our development process and the project’s success. Throughout the three years the project ran, our squad communicated with Raven’s product team on a daily basis to ensure maximum overlap, conducted fortnightly sprint meetings and demos, and held separate vision alignment meetings as market feedback poured in and the project requirements evolved.

Tintash delivered an end-user focused web portal for customers to browse through available real estate listings on the Raven platform. We also developed an app, available on both iOS and Android, that came with an agent/lender/title rep facing dashboard and allowed adding and updating buyer and seller info, making matches, and taking those matches forward.

The platform also included a custom search algorithm that allowed running up to a 1,000 searches concurrently. That matchmaking algorithm gave real-time results for any change in requirements, helping Raven instantly connect thousands of buyers and sellers across the country.