Buy Owner's Corporate Intranet Application
Buy Owner is the leading provider of real estate marketing services across the US and represents over 20% of all residential transactions.
The Challenge
Buy Owner was facing major growing pains as it planned to open 36 new offices across the US. Since their inception in 1984, Buy Owner experimented with different Information Technology models, allowing each office to handle their needs separately making for an ugly mix of legacy systems, data, applications, and business processes.
Our plan was to build a unified IT system that would provide an expandable real-time integrated information network.
The Execution
To achieve this real-time information network, we began by planning a web-based intranet application to serve as the national backbone of daily operations for Buy Owner.
The mainstays of the multi-tiered web application are the Lead, Seller, and Magazine systems. The Lead System facilitates the customer acquisition process and rapid response time, while the Seller System maintains all customer account related information and automated property matching. The Automated Magazine Layout Tool organizes their property listing data for their monthly publication, including the injection of featured properties and advertisements.
The application also includes numerous administrative controls, providing Buy Owner with a way to manage almost every aspect of the system, from user access management, custom office settings, and reporting.
The Results
In the end, Buy Owner was empowered with a scalable web-based application that improves many aspects of their business operations. Automated functions, enhanced application usability, and more powerful tools help to increase employee productivity, plus faster lead processing and customer response rates improve customer acquisition numbers.
Most importantly, Buy Owner now has the stable IT system architecture needed to handle their aggressive business plans well into the future.
My Role
While working at BFW, I was tasked with leading a small team of developers from both BFW and BuyOwner through the entire project lifecycle. Working in direct contact with their Director of Information Technology, we studied their existing workflow from call center operations, sales scheduling process, and property listing/sale.
Based on this process audit, we developed a new system plan and got to work. The resulting application was built in a Windows environment using a Microsoft SQL database with ASP/VB and AJAX scripting.
Over the past few years, I've continued to work off and on with BuyOwner to add new features and tools to their powerful Intranet Application.
* The Buy Owner Intranet Application is a private tool used by both the corporate and franchise offices, and is not accessible to the public.
