I’m pleased to announce that Gnomen has been busy in the lab, working on our new system that will set a new standard for estate agency industry as we know it.
I’d like to share with you our journey, challenges we’ve faced and where we are today in our development phase.
We realised that although software platforms shout about new features, workflows and groundbreaking updates, the industry as a whole hasn’t evolved much over the past 15 to 20 years.
Because of this, we decided to build a new platform from the ground up and we hit the drawing board. We began re-analysing every stage of sale or let, from the estate agent, the business owner to the customer. The diagrams below give you an idea of the complexity in our user interaction and user experience planning (UI/UX).
The challenges we’ve faced
The first realisation was that this is a system built over 15 years. We needed to rethink the process from a UI/UX perspective, and needed a fresh approach to understand today’s modern UI/UX philosophy and best practices. Rolling out a vast system also meant that we needed to scale up our development team as well as bring in experts from varying disciplines.
Sharing the experience with outside expertise, we saw how much opportunity there was to innovate within our industry, especially the relationship between the agent and customer.
One of the key approaches to our new system which sets us apart from any other, is that rather than looking at each module in the system separately, such as managing tasks, diary, work orders, etc. everything works together in one ecosystem.
Our next challenge was the technology and architecture the platform was built on. We’ve had to consider Amazon servers, native mobile applications and the use of a “single page application” for our platform. While these seem like jargon to you, these translate to future-proofing endless possibilities from reliability, speed, accessibility, scalability, security, open api integration, etc.
Of course, new technological architectures meant new knowledge and knowhow that we didn’t have in house at the time.
At this point we were facing a choice from using our existing technologies (having the advantage of in-house knowledge), or going for a new framework where we would need to hire new developers and acquire new in-house expertise.
We opted for the latter.
Our next challenge over 2021 was to put a new development team together, and understand which skills were needed to put together the perfect development team. By mid 2022, our development team grew from 3 developers to the 12 that we have today.
Rebuilding a new system has meant restructuring a part of our company and changing the way we work.
Where we are today
We are now on our 51st weekly sprint. We have completed 68% of the system. We aim to launch the beta version in the 2nd quarter of 2023. We’ll be making announcements of the new system closer to this date. We can’t wait to show you our vision for the future of estate agency software.
In the meantime, we decided to keep you updated on a weekly basis of our progress.
We will also be needing your support by taking part in user testing and giving feedback.