Meet Our Customer
RE/MAX INTEGRA is a family-run, Toronto-based business that represents approximately 30% of the RE/MAX worldwide network. With a team of more than 29,000 sales associates, they operate more than 1,900 offices across more than 35 countries.
Challenge
In the ultra-competitive real estate industry, data has the power to give a business an edge over the competition – if they have the ability to capture, store, and mine it for actionable insights. RE/MAX INTEGRA knew this all too well, but they were struggling to provide the level of reporting that would enable stakeholders across the organization to make better informed - and more timely - business decisions.
Real estate technology systems are notoriously fragmented, and the technology stack at RE/MAX INTEGRA was made up of multiple proprietary and third-party tools. Agents relied on Leadstreet US, LeadStreet Ontario-Atlantic, and iConnect Europe to manage their clients and transactions. iFranchise was used for membership and billing, and internally the organization operated multiple department-specific systems. As a result, data was spread across disparate, disconnected technologies, and correlating it was an extremely difficult and highly manual process. Misinterpretation and improper manipulation of data was an all-too-common occurrence as there were no enterprise-wide reporting standards.
Vision
Deploy a unified underlying data platform to ensure data consistency, accuracy and access. Doing so would enable key stakeholders to query data on demand, create reports in near-real time, and uncover the insights required to operate efficiently and effectively.
Solution
To meet RE/MAX INTEGRA’s mission-critical business demands, NorthBay Solutions proposed developing a cloud-based, Amazon Redshift data warehouse solution. This type of AWS-enabled data warehouse would provide security, expandability at reasonable cost when compared with other solutions. With the ability to collect and ingest hundreds of millions of rows of data per day, it would position RE/MAX INTEGRA to aggregate and centralize data, as well as facilitate rapid and accurate dimensional analysis for business intelligence reporting. Data could be quickly processed to deliver the insights needed to manage evolving real estate operations across the globe.
But first, NorthBay needed to find ways to overcome the underlying issues with data quality. There were no validation checks or governance for the iFranchise system, and logic used to determine when agents joined, left, or moved to a different office was flawed. As a result, NorthBay proposed implementing an alternate approach, called Snapshot, for correctly calculating agent counts.
AWS Services
Benefits
Here are the top five business intelligence benefits that NorthBay delivered by developing the AWS data warehouse:
- Fast access to actionable data for informed decision making
A user-friendly dashboard displaying KPI metrics, along with corresponding detailed reports, enable stakeholders to access accurate, actionable data in real time. - Organizational alignment on business objectives
Associates across all areas of RE/MAX INTEGRA have access to powerful data visualizations of KPIs, sales targets, and benchmarking information for managing operations and gauging performance over time. - Access to centralized, normalized data
All relevant data from disparate systems is cleaned, normalized and integrated into one warehouse for querying across multiple datasets. - Reduced duplication and labor costs
Redundant tasks related to correlating data and developing reports were automated, resulting in significant time savings. - Elimination of bottlenecks
By implementing a robust, self-service reporting function, stakeholders are no longer reliant on IT resources to get the data they need to make important business decisions.
Next Steps
As the real estate market continues to evolve, the AWS data platform that NorthBay developed helps RE/MAX INTEGRA stay one step ahead. Since implementation, the two companies continue to work together to aggregate additional third party and data sources into the data warehouse in order to optimize the ability to provide business insights and support growth.
