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MyAtlas

Edina Realty and its parent company HomeServices of America had a vision to simplify the home buying, selling, and refinancing process through MyAtlas, a new customer dashboard that tracks the home buying process. Valtira helped bring this vision to life by architecting a system that integrated their various services into a unified dashboard.

Needs and Challenges

The real estate process is not something most people encounter on a regular basis, making it difficult to navigate. The process of buying or selling a home involves many different companies including, buyers, sellers, agents, appraisers, lenders, title companies, and county recording offices. These services have historically been siloed because each part of the process has its own technology system. Edina Realty had a vision of becoming the first full-service real estate company, offering all the resources needed to buy, sell or refinance a home.

After nearly 20 years of discussing the idea, Edina Realty and HomeServices of America partnered with Valtira to begin planning how to build the system. For the past 2 years, we’ve worked together to architect, design, and build the first iteration of the platform and many enhancements and feature additions are on the roadmap.

Solution

When a user logs on to MyAtlas, they are able to see multiple services offered by Edina Realty, or one of their affiliates including mortgage, title, insurance, and warranty companies. The app visually shows the user what milestones they have completed, their current point in the process, and upcoming touch points before closing.

The long-term vision is to offer homeownership recommendations as well. We’re exploring ideas around home renovations and insurance coverage.

HomeServices of America, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, is, through its operating companies, one of the country’s premier providers of homeownership services, including brokerage, mortgage, franchising, title, escrow, insurance, and relocation services.

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Project Highlights

Single sign-on across all HomeServices of America product offerings
Responsive web experience integrated into the Brokerage, Mortgage, and Title Services
React Native mobile application with the ability to browse for homes and a customer dashboard that tracks the progress of transactions

Technical Architecture

The MyAtlas mobile app and responsive web experience is designed to be white labeled. This allows the numerous HomeServices of America companies to utilize the same codebase and brand the applications to match their guidelines. From a customer perspective, they can log into the various services under a single login.

The iOS and Android applications were built with React Native, utilizing Microsoft’s AppCenter to automate deployment to the App stores. The underlying services were built on Microsoft Azure Functions, powering both the web and app experience. Each company integrated with the back-end data store using a different set of Azure Functions which pushed the data into the Dataverse. Model-driven & canvas-driven LogicApps were built to help administrators review the data and make changes.

Greg Mason

CEO, Edina Realty Home Services

“Historically that information has been ‘siloed’ because every one of our companies has its different tech systems and this really pulls it all together. It was a very complicated, complex project.”

UX Design Process

The UX process started by wireframing the responsive web experience. Valtira and Edina Realty conducted several user testing sessions as we developed more detailed wireframes and iterated on the experience based on the feedback we received from both the customers and a pool of real estate agents.

Visual Design

We then turned our attention to the app experience which was an even bigger endeavor because we were not only building out the transactional dashboard with milestones but we also needed to include the home browsing experience. Within the mobile app you can not only browse for homes, view listings, set up showings, and communicate with your real estate agent but you can also track the milestones of your transaction ensuring the user is prepared for their closing date.

Development

For the past two years, we have scaled up an agile team working in two-week sprints, consisting of both Valtira and Edina Realty team members. We prioritize work for each release and have an ongoing backlog of tasks to pull into the following sprints.

Improvements and Metrics

While the MyAtlas Product is in the early stages of product launch, we have found that 82% of consumers prefer to use one company for real estate transactions. We believe this product and its ongoing roadmap will address this issue by pulling various services together in a streamlined, intuitive approach to complicated real estate transactions.