Home Partners of America
A New Path To Homeownership
About The Client
Home Partners, originally a venture of Ranieri Partners, helps people get into great homes in neighborhoods they love, by purchasing the home of their choice and leasing it to them, with the right to purchase the home in the future. The website lets people search hundreds of thousands of real estate listings around the country, select the home they want, and apply online to enter the Home Partners program. The site integrates with external systems for MLS data, Google Maps, Salesforce.com, and others, to ensure a fast, easy, and secure experience.
Work Carried Out
Montrose Software led a project to design and build the website, homepartners.com. We chose the technology stack, and built the site totally from scratch.
The system automatically pulls new property listings from multiple sources, to always show up to date prices on the site. It allows Home Partners to define new geographic areas. We also integrated with a payment processing service, and worked with subcontractors who prepared the graphic design of the website. After successful deployment, we maintained and enhanced the system on an ongoing basis.
Challenge: Normalization of ratings data across vendor API’s
To satisfy the need for a wider rating coverage, and more frequent updates, our team was asked to replace an existing rating component with a stand alone tool.
After initial investigation, it turned out that each rating agency exposes data via a different protocol, and in a different format. Except for that, they differ in frequency of data releases, and the handling of the data updates. Some publish full data universe on monthly basis with daily updates, and others publish full data universe on each major update. To cover all corner cases, we familiarized ourselves with data dictionaries and API specifications provided by each agency.
The lack of the standardized API shared between the data providers required a very flexible metadata driven tool, which can be easily tuned per provider, and can ensure that all the data will be stored in a consistent way.
Our tool allows users to easily configure the connection protocol, data normalization algorithm, and the way of recognizing not rated securities. To address the inconsistencies within the data release frequency, we implemented various data update strategies (e.g. daily patch or monthly full universe update), that could be easily combined via the configuration file.
The single standalone tool lets the client set up a robust ratings retrieval process, that handles all the rating data in a consistent way, and audits it in order to comply with government regulations regardless of the rating provider.
Applied Technologies
Ruby on Rails
MySQL
Redis
JavaScript
AWS
Google Maps
Their QA is solid; we rarely had any failures or malfunctions after the release. They continued maintenance and upgrades for us after the launch and did a very good job. The executives tried to bring software development in-house, and the in-house team never worked as smoothly as they did.
Product Manager, Home Partners of America
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