Presented by MongoDB
While Anywhere Real Estate Inc. itself isn’t a household name, its brand portfolio includes some of the most recognized brokerage brands and service businesses in real estate, such as Better Homes and Gardens, CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty. Anywhere is the largest franchisor of residential real estate brands in the world, counting agents, brokers and home buyers and sellers among its customers.
Recently, the company has gone all-in on digital transformation and innovation on the backend to maintain its reputation and relevance across brands and customer cohorts.
“We are on a journey to build new agent, broker and consumer experiences, modernizing our platform to stay ahead of the market,” says Damian Ng, senior vice president of technology at Anywhere. “We’re a Fortune 500 organization with a multi-brand operating model encompassing some of the largest brands of the industry, so we’re tackling a lot of uniquely complex problems.”
The ultimate goal of these digital initiatives is delivering a better experience for end users, while propelling results for the businesses of both the company and its customers, says Brian Hanks, vice president of software engineering for Anywhere.
“We’re solving a set of consumer pain points with existing and new consumer and agent products, and we need to have the proper technical skills and partners to do that,” Hanks explains. “We’ve got a significant number of different business initiatives that range all the way from backend data analytics work to end consumer facing systems.”
Right now, Anywhere is leveraging MongoDB Atlas and Atlas Search for enhanced search capabilities and optimizing customer-facing tools to work faster, more efficiently and effectively, in a simple, seamless experience. Here’s a look at how the partnership has transformed the way Anywhere delivers.
Simplifying homebuying by eliminating tech complexity
The company’s main goal, Ng says, is to remove as much of the manual, day-to-day complexity around home buying and selling as possible. Agents and brokers, buyers and sellers alike all go through an enormous number of steps to complete a single real estate transaction.
“Much of our company strategy is about reducing as much of the administrative work as possible, across the life of a real estate transaction, whether that’s listing it, selling it or buying it,” he explains. “So, a lot of our focus is on modernization, both in terms of technology, by embracing a cloud-first ecosystem, but also in terms of our approach to building our tools.”
That means transitioning from a portfolio of individual tools to delivering a platform experience, in which all the tasks required by each person are right at their fingertips. All this is delivered without a hint of the complexity on the back end, where multiple capabilities, sometimes from multiple partners, make the magic happen seamlessly.
MongoDB Atlas as the data and development backbone
About five years ago, engineers initially integrated MongoDB Atlas into the Anywhere enterprise data platform as the backend data store. Soon they began to broaden its use, bringing it to individual applications, such as its marketing web platform, numerous internal enterprise business capabilities, data analytics processes and its newly revamped listing search service.
The different applications pull thousands of data sources into MongoDB. For instance, the marketing web platform uses MongoDB for online transactional processing (OLTP), enabling a large number of real-time database transactions by a large number of users. In other areas, such as the listing search service, a user’s search criteria is handled by the Atlas Search function and results are returned by an API call.
MongoDB’s document data model has been especially crucial for building cross-functional teams, making it easier for a given engineer to be truly full-stack. And as a multi-database organization, MongoDB is a critical component of the Anywhere microservices-driven architecture, where it allows each service or each team to make its own catalog data depository decisions while aligning to the enterprise guidelines.
“It means we don’t have to force everyone to use a single tool or solution,” Ng explains. “We’re able to equip teams with the information they need to optimize, and trust they make the right decisions.”
What sets MongoDB apart
When Anywhere was looking for a database, they wanted a hosted and managed platform to make operational and administrative overhead easier to handle. It was also essential that it be agile enough to not only handle rapid-fire changes but significantly speed up development.
“It’s flexible. It’s scalable. You can make changes on the fly,” Hanks says. “If you notice that something is going wrong after a recent release, it literally takes several minutes to make a change to the Atlas cluster to deal with the problem in the short term while you go back and potentially fix the root cause.”
He adds, “If you’re leveraging all of the different tools that come with MongoDB, Mongoose and the various libraries, you can have a working application very quickly, and you don’t have to worry about a lot of the detail that you would have to worry about with a traditional RDBMS,” he says.
Over the past two years Anywhere has started to deepen its relationship with MongoDB, as they began to accelerate their tech innovation. There are several goals, from training internal teams to work as a stronger engineering community, to partnering with MongoDB to innovate with new tools and continuously optimize and simplify its approaches to delivering a seamless platform to customers.
Taking search to the next level
A recent major project in the company’s digital acceleration tackled the Anywhere search capabilities, which are crucial to both internal and external user experiences. Previously, search experiences had been built with multiple vendor products stitched together with MongoDB at the backend. This led to a great deal more complexity than they needed as it increased the operational overhead with more to provision, secure, upgrade, patch, back up, monitor and scale. Additionally, it added unnecessary architectural complexity with the added difficulty of keeping data in sync between two separate systems. Both issues significantly added to the cognitive load of the Anywhere development teams.
“Given our scale and the flexibility we need on our search solution, because we leverage a common search capability across multiple real estate brands where each brand has unique complexity, we started reevaluating our choices,” Ng explained.
The team at Anywhere built multiple proof of concepts (POCs), or tests to verify that their databases can support proposed schema, queries, and, ultimately, expected volume and throughput. With that data, it became clear that MongoDB Atlas Search offers the capabilities required — while significantly reducing complexity — because Atlas Search eliminates the need to manage multiple technologies independently.
Instead of having to maintain a completely separate infrastructure, Atlas Search is built into Anywhere’s primary database, which means it’s not necessary to endure the overhead of keeping the search cluster data in sync with the primary data, because that happens automatically. Lag and results getting out of sync is no longer a worry, because every time the primary database is updated, whether that’s listing a new property or updating agent information, so is the search.
“By integrating the database, search engine and sync mechanism into a single, unified and fully managed platform, Atlas Search was the fastest and easiest way to build relevance-based search capabilities directly into our applications,” Ng says. “And the way it performs and how the search is implemented actually directly impacts what the end users can search for and how long it takes for them to get results.”
Since implementing Atlas Search, the team at Anywhere has observed a 60% improvement in response time for search results.
“It’s an exciting time to be on the tech team here at Anywhere as we’re undergoing a long-term digital transformation to modernize our offerings and architecture,” said Ng. “We’re focused on building delightfully simple and efficient digital experiences while empowering our consumers and affiliated agents with knowledge and insights. That all comes down to prioritizing engineer experience for our teams. Being an engineer at Anywhere offers the opportunity to build products and services at scale that are impacting hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals on a daily basis.”
Learn more here about the ways the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform can accelerate and simplify how you build with data.
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