case study
Safely
Safely helps landlords keep all renting-related documents in one place and reduces the financial property risk to the minimum.
Location
Estonia
Industry
Insurance/Real Estate
Technologies
Ruby HTML
The platform also offers a lease agreement creator. The landlords can create documents and edit the agreements using a flexible template. When the contract is ready, the tenants can review the requirements and make comments before signing it off.
They help landords cover proper contract & delivery deed, costs distribution and invoicing, reminders, readings and manuals, as well as dispatcher and service provider management.
The Background
The idea behind setting-up the platform originates from insurances. The industry noticed that rental claims and their management were similar. For example, insurers missed handover protocols with information about the condition of the estates.
This caused problems with maintaining photo documentations of the rental apartments state. The insurers also reported recurring problems of missed maintenance schedules that often made warranties void.
As a response, Safely started as a simple tool that has developed over the years into a robust management platform, incorporating an inbuilt risk engine and credit bureau integrations for underwriting the insurance policies.It is worth mentioning that Safely’s risk engine can evaluate the insurance risk based on statistical analysis and risk scoring.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge was to satisfy and automate complex business processes within one platform. It quickly became evident that the best practices in the real estate business domain do not exist. Almost every company has their own processes, legal interpretations, tenant-related practices, and existing IT services.
We were looking for a single, maintainable platform, and so the challenge was to design a flexible and modular system. We wanted to build a tool against custom apps for a single business entity. We were pleased to go for RoR because Rails enabled us to achieve flexibility and configurability while still maintaining a common platform.
The Process
To start marketing Safely, we needed to launch the system fast. With Ruby On Rails, we could release the functional prototype in weeks rather than wait for months until the development is over. We used the ROR conventions because this made Safely easy to keep. And the framework is regularly updated with all necessary security patches.
From the system perspective, we opted for a common core component. We wanted to handle basic technical tasks such as user management, registrations and passwords.The remaining components are what we called micro-applications. Larger than micro-services, they contain full business solutions for cost distribution, document management and invoicing, among other features.
The Safely infrastructure uses a single codebase which we deploy to different countries. It allows customers to manage white-label solutions in their stack. Since we run the system from one codebase, it is also efficient for our team as platform developers.
When it comes to HTML and the front-end, we decided to use the Stipulus Javascript framework. It let us boost up our code and make the web app animation flow nicely.
There were also other reasons for choosing Ruby. It has a robust security and lot of inbuilt security measures. ROR also enforces a set of performance indicators that developers follow from the start. In the end it allows to build a combination of smaller functions, instead of a monolithic application.
