Real estate apps | PAP success story

Client location

Paris, FRANCE

Business area

Real estate

Product

Web Platform

Delivery center

Chisinau, MOLDOVA

Project type

Development

About the client

PAP.fr is a France based real estate services company with an online platform that, for a fee, allows users to buy, rent, sell and make estimations on property. They also have a tool that allows users to manage paperwork related to contracts and construction permits. Their service allows users to sell and rent properties independently without having to use a real-estate agency as a middleman.The company started in 1975 and PAP.fr transitioned from using a printed out catalogue and phone lines as their primary way of doing to business to today where most of their services are managed online.

Technologies used

The challenge

How does a company that is over 40 years old keep up with four decades of technology changes? One of our recent clients, PAP.fr, had to face this challenge. They transitioned from functioning in a completely offline mode to creating their own web apps and an online platform for doing business. However, integrating the newest technologies and practices in any company is a continuous effort and they decided to team up with Pentalog to push their innovation one step further.

PAP.fr created their online platform, tools, and even a mobile app before teaming up with Pentalog but they began to face new challenges that motivated them to reach out to us. As free to use websites like Lebencoin (basically the French version of Craigslist) gained in popularity, PAP.fr needed to start offering more services in order to differentiate themselves from the crowd of free online buying/selling platforms.

At the same time they also found that it was time to catch up on their technical debt and modernize their overall systems.

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The solution

To overhaul their systems and develop new tools, PAP.fr decided to team up with a one of Pentalog’s development teams in Chisinau, Moldova for an IT nearsourcing solution. 5 developers, one of which acted as a part-time Scrum Master for the team, and a project director began creating new web apps, overhauling old technology, and migrating systems to the newest platforms available.

The results

Pentalog’s developers were able to deliver three different web apps for PAP.fr, expanding their service offer. One app focuses on managing real-estate announcements, descriptions, transactions, etc., another helps owner’s manage their different properties, and the final one focuses on content management. The Pentalog team also implemented the estimation functionality as mentioned earlier. Our developers are still actively maintaining these new apps while they continue to migrate more and more of PAP.fr’s older apps and systems to newer technologies, adding new functionalities as they go.

Overall, PAP.fr has been satisfied with our ongoing collaboration which started in 2011. Both teams make frequent visits to the other’s offices which helps build strong lines of communication as well as a sense of teamwork. PAP.fr’s management has been very active in this collaboration process which has helped make this venture a success.

As we continue working together our developers will continue to help PAP.fr expand their service offer by leveraging the most up to date technology available.