RentOwnHouses.ca Case Study

Rent-to-Own Real Estate Listings Web Application

In April 2007, two creative minds approached us looking to turn their vision into reality. They wanted to give people who couldn’t otherwise qualify for a mortgage a chance to own their dream home immediately, while the market was still hot. An innovative 3-year rent-to-own program was born that consisted of flexible terms which would allow the existing owners to leverage the equity in their home without the hassles of selling while giving purchasers immediate possession in the home they desire. Rent to own real estate had been utilized in numerous markets around the world, but was relatively new to Canada.

Upon describing their business model, we went about the task of turning their rough requirements into a refined list of features. We broke these features into phases; phase one contained items that were absolutely necessary to the basic requirement of offering a usable real estate website; later phases included functionality that would offer superior process streamlining but were not immediately necessary. Upon review of the list, they chose the features they wanted to see in the first phase of what would become the RentOwnHouses.ca web-application.

Now that we had a list of requirements that needed to be developed, we estimated what each feature would cost, breaking them into logical chunks such as the web front end, basic administrative control panel and the home listing features. We then presented our estimate to complete the project, and once approved we began work.

At the end of phase one, we delivered a professional, easy to use website with a similarly easy to use administrative control panel. The administrators have the ability to create listings with all relevant information including up to 12 pictures, edit and delete listings. We also developed a tenant application that allows the ROH administrators to effectively manage the time they spend with clients by reducing the following of dead end leads. The site also boasts top rankings for relevant queries with major search engines.

Presently, we are developing a new web site for this client and they are organizing their requirements for phase two of the ROH web-app.

Technologies Used:

• ASP.NET 2.0 (C#)
• SQL Server 2005
• XHTML
• CSS
• Javascript

Project Screenshots

Click an image thumbnail below to enlarge

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