Properati: helping you find your ideal home
About PROPERATI
Properati is a startup operating in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Ecuador (as part of the OLX Group). This platform collects available properties for sale or lease, whether brand new or not, and makes it easy for interested parties to find the dwelling they want online.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usProperati collects available real estate properties by incorporating value-added data that eases online searches based on the preferences of the interested parties.
Google Cloud results
- 600k announcements in Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador generating 1 million visits per month.
- The purpose is to deploy Google Cloud's image recognition to offer more specific choices based on customers' requirements.
- It has a database for public and free query via the research platform using BigQuery.
Generates 200K links between buyers and sellers per month.
Properati is an Argentine startup that collects available real estate properties, such as houses or apartments, whether brand new or not, for sale or lease, and makes it easy for users in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay to find the dwelling they want online. The main purpose of this platform is to add information that is relevant to a person looking for a new home.
Properati has an extensive database that can be queried using different features and filters that display information that is relevant for each user to be compared with other options, enabling customers to find the most suitable home. Such information is not limited to a basic description of properties (e.g. number of rooms, location or prices per square meter): it also provides information on nearby metro/train stations, on whether the property is located in a commercial or residential area, and on whether the user should consider adjacent neighborhoods.
In mid-2018, Properati became part of the OLX Group, a global marketplace featuring 17 brands, with presence in more than 40 countries and +5,000 employees. Properati's headquarters are located in Buenos Aires, and, for expansion purposes, the company will be supported by OLX's offices in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama, thus covering the entire continent. Properati is currently operated by 18 employees, and is also backed by OLX's team in each location.
The tools to deal with large market competitors
One of Properati's main challenges was competition in a market with well-established companies. In order to render a property search service that stands out from competitors, Properati needed an infrastructure to enable fast processing and storage of large volumes of data at an affordable price. Moreover, such technology had to go beyond the local market and become available in different Latin American countries featuring a highly-advanced security system.
Likewise, another challenge was related to the flexibility of such technology to grow at scale by spontaneous means so as to cover traffic peaks during a specific period of time and, once such peaks are over, to reduce its capacity. All this without a significant financial investment.
High-speed data analytics to accelerate development
In 2016, Properati started to use Google Cloud more deeply, leveraging data analytics tools like BigQuery and Looker Studio. These services enabled the company to speed development, with a large volume of stored data and no need to make significant investments, as well as to obtain instantaneous responses for queries on such data.
Google Cloud provided Properati with an architecture that offers flexibility and scalability, streamlining the availability of its services and improving response times based on a cost-effective model for a startup. Likewise, Properati can now manage a large volume of pictures of properties and improve response times by enabling users to send queries through their smartphones or PCs. Thanks to Stackdriver, Properati monitors the infrastructure running directly in the cloud, thus providing 24/7 support.
By meeting the company's technological needs, Properati succeeded in focusing on the value added for the user and deeply exploring the large amount of data collected through the years. "This is like riding over the shoulders of a giant moving forward with technology and pulling everyone along the way", said Martín Sarsale, CTO of Properati.
"This is like riding over the shoulders of a giant moving forward with technology and pulling everyone along the way."
—Martín Sarsale, CTO, ProperatiBig results brought by Google Cloud
Properati mainly uses Google Cloud to process large volumes of data. Nowadays, the company has 600K announcements in Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador, generating 1 million visits and 200K links between buyers and sellers per month.
In the mid-term, the company, among other plans, seeks to deploy other Google Cloud tools, such as image recognition, to offer enhanced services with more specific choices based on customers' requirements. For example, if a user is looking for a house with a garden, it would make sense that, apart from excluding non-garden houses, the first picture of each property shows the actual garden.
The company currently owns Properati Data, a section where information on properties available for sale and lease in the country is published so that scholars, journalists and researchers can access such information free of charge. Considering that this section handles a large amount of data and, therefore, files that would be hard to manage, the company has reached an agreement with Google's BigQuery team to make this information available for queries directly from the platform by means of a public database. Properati is now the first company in the industry to share data this way.
Properati highlights that it has a powerful and experienced internal development team, backed by Google's development team, that continuously offers new tools and products enabling Properati to expand its development team and offer better services to customers.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About PROPERATI
Properati is a startup operating in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Ecuador (as part of the OLX Group). This platform collects available properties for sale or lease, whether brand new or not, and makes it easy for interested parties to find the dwelling they want online.