Sinyi Realty: Offering more efficient and personalized real estate services through cloud transformation
About Sinyi Realty
Founded in 1981, Sinyi Realty is a leading Taiwanese real estate company. With the vision and goal of "adhering to corporate social responsibility and achieving a world-class service industry," starting from Sinyi Realty, it has since developed Taiwan's core business group, Taiwan relations business group, Mainland China Sinyi Business Group, Development Business Group, Overseas Business Group, and Cultural Public Welfare Business Group. Sinyi Enterprise Group vertically integrates real estate development, agency sales, intermediaries, and home services in the upper, middle and lower reaches of the real estate business, establishing diversified operations.
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About iKala Cloud
iKala Cloud is a subsidiary specializing in the cloud services of iKala, a Taiwanese digitalization and AI commerce solution provider founded in 2011. The company has served more than 400 enterprise customers in various industries across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Holding more than 60 professional cloud technology certifications, iKala Cloud has been a Google Cloud partner since 2017.
To enhance the user experience of its online platforms and provide more personalized services, Sinyi Realty leverages Google Cloud to increase the capacity and range of its online services, implement data-driven sales strategies, and improve IT operations and development efficiency.
Google Cloud results
- Shortens online service response time by 50% with powerful cloud infrastructure
- Reduces time required to develop and deploy new app features with Cloud Run
- Supports 10X faster data processing for more in-depth analytics through BigQuery
- Enables quick image recognition through edge computing supported by Vertex AI
Tackles 4X more website traffic without disruptions
Buying a home is an important step in many people's lives. To facilitate the process of property viewing and transaction, real estate agencies are using the latest technologies to transform and innovate the ways they operate and provide services.
Founded in 1981, Sinyi Realty has 500 direct selling stores across Taiwan, where it is headquartered. The company also has offices in China, including Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, overseeing business development, and a cultural public welfare department, as well as businesses in Japan and Malaysia. Dedicated to improving the real estate customer experience that it offers, the company has adopted a digital mindset for over a decade to stay ahead, launching a wide range of online services, including property search, housing market insights and home service reservations through its websites and applications.
"Our mission is to help customers settle in their dream homes by continuously upgrading and expanding our service range," says Hsin-Yao Chen, data analytics manager at Sinyi Realty. "That's why we have been adopting new technologies to provide more efficient and personalized real estate services."
Sinyi Realty first ran its websites and applications with on-prem servers and its self-built databases based on an open-source system. As the traffic from their online platforms gradually increased along with the growing popularity of mobile devices, the quality of its online services was often challenged by technical errors resulting from limited infrastructure scalability. The real estate company was also looking to enhance its data analytics capabilities to implement data-driven sales strategies and provide more personalized services. To address both areas, Sinyi Realty embarked on cloud transformation in 2018 and moved its online services and data analytics workloads to Google Cloud for highly scalable infrastructure, powerful data collection software, and intuitive cloud tools.
"Through cloud transformation, we wanted to improve the quality of our online services and enhance our ability to conduct data analyses and develop new features," explains Hsin-Yao Chen. "Google Cloud has all the tools that we need to reach our goals with clear documentation and easy-to-use interfaces, so our staff can easily get the hang of new cloud tools."
"Through cloud transformation, we wanted to improve the quality of our online services and enhance our ability to conduct data analyses and develop new features. Google Cloud has all the tools that we need to reach our goals with clear documentation and easy-to-use interfaces, so that our staff can easily get the hang of new cloud tools."
—Hsin-Yao Chen, Information Security Team Lead, Sinyi RealtyImproving online service capacity and stability with highly scalable infrastructure
Following the technical advice provided by Google Cloud partner iKala Cloud, Sinyi Realty changed its infrastructure architecture and completed the migration to Google Cloud in just six months. Now, the company uses the virtual machines (VMs) on Compute Engine and Kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the main servers of its websites and applications, while leveraging Cloud SQL to deploy databases and Cloud CDN to deliver content.
Before the migration, Sinyi Realty's on-prem servers and databases often encountered errors during high traffic because of their limited scalability. With GKE and Cloud SQL, Sinyi Realty's operations team can swiftly scale up computing resources when needed and avoid service disruptions. The company's websites now handle 4X more traffic than in 2018, without any technical issues, and can allow up to 2,000 customers to sign up for an event every second. Furthermore, the improved server performance and faster content delivery speed supported by Google Cloud tools translate into 50% shorter response times, which has greatly improved the user experience of Sinyi Realty's online platforms.
"Thanks to the high scalability and performance of the cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud, we're able to significantly enhance the quality of our online services. Now, we can provide more stable and efficient services to more customers," notes Hsin-Yao Chen.
Enhancing IT operations and development efficiency for more innovation
Another great advantage that the infrastructure on Google Cloud has brought to Sinyi Realty is the increased IT operations and development efficiency. With fully-managed tools like GKE and Cloud SQL, the infrastructure team's maintenance workloads have been greatly decreased. As a result, the real estate company has more resources to invest in product development and is able to operate 3X more services with the same number of engineers.
Before using Google Cloud, it normally took Sinyi Realty a long time to prepare for the deployment of a new product or feature, because it required detailed hardware allocation planning and back-and-forth communication between the development and operations teams. Since the computing resources on Google Cloud are always ready for use and easy to configure, Sinyi Realty now only needs one-third of the time previously required to launch a new service.
To further enhance its service development and deployment speed, Sinyi Realty leverages Cloud Run to deploy its app services that need to be updated frequently. As Cloud Run supports simplified app development and deployment, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which can automatically verify new software functionalities and deliver them to end users, Sinyi Realty's development team is able to launch a new app feature within two weeks, instead of several weeks.
"Cloud Run has helped us minimize the time required for app development and deployment by supporting highly automated processes and enabling our development engineers to deploy a new feature by themselves without the help of the operations team," says Yi-Fan Chen, data analytics team lead at Sinyi Realty. "Now, we can easily and quickly realize our innovative ideas, and keep improving our services in the most timely manner."
"Combined with Google Analytics 360, BigQuery has substantially improved our data analytics efficiency and capabilities. By being able to process more data and conduct more complex analyses, our sales team has gained many useful insights that they weren't aware of before."
—Yi-Fan Chen, Data Analytics Team Lead, Sinyi RealtyAccelerating data collection and processing for data-driven sales strategies
A part of Sinyi Realty's cloud transformation plan aims at fully unleashing the power of data to implement data-driven marketing strategies and provide personalized services. To achieve that, the company adopts Google Analytics 360 to collect data from its websites, which are then imported into BigQuery for data cleaning and queries, along with the data extracted from Sinyi Realty's on-prem internal systems. Yi-Fan Chen says that the new data pipeline has significantly simplified the company's data collection and cleaning processes. Before, Sinyi Realty needed three engineers to write codes to collect and sort its website data. Today, the company's marketing team can gather data on its own through simple settings, which means more efficient data collection and more time for the tech teams to work on product development.
Additionally, the data query speed on BigQuery is 10X faster than the on-prem data warehouse that Sinyi Realty previously used, which means the company is now able to process large amounts of data in a short time and run more in-depth data analyses. For example, Sinyi Realty's sales team can categorize its customers into more precise segments based on their transactions, search histories and engagement data. By understanding its customers' preferences better, it is able to adjust its sales strategies accordingly and provide tailored services.
"Combined with Google Analytics 360, BigQuery has substantially improved our data analytics efficiency and capabilities," notes Yi-Fan Chen. "By being able to process more data and conduct more complex analyses, our sales team has gained many useful insights that they weren't aware of before."
"With the help of Google Cloud, we have achieved excellent results in digital transformation, by operating more efficiently and providing better services. So we're confident that using the advanced technologies of Google Cloud will enable us to continue upgrading our real estate services."
—Hsin-Yao Chen, Information Security Team Lead, Sinyi RealtyBringing innovative features through AI
By the end of 2022, Sinyi Realty will launch a new feature that allows users to look for property information by taking a photo of an address plate. The company will use Document AI to convert images into text, and Vertex AI to identify address plates in photos. Yi-Fan Chen points out that thanks to the detailed documentation of Google Cloud products, the team is able to quickly master the artificial intelligence (AI) tools and complete the development of the new feature in just a few months. Furthermore, Vertex AI supports edge computing which enables better user experiences, because images can be processed closer to the address, and the results get generated faster.
Moving forward, Sinyi Realty plans to expand its home services by better understanding what its customers need through data analytics. As the amount of its data and the number of its API products increase, the company will use Data Catalog and API Gateway for better management and coordination among different departments.
Hsin-Yao Chen says, "With the help of Google Cloud, we have achieved excellent results in digital transformation, by operating more efficiently and providing better services. So we're confident that using the advanced technologies of Google Cloud will enable us to continue upgrading our real estate services."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Sinyi Realty
Founded in 1981, Sinyi Realty is a leading Taiwanese real estate company. With the vision and goal of "adhering to corporate social responsibility and achieving a world-class service industry," starting from Sinyi Realty, it has since developed Taiwan's core business group, Taiwan relations business group, Mainland China Sinyi Business Group, Development Business Group, Overseas Business Group, and Cultural Public Welfare Business Group. Sinyi Enterprise Group vertically integrates real estate development, agency sales, intermediaries, and home services in the upper, middle and lower reaches of the real estate business, establishing diversified operations.
About iKala Cloud
iKala Cloud is a subsidiary specializing in the cloud services of iKala, a Taiwanese digitalization and AI commerce solution provider founded in 2011. The company has served more than 400 enterprise customers in various industries across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Holding more than 60 professional cloud technology certifications, iKala Cloud has been a Google Cloud partner since 2017.