IoT smart property management software

About the company

*This case study represents work completed under NDA. Specific details have been generalized to protect client confidentiality.

A progressive Western European property technology company creating a comprehensive integration platform for smart buildings.

Through the integration platform, the software offers property owners a comprehensive solution with target group-adapted apps for offices and homes. 

The idea of the digitalizing platform in property management came from the vision to make property management more efficient, optimize energy use, and increase security. 

The new integration platform, built with ZenDev development, can handle all the technology available today for smart properties from one app.

The challenges

There are only a few platforms that combine all smart devices in the house. Instead, different manufacturers build their applications for their devices.

For example, if you own a fridge and washing machine from 2 different manufacturers, you must install two applications. 

Now, imagine owning a smart building with multiple smart devices. 
 

Business challenge

• Property managers struggled with fragmented systems - each smart device manufacturer required its own app
• Complex access management across multiple properties and user types
• No unified way to monitor building performance and manage tenant relationships
   

Technical challenge

• Initial MVP was severely limited with hardcoded systems
• Non-scalable architecture that couldn't support planned growth
• No proper user interface for property managers or tenants
• Data structure couldn't handle complex property relationships

The solution

To automatize processes and ensure the project's scalability, we at ZenDev created a unique integration platform for property management with different roles and permissions.

Admin portal for property owners, landlords, and technicians

The solution consists of an admin portal used by property owners, landlords, technicians, and other property staff in their daily work. 

Technicians get restricted and time-limited access to install specific devices. The super admin has an overview and analytics of the platform's actions.

A business activity monitoring (BAM) portal can be used for CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on objects (buildings, apartments, rooms, etc.).

It also serves for the user and access management, where admins can give tenants access to the apartment or remove access when the tenant moves out. 

Another feature involved is the overview of properties and the output of different devices depending on which devices the tenant has installed. 

This can include, for example, the average temperature, water consumption, electricity use, and humidity; if the building has solar panels, you can see how much energy it produces. 

In the portal, you can be notified if the alarm has been activated (for fire, flood, temperature too high, or if some device has broken down.)

Since this is a multitenancy system in which data for a specific customer is totally isolated from that of other customers, the super admin role has access to all customers and all operations related to data from those customers. 
 

Mobile application for tenants

The mobile app for tenants combines multiple systems such as digital locks, sensors, smart delivery boxes, interphones, etc.  

The tenant has an overview of their smart devices and can, for example, open and close doors and windows, set up the temperature in a fridge, and change settings for the flood alarm.
 

Technology

For the backend, we used Go due to its speed and connected it with Neo 4J, which enabled our flexible structure. 

We've chosen React as the preferred technology to replace the old hardcoded front end and create the BAM portal from scratch.

To track platform health, we implemented the Grafana Prometheus stack, and to save historical events, we used Mongo DB.