Challenge
eXp Realty is one of the fastest-growing real estate technology companies in the world with more than 72,000 agents operating in 18 countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India, Mexico, Portugal, France, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Italy, Hong Kong, Colombia, Spain, Israel, Panama and Germany. Their international expansion has been impressive, but also raises an important question: What technical capabilities facilitated their expansion?
Business leaders determine when, where, and how an organization expands its reach. However, the technology used to carry out such plans must support (and ideally enable) the company, otherwise they will remain just that - plans - and never materialize into reality.
In our first installment of their success story, we outlined how Kinetech enabled eXp Realty to kick-off an international expansion with Australia and the United Kingdom by using Mendix to develop the first version of the Join Application. In this installment, we’ll outline how Kinetech refactored the original Join Application so that it could support multiple countries and serve as the sole new agent join application (the “Global Join Application”) for all countries outside of the United States and Canada. This is a perfect example of the compounding benefits of lowcode. We will also highlight an entirely new application that was developed called the Payment Application, which is a microservice focused exclusively on payment processing.
"Our initial vision was to create unique applications for each of our expansion countries, with Mendix we were able to use a foundation project that could be stood up and localized to meet the needs of both UK and Australia.”
- Ceilia Cravens | Sr. Product Manager, International, eXp Realty
One of the primary challenges Kinetech had to solve was how to ensure the international engineering team remains an enabler of the leadership team’s international expansion plans. At the same time, Kinetech had to ensure that our technical solution was consistent with the microservice architecture and governance practices defined by said leadership. The engineering team had to avoid unnecessary application proliferation and focus on scalability of not only each individual application but also the overall ecosystem. The most difficult challenge to overcome was how to build applications that were both standardized and customizable, where the benefits of both models were realized and the drawbacks minimized.
Solution
Kinetech’s first priority was to convert the existing Join Application into one that could support an unlimited number of tenants (countries in this case) and operate as another microservice that would be a part of a global microservice ecosystem. What would later be called the Global Join Application would also need to support the unique business rules and requirements for each country regarding the many steps within the new agent application process, which includes new agent application submission, payment processing, language translation, separate management teams, outbound contact to the team and applicants, file document storage, and much more.
In our first installment, we discussed how the new agent application process, business logic, and user interface were designed reflexively. This allows eXp Realty’s end users to dynamically create complex questionnaires that include dependencies, conditional visibility and much more within the actual application (i.e. at runtime vs. requiring code changes by the development team).
Converting the original join application to a global multi-tenant microservice required that Kinetech refactor it using those same advanced architectural principles used to build the reflexive questionnaire outlined in in our first installment. However, this time those principles had to be expanded to include all aspects of the application process against a single module. Kinetech refactored the application so that it now supports an unlimited number of tenants, and requires little to no engineering effort to do so. End users of the Join Application can now launch the service within a new country in less than one day. All country specific capabilities are configured in the Global Join Application by the production support team and do not require additional development from the engineering team nor have the need to perform a deployment to launch a new country. This design not only largely removed the engineering team from the international expansion process but it also ensured little to no ongoing maintenance. The engineering team is now brought in only when a new set of features and functionality are requested.
“Moving our application from single to multi-tenancy, utilizing the run-time configurations as part of the set-up reduced time to launch our onboarding application for new countries from months to weeks.”
- Ceilia Cravens | Sr. Product Manager, International, eXp Realty
After the Kinetech Team completed the conversion of the Join Application to be a multi-tenant global microservice, they set its sights on the development of an entirely novel and autonomous microservice for payment processing, called the Payment Application. The Payment Application is an ideal candidate for a stand alone application within a global microservice ecosystem because it has a clearly defined, and specific, use case, as it is largely autonomous and uncoupled from all other applications in the eXp ecosystem.
Separation of the payment function into its own microservice improves the resiliency of the overall ecosystem of applications because should it need to be taken offline or become unavailable then the Kinetech Team can do so without impacting other applications. The appropriate resources may also be allocated to each application independently of others, which ensures the appropriate resources are provisioned based on actual need.
The Payment Application is also available to connect to any other application within the global ecosystem, and developers may leverage the existing design to do so. The steps to configure and set-up a new country within the it are similar to the runtime configurations made within the Global Join Application. Each new country, or any entity, may be configured by end users, which allows eXp Realty to launch a new payment processing capability in a country within a few minutes. There is no need to engage the engineering team.
All that is required by the developers of other applications is to build the business logic within their respective solutions that will redirect the end user to the Payment Application. Everything else is still managed by the Payment Application. This serves as another example of a single scalable design that may be reused over and over again.
eXp Realty may now accept payments globally!
The rapid expansion into 14 countries within 12 months brought another challenge for the Kinetech Team to address. If the Global Join and Payment Applications are to be accessible to people from different countries then there is a good chance the solution will need to be multilingual. We answered the challenge with a combined use of out of box Mendix translation capabilities plus custom built language translations that are managed at runtime by eXp Realty’s production support team.
We’re now supporting over 20 languages (and counting) which ensures there is no language barrier to join eXp Realty. Runtime translations ensure eXp’s production support team has the tools it needs to customize both the end user experience and the core functionality of the applications to meet the unique needs of each country, market and customer base.
Results
eXp Realty’s expansion into 14 new countries (and counting) in 12 months tells you most of what you need to know about this success story. The speed and scale with which they have been able to expand globally was facilitated, in no small part, by the Global Join and Payment Applications.
Kinetech was able to convert what is typically a bottleneck to rapid business expansion into new markets - the IT and development team - into a facilitator and enabler. eXp Realty may now launch both the Global Join and Payment Applications in new markets in less than one day, with minimal effort from the engineers, if any at all.
The power of intelligent and scalable architecture was realized here because the entrance into each new country does not require additional development effort: all of the set-up steps may be completed within the application by an end user. Now, only new functionality requires additional development by Kinetech, and most of that development is a one-time effort. Once it is built then as with the rest of the capabilities we’ve discussed within each application the end users own the keys and are able to quickly set up new countries.
"Kinetech was a huge part of the success of eXp’s ability to expand globally at record pace. They are an outstanding partner for any business looking to improve upon their Mendix utilization and scale for future.”
- Ceilia Cravens | Sr. Product Manager, International, eXp Realty
Intelligent architecture will continue to ensure that the applications built by Kinetech are scalable and that eXp Realty's expansionary plans are not hindered by the limitations of their development team. Afterall, the IT organization should enable and facilitate the business rather than be a bottleneck that hinders it.
