Building a product for a New York City-based media company

Observer Media, a New York City-based media company with over 30 years of experience. This diversified media, information, and services company is known for its products and information platforms, such as Observer, Commercial Observer, and now, Realgraph.

Realgraph belongs to the family of products from Observer Media. This platform delivers detailed commercial real estate trends and updates to commercial real estate professionals.

Business

Observer Media needed skilled Django programmers who could help them develop their innovative platform, Realgraph. This specialized information portal is dedicated to professionals in the commercial real estate sector (brokers, investors, and companies looking for rental properties).

The idea behind Realgraph was to provide this target group with a platform where it would be possible to search for detailed information about transactions using a set of criteria. Realgraph would allow users to quickly get key insights about what is happening in their area's commercial real estate sector.

Observer Media worked with an in-house CTO and WordPress team to develop Commercial Observer. Realgraph would be the next step forward from the foundation they had built with their in-house team, and Sunscrapers was there to help take that step.

Technology

After years of success with The Commercial Observer, the company wanted to create another platform that would work as a practical search engine to help users get the exact information they need. This meant developing a database to power Realgraph using the previously established content from the Commercial Observer.

Sunscrapers provided a talented developer to work with Observer Media's internal team and CTO. Together, we synchronized Realgraph and the Commercial Observer using JavaScript microservices and DynamoDB to show data from Realgraph inside articles published on the Commercial Observer. The component analyzed articles to identify references to entities stored in Realgraph.

Finally, we created an advanced search engine for Realgraph using ElasticSearch to allow users to search for transactions according to:

• property type
• location
• price
• space size
• year built
• sale date

Users can use the data to check for three types of transactions: sales, leases, and financings. Finally, we provided strategic consulting services to provide our expertise and recommendations to guide the product development strategy.