Two problems at once
ORIS manages the central data systems for the Belgian real estate sector. When the government introduced legislation requiring every holiday home to be registered and licensed, agents faced a large administrative load — on top of the existing difficulty of promoting themselves across a scattered set of property websites.
An earlier online booking system, built with another provider, had not taken hold.
The main issue was price and occupation time queries. Customers would want to view a property, but the existing solution was just too slow in checking the central database, and struggled to load the information fast enough. Customers would get bored of waiting, and that meant the solution never really took off.
Franky DeleuChief Information Officer, ORISLazee
We built the Lazee platform with ORIS: a portal that registers holiday rental properties with the government automatically, and gives consumers somewhere to book them.
- Secure connections to the government's VLIS platform, so agencies stay compliant
- Automatic validation of every address in an agency's portfolio, and a PIM number generated per new property
- One listing feeding several holiday booking websites, instead of one listing per site
- Central coordination of availability — a reservation taken by phone or in a high-street branch immediately removes those dates everywhere
The front end runs on a Linux partition of an IBM Power System S814; the core database and part of the system logic run on IBM i on the same physical server, next to ORIS's core business systems. Property data and photographs live on the i; consumer-contributed features such as local sights and restaurant recommendations run in Drupal on Linux. The web services are RPG and SQL on IBM i, answering in JSON, with Curl, ImageMagick and the Db2 driver for Linux tying the halves together.
What it changed
The market adoption rate is higher than we ever could have predicted — last time we checked, 90 percent of the Belgian market was using it to register and promote their holiday homes, which means property listings can be coordinated nationwide in a way they weren't before.
Franky DeleuChief Information Officer, ORISRegistration that used to take agents weeks per property now completes in days, sometimes hours. The combined system also answers queries far faster than the platform it replaced — which is what let it succeed where the previous attempt had not.
ORIS is now looking at automating contracts, payments, monitoring of cleaning and repairs, insurance policies and maintenance reporting.
Source: cdinvest.eu portfolio, Oris (Open Real Estate Information Services) · Gent, Belgium. All quotations as published.