Data lake centralises key data for analysis, reduces administrative load and improves insight for customers of Dexar Group.
INDUSTRY
Real Estate
SERVICES
Data and Analytics
Company Overview
- Customer identifies competitive advantage opportunity through data aggregating
- AWS technologies offer a modern, low cost and agile solution
- Landmark use of data lake technology in property industry
Dexar Group works primarily with property industry leaders to grow and diversify their business offering by identifying key opportunities for growth and innovation.
The Canberra-based company identified an opportunity to give its customers – real estate organisations – a competitive advantage by integrating data from many different sources in one place.
The Challenge
There are various systems and sources of data used across the real estate industry holding information that is useful individually to assess business within a single vertical. However the isolated data prevented timely and complete data analysis.
Bringing this data together to form holistic market status, client profiles and trend analysis was identified by Dexar as a significant business opportunity not before available to a residential real estate group.
The traditional approach to leveraging this siloed data is usually establishing a data warehouse, which are generally costly to maintain, and relatively unresponsive to timely business queries.
To overcome these constraints, Dexar was looking for a more modern approach which could provide velocity, complete security, data structure, elastic storage and a seamless view for users.
The Solution
The solution to this challenge was a data lake, which essentially connects all of the existing systems ‘as is’, allowing information across them to be queried at once, using a single log-in, and presents the aggregated results in a uniform format via the Dexar portal.
Typically, this type of data integration is undertaken via ETL and data warehousing, which had drawbacks including high cost and low responsiveness. By utilising a low cost AWS data lake approach, data is reported, analysed and visualised faster and costs are reduced through removing the need for storage.
A number of AWS tools were used in for the data lake and downstream processing.
The project, completed within a 12-week timeline, was delivered using agile methodologies over a series of sprints, and customised as the project progressed to meet evolving client needs.
Services Deployed
The Results
Utilising the data lake approach, Dexar can provide meaningful analytics and industry-relevant information in a timely and efficient way to its customers, setting it apart in the industry and enhancing its reputation as a technology-led organisation.
Dexar now processes a significant amount of data every night including over 14.5 million addresses, 3.7 million properties, more than 200,000 listings and over 500,000 sold properties in under 90 minutes.
This level of processing power for such a low cost has provided a significant operational ROI benefit in addition to the value in provided the differentiated service offering.
This project is understood to be the first time a data lake has been implemented in an Australian property industry organisation, demonstrating both the opportunities on offer through AWS and the forward-thinking mindset of Dexar Group.
