Industry

Real Estate

Tech Stack

PHP, React, React Native

Years

2022 -

Links

Visit Website

Overview

From early growing pains to a scalable, enterprise-grade platform, this is the story of how Danubio partnered with Inside Real Estate to transform CORE Home into a fully white-labeled, multi-tenant solution that helps brokerages deliver personalized, branded homeowner experiences across web and mobile.

In this case study, you'll see how we re-architected the system for long-term scale, streamlined mobile app delivery for dozens of brokerage brands, and built a foundation that now powers millions of client interactions throughout the homeownership journey.

The Vision

Inside Real Estate set out to solve a critical gap in the real estate lifecycle: keeping clients engaged long after the transaction. Traditionally, agents struggle to remain “top-of-mind” after a deal closes, despite 91% of homeowners saying they would work with their agent again, only ~26% actually do so for their next transaction.

The goal was to create CORE Home, a fully branded, white-label, multi-tenant, mobile and web platform that helps homeowners track their home's value, manage maintenance, explore market opportunities, and stay connected with their agent.

Rather than relying on third-party portals, brokerages could offer their own app, under their brand, to deliver ongoing value and build lasting client relationships. and the new app would become a digital home base for homeowners, empowering agents to stay top-of-mind through every stage of ownership.

Market Context

In a landscape where tech giants and consumer portals increasingly compete for homeowner attention, brokerages needed a way to stay at the center of the client relationship.

Real estate professionals lacked tools to engage clients between transactions thus leaving the door open for outside platforms to fill the gap.

The app we developed offered a strategic answer: a brokerage-owned, consumer-facing experience that drives loyalty, repeat business, and long-term value by keeping agents involved well beyond the closing table.

The Challenge

When Danubio first engaged with the project, it was clear that while the vision was powerful, the implementation had fallen short on technology.

The initial development effort had resulted in a platform with significant architectural and maintainability issues. Key challenges included:

• Multi-Tenancy & White-Label Complexity

  • The new app needed to serve many brokerage clients in a single platform, each with their own branding, custom domains, and slight feature variations.

  • On mobile, every white-labeled app had to be built and updated in parallel, a complex build and release process that the original solution struggled to streamline.

  • With plans to onboard millions of end-users and hundreds of thousands of agents, the existing system risked performance bottlenecks and instability.

• 3rd-Party Limitations

  • Some core functionalities were built on third-party services that proved limiting.

  • These external dependencies constrained customization, inflated costs, or were not scaling well under increasing load.

• Integration Challenges

  • The app had to integrate deeply with the existing CRM platform (so that, for example, a saved search or chat in the app would reflect in the agent's CRM)

  • The prior architecture did not handle this two-way integration elegantly, risking data lags or inconsistencies between the consumer app and the agent-facing systems.

  • Achieving real-time sync and a unified experience was a challenge yet to be solved.

The Solution

Danubio approached the CORE Home engagement with a strategy of architectural refactoring combined with rapid iterative delivery. From the outset, our team worked closely with client's product leaders to lay out a new system architecture and phased implementation plan.

The solution addressed each of the challenges head-on:

• Architectural Redesign

  • We redesigned the system as a cloud-native, scalable platform. The new architecture introduced clear separation of concerns (services for search, valuation, notifications, etc.), enabling components to scale independently as load grew.

  • Embracing modern best practices, the backend was refactored for multi-tenant operation, ensuring that a single deployment could securely serve many brokerages with configurable branding and settings.

  • This redesign provided a robust foundation for high throughput – as evidenced by the relaunched system successfully processing millions of requests per day without performance issues.

• Phased Rewrite with Zero Downtime

  • Rather than a risky full rebuild in one go, we implemented a phased rewrite. Critical pieces of the old system were gradually replaced with new modules behind the scenes.

  • This approach meant users and agents experienced no service disruption during the transition. Our tactful communication and planning helped client's leadership buy into this iterative strategy, instilling confidence that the end-goal would be achieved without “pulling the rug out” from under existing users.

  • Dual-format outputs (web & PDF). We implemented scalable PDF rendering to ensure high fidelity regardless of content size.

• Eliminating Bottlenecks

  • Wherever third-party services were impeding flexibility or scale, we built native replacements.

  • For example, a 3rd party authentication library did not have support for customized OTP emails.

  • This removed external points of failure and gave the client full control over feature evolution.

• White-Label & Multi-Platform Enablement

  • A major focus was enabling easy white-labeling of the app for each brokerage. We set up an automated build and deployment process for mobile apps, allowing the client to generate branded iOS/Android apps for a new client with minimal effort.

  • Configuration management was introduced so that branding (logos, color themes, app names) and even certain feature toggles could be adjusted per tenant, all while running off a single codebase.

  • On the web app side, dynamic theming was implemented to skin the user interface for each brokerage client. This investment in tooling meant that as we onboarded more enterprise customers, the overhead of launching and maintaining each custom-branded app dropped dramatically.

• Best-Practice Development

  • Throughout the rebuild, we applied rigorous engineering practices to set the project up for long-term success

  • This included comprehensive unit and integration testing of new components, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for frequent, low-risk releases, and performance testing to validate the scalable design.

  • Our engineers worked in tight iteration cycles with the client's product team, ensuring that each new feature or improvement aligned with the product vision and was delivered on schedule.

Notably, the re-architected CORE Home solution now encompassed all the rich features originally envisioned, on a far more solid framework. Our work allowed the client to quickly enhance and roll out the complete feature set to delight consumers.

The platform's capabilities now included home value & market tracking, personalized home search, in-app messaging, My Move (Moving Assistance), My Transaction (Closing Support), My Maintenance (Home Maintenance Management) and much more.

All of these features are wrapped in the brokerage's branding and delivered via web, iOS, and Android apps bearing the brokerage or franchise's name.

The rebuilt platform not only stabilized operations but unlocked long-term value for brokerages, agents, and clients alike:

The Result

The partnership between Inside Real Estate and Danubio yielded a resounding success, transforming CORE Home from a troubled project into a flagship product driving value for brokerages nationwide. In Fall 2022, the client launched CORE Home to one of their largest clients, eXp Realty, under the branded name “360 Home.”

• Enterprise-Grade Stability at Scale

  • The rebuilt CORE Home platform now supports millions of client interactions daily, across web and mobile, with zero service disruptions.

  • Danubio's architecture enabled dozens of customized apps (web + mobile) for different brokerages — all powered by a single codebase.

• Strategic Differentiation

  • CORE Home became a centerpiece of the client's product suite and competitive advantage in winning and retaining enterprise brokerage clients.

• 30× Increase in Client Engagement

  • Homeowners using CORE Home were up to 30× more likely to re-engage with their agent compared to industry benchmarks.

• Industry Recognition & Client Praise

  • Featured in top real estate publications and endorsed by brokers as a must-have tool for driving repeat and referral business.

Conclusion

The CORE Home case is a prime example of how the right technology partner can turn a vision into reality, even in the face of initial setbacks.

By engaging Danubio, Inside Real Estate was able to salvage and accelerate a mission-critical product initiative without alienating its customers or compromising on features.

Our careful blend of technical expertise, strategic planning, and collaborative execution helped rebuild CORE Home on a foundation that will support innovation for years to come.

In conclusion, the CORE Home case study highlights how re-architecting for scalability and maintainability can unlock a product's true potential.

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