Housing Management Software Development
For a student housing operator in the United States, EMBIQ took over the development, maintenance and cloud operations of an existing housing management platform. It covers the resident journey from sign-up and room assignment to contracts, payments and move-out, across several properties run under one system.
Technologies used
Python, Django, Celery, Vue.js, SQL, REST API, AWS (EC2, Auto Scaling, CloudWatch), infrastructure as code
Tools
GitHub, Jira, Jenkins, Asana, Dependabot, Snyk, Cloudflare
5
Project members
12 months
Project length
Custom Software Development
Category
Real Estate
Branch
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The challenge
The client runs student housing and manages it with its own web platform. Prospective residents sign up and reserve a room, sign contracts and pay online, and submit maintenance requests, while managers handle room and unit assignments, move-ins and move-outs, parking, deposits and financial reports for each property. The platform, with a Vue.js frontend and a Django backend, had been built earlier by other developers, and in 2021 EMBIQ was asked to take over its maintenance, starting with the roommate matching part of the system. The work was less about one large feature and more about keeping a live, multi-property system reliable while it kept growing. The production server was running into memory limits and outages, scheduled jobs for settlements, ledgers and reports occasionally failed, and each new property or company needed its own branded site and configuration. At the same time dependencies had to be kept current and secure without breaking a system that residents and managers use every day.
As a Backend Developer, my role was to ensure the robustness and reliability of the software. I worked on creating efficient algorithms to manage housing assignments and payment tracking.
Key Features
- Take-over of an existing Vue.js and Django platform, with development environments and CI/CD set up by EMBIQ
- Branded web addresses for individual properties under a company site and spin-up of new companies and properties
- Resident lifecycle features: registration, invite links, room and unit assignments, co-ed settings, move-in and move-out dates on contract documents
- Parking inventory that stays consistent across multi-semester contracts, bed changes and transfers
- Deposit refund letters and emails, maintenance requests with images, and click-to-call or text on mobile
- Financial jobs and reports: ledger fixes, settlements, transactions and detailed transactions reports
- Cloud operations on AWS: auto scaling, CloudWatch alarms, memory alerts and security group rules kept as infrastructure-as-code scripts
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The result
EMBIQ looked after the platform for about three years, from 2021 to early 2024, working from a shared task board with the client and reporting the hours spent each month. Development covered the changes managers needed most, from new financial reports and contract document fixes to parking and assignment workflows, while DevOps work added auto scaling, alarms and memory alerts to reduce outages and took care of launching new companies and properties. Security and maintainability were handled continuously rather than in large, risky upgrades: Dependabot and Snyk updates were reviewed and deployed every week, runtime and library versions were upgraded, and scheduled AWS maintenance notifications were handled as they came in. This let the client keep its existing platform and workflows and extend them step by step instead of rebuilding them.
- Existing platform taken over and maintained for about three years without a rewrite
- Auto scaling, CloudWatch alarms and memory alerts on the production environment
- New companies and properties launched with their own branded web addresses
- Weekly dependency and security updates from Dependabot and Snyk
- New transactions reports for property managers
The project was a great success. We managed to create a solution that not only met but exceeded the client's expectations. The software is now being used to manage student housing efficiently, improving the experience for both managers and students.
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Agnes
business development specialist
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