Case Study – AKERYS
AKERYS’s Labo Immo
A breakthrough real estate search and market
analysis tool built on Exalead CloudView
What AKERYS needed
• Ensure that the company’s 2,140
employees have a clear and precise
vision of the market
• Provide accurate data to millions of
potential buyers
• Serve real estate developers in need of a
reference tool for their sector
• Aggregate millions of pieces of hybrid
web data on a single site
• Support the indexing of very large
volumes of information
• Offer intuitive and intelligent navigation
• Furnish real-time, highly relevant search
results
• Provide a flexible and efficient indexing
tool
About AKERYS
A leader in rental property investment and new home sales, AKERYS was created
following the 2005 merger of the companies 4M, ACTIF+ and IFB. The Group incorporates
four complementary lines of business (real estate development; new home sales,
brokerage of insurance, credit and financial products; and real estate services) to offer a
complete suite of products and value-added services to its 110,000 clients.
With 2,140 employees and 700 commercial partners, AKERYS provides services
nationwide in France, and offers its clients the most comprehensive range of solutions
for meeting their housing and savings needs. The AKERYS Group chose Exalead and the
Exalead CloudView® solution to develop Labo Immo, its "real estate laboratory" project.
Benefits of the Exalead solution
• Automatically extracts several million
pieces of relevant data from the web
• Analyzes thousands of web pages daily
to provide the most up-to-date statistics
possible
• Supports data archiving and historical
analysis to detect and monitor trends
• Features an easy-to-read display of
search results and exceptionally fluid
drill-down navigation
• Automatically reconciles heterogeneous
data from multiple sources
• Provides a tool that is easy to master
• Meets requirements for
scalability and response time
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Context and objectives
Before buying or renting an apartment or
selling property, a potential owner, renter or
even developer, likes to have a clear and
precise grasp of the current market. Most of
the time, these people turn to the Internet for
information about real estate trends and
available properties, only to be confronted with
thousands of disjointed results.
To evaluate market trends, one is forced to
compare data from multiple sources, including
statistics from notaries, real estate associations, and property valuation sites. The data are
very often conflicting, covering differing time
periods and lacking the geographical specificity
users need to make meaningful comparisons.
In 2010, this state of affairs led AKERYS, which
was already using Exalead CloudView for online
customer service, to launch its Labo Immo
project (labo-immo.org). This real estate
laboratory consists of a single website that
offers an overview of the French real estate
market through statistics derived from intelligent extraction of data from the major real
estate classifieds sites.
Selection Criteria
AKERYS needed a search engine that was robust enough to serve as the
foundational technology at the heart of the labo-immo.org portal. The strength
of this engine would be the determining factor in the success and performance of the web portal.
AKERYS already had extensive information assets distributed throughout
several internal databases, but the company did not want to be limited to
using only this data, which quickly became obsolete if not frequently updated.
In contrast, new information is added to the web and updated every day. So
AKERYS was seeking a solution that would combine its existing data with the
infinite information assets of the web.
One of AKERYS’s major criteria was therefore an engine with a robust capacity
for automated extraction of web data. In fact, the Group was looking specifi-
The laboratory guides Internet users towards
the real estate advertisements that best meet
their needs, and provides a reference tool for
the profession, serving as a "real estate
barometer" for insight into the state of the
market.
cally for a solution that could process data in multiple formats and organize
the information based on existing or generated metadata. The search engine
of choice would not only have to gather the data from real estate classifieds
sites, it would need to extract and normalize very specific information from
that data (property location, price, size, type...) that would make it possible to
publish statistics and trends covering several months.
There were also other key criteria: a solution that could reconcile multiple
data sources (structured and unstructured), that was easy to customize, and
that could provide historical data views to name a few. AKERYS wanted to be
“From the start, this was a very complex
challenge. But with the Exalead CloudView
solution, we were able to launch the first
version of our service in just a few months.”
Eric Vibert, eBusiness Manager,
AKERYS
able to display intelligent results for its users by means of innovative filtering
criteria, while providing information in real time.
Because of this, a solution applying a methodology that could automatically
identify, extract, structure, and provide relevant data was essential to AKERYS.
Case Study – AKERYS
The Exalead choice
2 Exalead Products for 1 Solution
“As soon as we saw how robust and fast the
search engine was, we were sold.”
Jan Handgraaf, CIO, AKERYS
After evaluating numerous engines, the AKERYS team soon opted for
Exalead CloudView, which satisfied all of their selection criteria and even
offered possibilities for uses they had not yet envisioned.
In addition to processing data already stored in the AKERYS databases, the
The Exalead Answer
Exalead technology automatically analyzes and classifies content using
A Robust Platform to Meet a Sector's
existing and deduced metadata (embedded concepts and entities). It handles
Critical Needs
unstructured content (PDF, Word, etc.) as easily as it does structured content
Financial risk is an inherent element of real
(AKERYS’s databases), thus enriching the existing information with content
estate transactions, and investors must be able
from external sources (real estate agency sites). So two products, Exalead
to manage these risks to succeed. Therefore,
CloudView and Exalead Web on Demand, were installed to meet the full
minimizing risk is a key issue for any agency,
range of requirements specified by AKERYS.
developer, or individual who is planning to invest
in real property.
"The complementary nature of the Exalead CloudView and Exalead Web on
Demand products was the cornerstone of this project. We can say unequivo-
Accordingly, a site that intends to become a
cally that Exalead has given us a significant advantage relative to the others
barometer for the real estate sector, with the
in our market," states Eric Vibert, e-Business Manager at AKERYS.
financial stakes that implies for its users, cannot
afford to furnish imprecise information. The
A Fast and Simple Solution for an Ambitious Project
calculation algorithms used by the Exalead
The fact that the tool is so easy to administer and can be so quickly
search engine are powerful enough to extract
mastered, in addition to the support and consulting that come with it, were
raw data, analyze it, and render it meaningful
also factors in the final decision. "With a standard development project,
though precise aggregations and temporal
which was what we were originally considering, we would never have had the
trends.
same high-quality support or technological performance," adds Mr. Vibert.
This "all Internet" service needed a solution that epitomized reliability and
The use of the Exalead CloudView platform has
speed if it was to stand out on the web. The flexibility and performance of
therefore enabled AKERYS to deploy a powerful
CloudView, plus the expertise and responsiveness of the Exalead teams,
semantic search system that automatically and
made it possible for this project to be implemented in record time.
accurately aggregates, organizes and structures
relevant data disseminated across the Internet. It
"As soon as we saw how robust and fast the search engine was, we were
is the technological foundation AKERYS needed
sold. The Exalead teams understood our requirements and the ambitious
to realize a research model that is wholly distinct
objectives we had set for ourselves. They were very responsive and, from the
from conventional systems.
start, they grasped the implications of this project for our profession and
embraced our desire to make Labo Immo the site of reference for statistics
In addition to supporting AKERYS’s ambitious
in our sector," declares Jan Handgraaf, Akerys Group’s CIO.
plan for large scale web crawling and accurate
statistical computations, Exalead CloudView has
also delivered the performance required to meet
AKERYS’s stringent quality of service standards,
including absolute respect for security, high
availability, and unlimited scalability.
Case Study – AKERYS
Data History and Reconciliation
Laboratory users can analyze real estate market trends for both sales and
Conclusion
rentals. The data is drawn from advertisements posted on the major
"Extracting targeted data on the web in this way
online real estate portals, with almost 50,000 pages analyzed daily per
allows our employees and other real estate
portal. For each search, an initial filter distills the pool of results, then
professionals to get an overview of the market
CloudView offers the user multi-dimensional criteria for refining results.
that is as close as possible to its actual state. It
The information, presented in the form of graphs and charts, is the
also gives them the tools they need to best
product of an innovative process executed by Exalead CloudView,
estimate the value of a property," emphasizes
which generates dynamic reporting against structured data. The search
Jan Handgraaf, AKERYS CIO.
engine crawls and extracts relevant data from millions of real estate
classified advertisements, combines this content with data drawn from
In a market as unstable and risky as real estate,
AKERYS’s databases, then analyzes the aggregate data and organizes it
Exalead offers the AKERYS teams, as well as
into clusters and trends, with multiple additional filtering options (by
potential real estate investors, an economic
place, type of apartment, rent, size, and many other criteria).
intelligence tool that, beyond optimizing property
sales or rentals at a specific moment in time,
The incorporation of historical data further allows users to monitor
enables them to reduce their downstream
changes over time and identify emerging trends. This enables users to
financial risks.
cross-reference this data to arrive at more accurate estimates. The
laboratory can provide insight into different trends, answering questions
As for future projects, the AKERYS teams are
such as "How has the sale price of a two bedroom in Paris changed this
looking at ways to extend the applications of this
month?" for example, or " How has the price per m² evolved?" or "What is
tool, both internally and on the web. They also
the average size of an apartment renting for 1,200 Euros?"
hope to offer their users more statistics in the
form of new kinds of graphics. So their
These are the types of statistics which are valuable to both individuals and
collaboration with Exalead has only just begun...
real estate professionals. Before agreeing that an property should be put
on the market by the AKERYS GROUP, or to evaluate a rent amount,
marketing teams in particular need such key statistics. This information
can take the form of quantitative data and can also be drawn from photo
libraries, management reports, or other sources. This is an example of
the type of multi-source reconciliation the Labo Immo service also
provides to employees and industry professionals.
To evaluate individual offerings, users can access detailed lists of relevant
advertisements, though only top level summary data are displayed to
protect proprietary rights. Clicking on a link for a detailed view takes the
user directly to the source ad on the original site.
Contact us to discover for yourself why Exalead is the right search platform
to work with your structured and unstructured information.
Visit www.exalead.com to learn more.
About Exalead
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E.U. Headquarters, Paris, France - U.S. Headquarters, San Francisco, CA
Offices in 7 countries
300+ customers worldwide
Founded in 2000 by AltaVista executives
Exalead is a division of Dassault Systèmes, whose 9000 employees and 6000 partners provide 3D based applications,
PLM based applications, and Search based applications to more than 115,000 customers in 80 countries.
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75008 Paris
France
Tel: +33 (0)1 55 35 26 26
Fax: +33 (0)1 55 35 26 27
www.exalead.com