About RE/MAX INTEGRA
RE/MAX INTEGRA, based in Toronto, is a family-run business that represents approximately 30% of the RE/MAX network worldwide. They have presence in 35+ countries and more than 29,000 Sales Associates in over 1,900 offices. Their Ontario-Atlantic Canada region is driving towards 10,000 quality Associates. The US regions; New England and the Mid West (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Indiana) – account for over 6,000 Associates, and Europe and the Middle East account for more than 13,000 Associates. For more information visit
The Challenge
Information is a critical asset in real estate and therefore having the ability to properly exploit that information is of tremendous benefit to RE/MAX INTEGRA. This includes collecting and reporting data on key performance indicators across various business units, departments and at various audiences (Regions, Brokers, or Agents). The primary challenge is to enable RE/MAX INTEGRA to make better informed and more timely business decisions by delivering key individuals with actionable data and reporting.
A few of the challenges that RE/MAX INTEGRA has with their current approach include
- Data resides in multiple, disparate, disconnected systems
- Manual and semi-manual methods to generate reports are time consuming
- Cross correlation of data among systems is not easy
- Reports are primarily static
- Many systems in the enterprise are transactional and not designed for large scale reporting and querying
- Data in various ‘islands’ ranges from structured to semi-structured to unstructured
- Data sources have accumulated complexity, bad data and missing information
- Business rules and business validation is embedded within the data
- Data is split between multiple geographies and overseas
- Lack of standardized report formats
- Misinterpretation and improper manipulation of data
The RE/MAX INTEGRA business operation leverages many 3rd party vendors as well as internal service providers using a wide variety of technologies. Real Estate service operations are data intensive, fragmented, manual and require tedious manual data entry to deliver actionable business information. Integrating various data sources for reporting purposes can span transactional systems, sales performance tracking, financial and accounting systems. This data is required both at the corporate level, but also heavily used by the Franchises to run their respective business. RE/MAX INTEGRA is both a data user as well as a shared service provider. The integrity, timeliness and accuracy of the data are critical.
Overall, RE/MAX INTEGRA supports multiple offices in dozens of countries servicing over 29,000 associates. Each level of management requires purpose-specific, insightful, and actionable information that they can use to make both short and long-term decisions. It is critical that RE/MAX INTEGRA deploy a unified underlying platform that helps ensure the current and future sources of data are consistent
Why Amazon Web Services?
Business critical demands required RE/MAX INTEGRA to implement a cost-effective cloud-based data warehouse solution that would collect hundreds of millions of rows of data per day directly to the AWS infrastructure. The data must be quickly processed to deliver business level information that can be used to manage evolving real estate operations across the globe.
Amazon Redshift proved to be the ideal data warehouse solution incorporating engineered data collection processes that bulk load and move data into cubes via an ETL process. The data is then consumed through BI front-ends, web portals and API access by other systems in the enterprise.
Dimensional cubes enabling data slicing, segmenting, and BI reporting by RE/MAX INTEGRA was implemented in a matter of weeks using the NorthBay Amazon Redshift JumpStart™ package. Creating an Amazon Redshift data warehouse that aggregated and centralized data enabled rapid and accurate dimensional analysis. RE/MAX INTEGRA is now positioned to accumulate and aggregate data from additional sources, create purpose-specific cubes and facilitate business intelligence reporting. The Amazon Redshift infrastructure offers security, expandability at reasonable cost when compared with other solutions.
The Benefits
Clean data at one place:
The warehouse provides a strategic asset to RE/MAX INTEGRA where over time all data from disparate systems is brought into a cleaned and normalized state for querying across multiple datasets.
Reduced duplication and labor costs:
Significantly reduce the redundancy across business units while reducing the time it takes for data to be consumed and for new reports to be created.
Eliminate bottlenecks:
A set of self-service reporting via tools that do not require IT resources thus resulting in faster answers and decisions.
Actionable data:
A dashboard and associated critical reports that focus on the most relevant data, where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be viewed and leverage real-time and accurate data.
Align associates toward business objectives:
A common and central visualization of KPIs, targets, and benchmarks that help associates focus on the most critical success factors.
What’s Next?
RE/MAX INTEGRA continues to seek deeper acquisition and use of a unified data lake. As the real estate market continues to evolve and RE/MAX continues to grow, our core technology infrastructure must rapidly adapt to changes.
RE/MAX INTEGRA will continue to focus on aggregating both 3rd party and internal data sources and continue to load the Redshift data warehouse to further integrate its data. Timely, unified and accurate data is vital to our continued and sustained competitive advantage. We will remain focused on ensuring our data management initiatives provide business insights needed to deliver operational results as well as advanced internal measurement access.
