Leobit
Tax-Optimized Solution for Realized Technologies LLC
Online Investment Portal for Real Estate Industry
Leobit brought to life the customer’s idea to create a tax-optimized real estate solution for individual real estate investors. It offers opportunities to buy and sell equity ownership interests in the commercial real estate industry and makes 1031 real estate exchanges simpler and less time-consuming. The product developed with the help of our team allowed the customer to reduce production costs, increase the number of clients, and raise $6 million in Series A funding.
Client background
Realized Technologies LLC is an American technology-enabled platform that provides wealth management solutions for investment properties. Realized Holdings already has 60 years of collective experience and can boast of 5 billion dollars’ worth of real estate transactions performed. Investors use the Realized platform to tax-efficiently transfer wealth from legacy properties into passive income-oriented commercial real estate portfolios customized to their specific needs. It also helps ensure that investors are equipped with the necessary information to make informed investing decisions.
Business challenge
The customer contracted Leobit in 2016 to create a proprietary online investment portal. However, our experts quickly understood that the scope of work is much larger than the client expected. The portal itself consisted of independent applications highly interconnected to each other. As a result, our developers started working on four projects of Realized Technologies LLC:
- Realized Marketplace
- Transaction Manager
- Qualified Intermediary
- Capital Gains Tax Calculator
The logic of the whole process is the following:
On Realized Marketplace, Realized Technologies LLC lists its offerings to its clients. From the diversified custom portfolios, the clients can choose the properties that best suit their investment goals. When the offering is chosen, the investment is simultaneously created on the side of the Transaction Manager. The regular users don’t have access to the Transaction Manager, but it is used for managing all entities, users, investments, documents, etc. Meanwhile, the clients fill out a form on Realized Marketplace that defines necessary initial documents for making an investment. The clients can sign these documents via the portal. When the preparation process is finalized, this is where the Qualified Intermediary (QI) comes into the picture. The QI holds and safeguards your money until you close a replacement property that ensures law-compliant 1031 exchange. A Capital Gains Tax Calculator allows clients to estimate the tax impact of selling the investment property and calculate the capital gains through a 1031 exchange.
Considerable growth of scope led to the necessity of additional resources required in a short period of time but Leobit’s team managed to face this challenge and delivered them quickly.
David Dahill View all
We started working with Leobit in June 2016 to create a proprietary online investment portal with a solid UX for our clients and the partnership is ongoing. We’re happy with Leobit because they identify issues and make improvements in an effective manner. The team’s insightful advice makes the solution more efficient and user-friendly. The service is great and the deliverables are nearly bug-free. The team’s communication and time management skills are great given the complexity of full-stack development.
Project description
The project consists of four key stages.
Stage 1
DISCOVERY
Leobit’s team started to work on the project in June 2016. Our experts conducted careful analysis and planning based on a clear set of requirements from Realized Technologies LLC. After the initial scope estimation, our team picked the Kanban approach to software development. For the front-end development of this large-scale enterprise solution, Leobit’s engineers suggested choosing the Angular framework. Our recommendations were approved by the customer and the development process started.
Stage 2
DEVELOPMENT
When the work started, Realized Technologies LLC noticed an opportunity to turn their internal software solution into an independent product for the external market. It required changes in the initial project scope, and every couple of weeks, Leobit’s team added new features and services to deliver the portal, which led to cost savings and an increasing number of the customers’ clients. When extra tasks appeared, our engineers changed the approach from Kanban to Scrum in order to increase transparency and project visibility.
One of the biggest challenges was to make sure that the developed solution met the requirements of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. According to United States law, all business transactions must be documented. By integrating Factom blockchain with Qualified Intermediary, Leobit’s experts enabled an unalterable record-keeping system without disclosing private data.
Also, the customer’s rapid business growth made it impossible to track all client conversations. A big portion of the conversation history of each client was lost or stored on the personal accounts of employees. Leobit helped Realized Technologies digitize their business. Our team automated such operations as documents flow, document formatting, editing, collecting, etc., making the whole process simpler, faster, and more secure. With improvements performed by our developers, the customer gained control over a hundred times more transactions than was possible before.
On the Realized Marketplace, Leobit’s experts conducted the integration with ShareFile that allowed documents to be securely shared, sent, and collected from clients. While integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) guaranteed reliable and scalable cloud storage, our team also performed third-party integration with DocuSign, which allowed investors to sign legal documents online.
In order to prevent problems in production, Leobit developers conducted tests and collected customer feedback on working in a staging environment.
Stage 3
RELEASE AND MAINTENANCE
After the deployment, our developers became responsible for completing additional security tasks, confirming that the platform functioned as optimally in the production environment as it did in the staging one, handling requests from end-users, verifying if the platform met customer and user needs, and conducting continuous maintenance and support tasks.
Stage 4
FURTHER COLLABORATION
Realized Technologies LLC is planning to continue cooperation with Leobit. UX redesign of the application is possible in the near future as a lot of information is displayed on the screen, and it has to be organized in a logical and user-friendly way. What’s more, the company runs three product lines and wants to have one team from Leobit help with their development.
Value delivered
Automation of 1031 exchange and selling and purchasing real estate
Gaining control over a hundred times more transactions after business digitalization performed by Leobit
Secure & transparent transactions with no personal data compromised via blockchain
Compliance with the laws of the United States
Regular releases with new functions and capabilities