‍The Need  

Associa is an industry leader in property management for community associations, serving nearly five million homeowners every day. They provide a wide array of programs and services to fit the specific needs of Home Owners Associations (HOA), including management, maintenance, and real estate management. Associa needed to replatform to one of their flagship offerings -- Community Archives (CA) – in order to scale with the rapid growth of the company, meet consumer expectations for a modern and seamless experience on numerous devices and easily adjust business processes and rules as local and state laws change over time. Community Archives is a Business to Consumer (B2C) digital product utilized by buyers and sellers to obtain real estate documents supplied by an HOA as part of disclosure. It was built utilizing older technologies making it difficult to maintain and did not meet with Associa’s current standards of cloud first development.  

The Approach

Associa chose Allata as a trusted partner to re-platform Community Archives. Allata employed modern cloud-based technologies (e.g., AWS, S3, Lambda Functions, MySQL, Angular Material, C#, and GraphQL) and guidelines such as the AWS Well Architected Framework to deliver a sophisticated customer experience that allowed Associa to expand market share by enabling Associa and non-Associa communities to utilize the product. Functional requirements in the form of user stories were clearly defined to ensure state and federal regulations were taken into consideration for all CA products. Our team consisted of Allata and Associa developers who worked collaboratively to bring a robust set of features to market that will support CA’s current and future needs.  

The Result

Throughout our 20-month engagement, Allata enabled Associa to remove complexity from the shopper experience while offering a standalone cloud native SaaS platform that external branches and independent associations can utilize to solve their business needs around resale documents. Reducing operational cost through automation, upselling additional services, and enabling the pursuit of self-managed and non-Associa managed markets represent just a few of the benefits garnered from the new platform. Additional capabilities delivered include dashboard reporting, task management, order preparation, and the integration of several external systems to support payment, customer creation, and accounting. Associa expects a significant increase in incremental revenues as more communities begin to utilize the new platform.

"This wasn’t a staff-aug project – this was an accelerator. With Allata’s expertise, guidance and horsepower we were able to form a blended team with Allata and Associa team members with the needed culture and management for high performance. We built a cloud native SaaS application, along with architectural and DevOps patterns and practices to sustain and scale Community Archives as our business grows well into the post Covid times." Greg Hamm, Vice President Business Solutions & Delivery, Associa