With mounting well-financed competition, and against a rag-tag budget, Synergy's only hope of keeping PropertyKenya.com alive, was through innovation. Innovate we did, and it has paid off BIG-TIME! Currently PropertyKenya has a link popularity way above that of ALL other Kenyan real-estate websites combined! With an excess of 300,000 hits and 8,000 visitors a month, and serving over 1.5 GB of cream real estate data, (Jan-Feb 2005 statistics), PropertyKenya is the true one-stop-shop for online real-estate in Kenya.
Some of our innovations include
- Property Shopping Cart
- Property Notification Service
- Property Classifieds
- Content Co-branding and
- Embedded Currency Conversion (ECC) being the latest
With the ECC technology, PropertyKenya is able to take varied pricing in multiple currencies from our Partner Realtors and present these to end-users in a uniform currency of their choice.
When we approached CBK with this proposal, seeking FOREX data support, CBK, through their head of IT Services, Dr. Onyiwo, acknowledged that this was a first request of its kind.
Meanwhile, we stuffed subsets of our distributed ECC infrastructure into version 2 of the Ultima Property Information Database. However, CBK was seemingly taking longer than expected, to simply transform their FOREX data from current formats to XML as required by our proposal. Time was not on our side. Pressure was mounting from our Partner Realtors, who include industry heavyweights such as Knight Frank, Villa Care, Tysons, CitiVillas Valuers, Neptune Shelters among others, to deliver the much awaited second version of the Ultima PID. Version 1 of the Ultima PID was our perception of the industry, version 2 represented views of the industry players who form the backbone of PropertyKenya. Since undoing the ECC infrastructure from version 2 was not a feasible solution, we had to find an alternative to CBK, if we were to deliver version 2 on time. And we had to find that alternative fast! At whatever cost!
That alternative was found in Olssen and Associates Corporation of Switzerland. Coupled with typically 20-hour working days, the ECC idea moved from being a dream into a usable reality
NOTICE
This new service is still in an experimental state pending a robust implementation of an online FOREX data infrastructure by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK).How to access the service:
To access this service, go to any of our search pages, Residential to let, Residential for sale, Commercial to let, Commercial for sale or Land for sale, select your preferred currency. The default currency is Kenyan Shillings (Note: any figures entered in the price fields should be in the selected currency)In the event you have been directed to a page with currency information
(e.g. from a search engine), Simply click on the Select Preferred Currency.
If you are a registered member, and you have logged in, you will be given an
opportunity to save the selected currency in your profile. Once saved in you profile,
all property notifications will be sent to you using the given currency.
