Porta da Frente

The issue was the automated tagging of the many thousands of photographs Porta da Frente publishes on its website.

“These photographs are mainly taken by professionals because we dominate the high-end of the market, and our clients – the sellers – expect to see their properties portrayed in the best possible light. These photographs are a vital and expensive resource, yet we never tagged them. We uploaded them into our CRM without ‘telling’ the system what they were: a bathroom, a balcony, a patio, a fireplace, and so on. We felt that doing this manually would be too time-consuming and take our salespeople away from what we want them to be doing.

“I wanted to find a way to automate this process,” explains Coelho, “but I was never convinced this would be feasible to a standard where it was useful to the business. Fortunately, I was mistaken. The Proof of Concept delivered to us by SoftwareOne showed that automated tagging was possible to a degree of accuracy that frankly startled me.”

The outcome and experience of the project far exceeded Coelho’s expectations both technically in what was delivered but also operationally in how SoftwareOne ran and structured the PoC, and – crucially – persuaded AWS to fund the work.

“My skepticism about the outcome of the PoC was clearly a barrier to commissioning a project of this nature,” he continues, “but SoftwareOne stepped up and leveraged its deep knowledge of the bureaucratic ins and outs at Amazon Web Services, as well as personal relationships within AWS, to get us the funding and remove this obstacle.”

SoftwareOne finetuned an AI foundational model to optimize the accuracy of automatically extracting from the images the keywords that described them. These keywords are placed as a separate text file – and can be uploaded to the CRM in this form, “although we haven’t done this integration yet,” Coelho adds.

The project took a month to complete and established that automated tagging would be viable as a business application, integrated with Porta da Frente workflows and systems. The next step in Coelho’s initiative is to get the green light to productize the Proof of Concept for an MVP to be piloted with the sales consultants.

“The PoC points to a solution for two problems,” Coelho explains. “The photographs ‘describe’ a property as it really is, but other information in the CRM may not always be correct. Property details are entered manually into the CRM, and this is prone to error. For instance, if a sales consultant fails to input that a property has two bathrooms, our website will list it as having zero bathrooms when the photographs tell a different story. Automated tagging will flag up these inconsistencies and ensure we publish a property correctly in all its details.

“So one issue is internal, making sure that the information in the CRM is filled correctly, and the other is to present that information to the interested buyers that visit our site. In terms of SEO, and in the way portadafrente.com is presented to browsing portals, having that data creates a richer experience.

“What will also improve is customer satisfaction. Our clients are – rightly – very demanding about how we present their properties and are quick to complain if they are unhappy about anything. And so with this project and this improvement on the data accuracy, we can anticipate some of those problems and try to minimize them. And that ultimately leads to better customer satisfaction.”

Coelho is grateful that SoftwareOne championed the project with AWS and prepared the ground for its next phase.

“Thanks to SoftwareOne I will engage in discussions about the MVP with clear and convincing evidence that it will work. I will also be able to set out and explain the costs of the MVP phase based on figures prepared by SoftwareOne. This is very important – to management, first of all, who won’t commit to anything unless they have a clear view of the cost implications, but also for me personally because I have had a few unpleasant surprises in the past. With SoftwareOne, the work and what that work will cost is 100% transparent.

“The scope of this project was fairly straightforward, but it did the job of convincing me that automatic tagging was feasible – something that I had doubted. I know that SoftwareOne has much more up its sleeves in terms of tagging the photographs in richer detail, and I look forward to making progress with our MVP.

“The start of our journey with SoftwareOne has far exceeded my expectations,” Coelho concludes, “so I am determined for this collaboration to continue as we continue to position Porta da Frente as the most technologically smart real estate broker in Portugal.”

Why SoftwareOne

SoftwareOne is Porta da Frente’s cloud provider for AWS. In 2024, the real estate firm sounded out SoftwareOne about leveraging AWS services to set up a Proof of Concept around the automated tagging of photographs for the Porta da Frente site and third-party portals.

The credentials of SoftwareOne’s Data & AI capabilities were never in doubt but Porta’s CTO was skeptical about the viability of a successful PoC and, further down the line, a business application to boost customer satisfaction.

When SoftwareOne went above and beyond to assure funding from AWS, the short project went ahead. Its outcome far outstripped expectations and the next step is to productize the PoC. With the thoroughness and professionalism that marked the entire project, SoftwareOne provided Porta da Frente with transparent and accurate costings for this MVP.