About Barr Technologies

With over 30 years of experience in the Real Estate industry working with Realtor boards, MLSs, and brokerages Barr Technologies has a deep understanding on the specific needs within Real Estate. The systems that are created are designed specifically to enable Agents and staff to focus on productivity instead of tedious data entry and company management within aging custom built back end systems. The design of our systems are architected to allow the the technology departments that used to keep those custom system up and running to focus on the enhancing the unique needs of the brokerage and to leverage the data within the system in new and innovative ways.

Laconia was born out of the necessity for a highly integrated, modern way to blend and enhance separate systems that off the shelf solutions cannot provide and without the high costs of running an entire software development team for a single system.
Laconia allows the teams that used to create and manage the Intranet to create new tools and unique solutions specifically for the needs of the brokerage while leveraging simple API calls for all data access and management.

What is Laconia?

Laconia is designed to enable staff to more focus on the job and not have to worry about the backend systems staying up and running, while being able to keep up with the changing times.

Laconia offers:

  • Secure logins
  • Accessibility from at the job, at home, or at a remote location
  • Designed for both desktops and mobile devices
  • Built on the serverless Wolfeboro platform to allow for ultra high reliability and ease of enhancement.
  • A customized dashboard with Announcements, Reporting, views of integrated third party content, and a broad overview of the corporation
  • Full calendaring and Event Attendance module with customizable locations, event types, and instructors.
  • Integrated Classifieds for want ads and items for sell.
  • A fully detailed firm roster with robust user details
  • Existing integrations with Testimonial Tree, Luxury Portfolio, LeadingRE, Xpressdocs, and HomeSpotter
  • Document management and organization
  • Vendor review manager and selector
  • Highly customizable and fine grained access and security rules and policies.

Technology and core design

What makes Barr Technologies, Laconia, and Wolfeboro different than other products? Simply put, it is the mindset that we serve users and do not use servers; it’s the Continuous Integration of regular updates and features, the ability to never “overload” the system by way of the serverless design that allows us to achieve over a 99.999% uptime and by way of the full API that allows every single create, read, update, and delete action to be executed by any integration in the exact same way that Laconia makes the calls provided that the integrator has appropriate Access Control Rights.

How can we achieve this? Amazon Web Services and the use of serverless Lambda functions and a core data store of DynamoDBAmazon Web Services, we can focus on our products and features for our customers rather than servers, hardware patches, firmware updates, dive space, and hours of downtime for monthly updates, replacement, and correctly sizing the server cluster for the load. This all means that we can run leaner and deliver a better product at a better price than anyone else.

We utilize a modern design for our software; Barr Technologies uses a fully RESTful API platform called Wolfeboro to separate the presentation portion of our applications that everyone sees and the backend functionality that makes everything work. This allows for faster updates to the core look and feel of the application without any worries of accidentally changing functionality. This design also allows our platform developers to be able to focus on the functionality of the features and not worry about how the front interacts with it. Since Wolfeboro is fully accessible via our open API this means that any developer that works with our customers has the same access that Laconia has, enabling custom development of any internal systems, Alexa skills, digital signage, or any other custom applications to be created to support the company.
Due to the nature of our system architecture, the API calls to Wolfeboro actually become faster as more load is added.

To continue with highly available applications, code separation, and Node.JSthe use of modern technologies, we have decided to use Node.JS for the serverless API platform Wolfeboro and Angular for Laconia to Angular 2achieve a faster responding “Single Page Application” that has a much cleaner and more of an installed application feel over a legacy website design. The use of Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to host Laconia allows for ultra low latency to the end users and ensure a higher availability.