Key Takeaways
- Tropicana needed to improve and stabilize a property management application built by a previous developer.
- Taazaa modernized the application, fixing bugs in the core logic.
- The new platform reduced monthly account corrections by two-thirds.
The Challenge
Tropicana Properties is a property management company that maintains a portfolio of 40 apartment complexes in El Paso, Texas. With their sister company, Tropicana Homes, they help low-income families get into an apartment and then into a home.
“We do everything,” said Iyari Fierro, Technology and Procurement Officer for Tropicana Properties, “And I think that really encompasses what Tropicana is. We do things our way, not necessarily how other management companies might do it, and that entails having our own custom property management software.”
When Fierro started at Tropicana, the company was already building custom property management software to handle the complexities of their tenant base.
“We have a combination of both market units and low-income units within a single property,” she said, “so it’s a combination of logistics, compliance, accounts, and records. It can get pretty tricky to handle these combinations at 40 complexes.”
Due to this complexity, no off-the-shelf products met their needs. Tropicana decided to invest in a custom application tailored to their unique business requirements and engaged a small software development company to build it.
That initial vendor struggled with the project, however. “The biggest weakness was that we didn’t have the right-sized team in place,” said Fierro. “One person was kind of doing it all, and with such a big project and so many components, it was just not working out for us.”
Payment issues were a major headache for Tropicana. The application often caused double payments and other tenant account errors that required manual corrections. Tropicana made roughly 60 of these account corrections per month, requiring the work of two or three staff members.
Because the custom product proved insufficient for their needs, Tropicana began looking for other solutions. One product they explored was Innago, a Taazaa client.
“We really loved their product and what they had to offer us. It has a lot of the features we need, but again, Tropicana is unique.” The Innago team worked with Tropicana to meet their needs, but Fierro’s team needed more flexibility to pull data and reports than Innago could provide.
Ultimately, Dave Spooner, founder and CEO of Innago, suggested talking to Taazaa. Tropicana partnered with Taazaa to re-engineer and stabilize the application. The goal was to stabilize it and make it more cost-efficient—without taking it offline.
“Because we’re still using [the application], we couldn’t just completely throw it out,” Fierro said. “It’s still something we use on a daily basis.”
The Solution
The Taazaa team faced several technical challenges in modernizing the Tropicana app.
One of the biggest was the migration from .NET 2 to .NET 8. The older framework was no longer receiving security patches, had performance limitations, and was preventing the introduction of new features. Upgrading to .NET 8 provided much greater security, performance improvements, and access to modern capabilities.
The Taazaa team initially encountered concurrency issues with background jobs. To make job execution more reliable, they leveraged Hangfire with custom queues and server configurations.
Deployments were another hurdle. Manual deployments on Windows servers slowed development, so they streamlined and automated the process by moving to a CI/CD pipeline with containerized deployments on Linux.
Data quality was a recurring challenge, with too many manual corrections needed in the initial stages of the project. Once the team identified and fixed the bugs in the core logic, the need for manual fixes dropped significantly.
When shifting deployments to Linux, Taazaa encountered library issues such as time zone mismatches and PDF generation errors. They resolved these issues by adding the tzdata library and installing additional packages for stability.
The improved Tropicana platform uses .NET 8 on the back-end, ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript/JQuery/RazorView for the front-end, PostgreSQL via Entity Framework Core for the database, and standard HTML/CSS.
The Results
These improvements resulted in a much more stable, scalable, and automated solution for Tropicana Properties.
“It’s sustainable,” Fierro said. “The maintenance is there. The Taazaa team worked hard to upgrade the code, and it’s working great. They’re a great team overall.”
Tropicana is already seeing the benefits of Taazaa’s work. “The frustration levels among our people and the property managers have decreased significantly.”
The upgrades have dropped the number of tenant account corrections needed from roughly 60 per month to 15-20. “It used to be two to three of us working on catching corrections, fixing accounts, and me having to jump in because the software wasn’t performing at the level we wanted. Now only one person is taking care of account corrections, and they still have time to manage data analytics and several other projects.”
Not only did the code work better, but the Taazaa team was also easier to work with. A standout aspect of the project was Taazaa’s Agile methodology. “I really love the Agile development structure that Taazaa uses. We see their work every two weeks versus waiting for something to take months.”
Fierro felt that the previous developers needed a lot of guidance, which wasn’t the case with Taazaa. “With the Taazaa team, I can just give them the vision, and they’ll figure it out,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about reminding them or thinking for them because I know I can trust what they have. The innovation and thinking outside the box is up to them, and that’s been very refreshing for us.”
“Taazaa has been a great help to us,” Fierro said. “I’m always appreciative of everybody on the team.”
