Mulki

Real Estate Management App for MENA Region

Unique real estate mobile app for MENA

Support for Islamic Hijri calendar

Smart scanning with ML technology

iOS

Android

Intro

Mulki is the first-of-its-kind real estate management app developed for the MENA region. It’s a mobile app created to assist real estate owners in their day-to-day operations by automating some of the time-consuming tasks.

Ibrahim Said

Client

Ibrahim Said

Client

Ibrahim Said is a businessman from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Being involved in the real estate construction as part of his business, he has accumulated vast knowledge of the pains and problems real estate owners in Saudi Arabia face.

He saw this as an opportunity it is and, after a recommendation from our other client, he approached Mind Studios to build a software solution.

The tasks set before us

Our client came to us with a number of features he envisioned for his real estate management mobile app

Possibility to view essential financial overview of property portfolio

Smart scanning for standardized contracts

Automatic calculation and calendar for expected payments

Support for Islamic Hijri calendar

Analytics

Notifications for expected payments

What we did

Discovery

According to our client’s research and surveys of real estate owners, the real estate industry in Saudi Arabia and MENA region lacked a high-quality mobile solution for property management. There were very few, if any, mobile-only or mobile-first solutions despite the fact that the population is overwhelmingly mobile.

Individual Property Owners

1 5

Properties

At the start of our partnership, we performed idea validation and research to define the target audience and the specific pains we were to help them alleviate with the new app.

The target audience we set for this new product is individual property owners with 1 to 5 properties. We created user personas for users and proceeded with further research.

Saudi Arabia real estate contracts follow a standardized template, as per the law. This brought the idea to our client that it was possible to automate the data transfer from each contract to the system. This, coupled with the automated conversion for Hijri calendar, became the unique value proposition of the new product.

We also performed scoping for the project to more efficiently prioritize features and create a solid roadmap.

Unit economics

The main goal of unit economics is to perform a feasibility study of the future project. During this process, we identify the most efficient channels of user acquisition — and therefore customer acquisition — costs, calculate capital expenditures, operating expenses, and other important metrics.

Business analysis for a fast-growing product

Traditionally, for most products in most outsourcing companies, a business analyst is only involved during the discovery stage: to help perform research, calculate unit economics, and describe initial functional and non-functional requirements.

However, as we came to understand with Mulki, in an ambitious product that aims at future expansion, a business analyst is necessary during all the time of development. Having an analyst present at all times and on all relevant discussions with the client helps plan for the future and document all the changing requirements properly.

Simple and smooth UX

Mulki was designed as a mobile-only product on the market where all its competitors are mainly web or desktop services. While the majority of the target audience would prefer a mobile app for their rental businesses, there was the issue of what they were used to. We had to come up with very efficient and simple UX. Our client literally asked us to lower the number of taps necessary for the user to perform certain actions — for example, contact creation, property addition, etc.

Design

Mulki is one of the projects in which we took part not only with visualizing the design vision of our client. We participated in creating the brand identity from scratch.

Arabic Language

One of the design challenges we faced is that to support Arabic language, with its right-to-left writing system, we needed to create a version of the app with mirrored interface elements. And they had to look great either way.

تسهيل إدارة عقاراتك

Color Palette

In Islamic culture, green is associated with paradise and grace. It is also considered the color of Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have worn a green garment.

Furthermore, green plays an important role in Arab culture as Arab countries are located in arid regions where green vegetation is scarce. In this context, the color green is associated with life and fertility.

In Islam, green is also considered the color of hope, mercy, and wisdom, which may be another reason why Arabs love this color so much.

Development

Mulki was planned from the beginning as a mobile app for both iOS and Android, since the shares of the Saudi Arabia market for both operating systems are significant.

68%

Android Market

31%

iOS Market

We built core apps with Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS. For the backend, we used Ruby on Rails.

Smart scanning

The core feature for the first Mulki version was the smart scanning for contracts. In Saudi Arabia, rental contracts are created according to a strict template and signed on paper.

Our task was to use machine learning for text recognition so that users could scan paper contracts via their phone camera and the app automatically filled the numbers from the contract into correct fields in the app.

We achieved that by using Google ML Kit for Android and Apple Vision for iOS.

We achieved that by using Google ML Kit for Android and Apple Vision for iOS.

We built custom algorithms to create payment calendars based on the data from the contract:

Amounts due

Start date

end date

Taxes

Extra expenses
Users receive notifications when the date of expected payment is near.

Mulki also has a smart feed for payment calendars. We created a wide range of advanced filtering options for users to manage their properties with ease.

To plan for future updates of the app and gather user feedback, we implemented in-app surveys users can fill in. This helped our client plan for expansion and create a roadmap for updates, as well as decide on which features should be premium without it hindering the use of the app for free too much.

Currently, the MVP version of Mulki is live, but we’re already working on more exciting updates.

mulki tech stack

iOS

SwiftUI

Composable Architecture

Vision

UIKit

Alamofire

AVFoundation

Moya

Android

Kotlin

Clean Architecture

Kotlin Coroutines

ML Kit

Firebase Dynamic Links

Retrofit2

Android Jetpack

CameraX

Backend

Rails

PostgreSQL

Redis

Sidekiq

Firebase

SendGrid

APNs

Lessons we learned

App localization is more than language support

Mulki wasn’t our first project with Arabic language support, but it was different in several ways from anything we’ve built before. For instance, the correct displaying of numbers inside text was to be checked manually for each feature we implemented. This was due to the fact that text in Arabic is displayed right-to-left while numbers are left-to-right. This had to be taken into account.

تسهيل إدارة عقاراتك

letters

عقاراتك تسهيل إدارة عقاراتك

numbers

٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩١٠١١١٢١٣١٤١٥١٦١٧١٨١٩٢٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩١٠١١١٢١٣١٤١٥١٦١٧١٨١٩٢

Frequently changing requirements

Since Mulki is a fast-evolving product, when we started it, we didn’t have a concrete plan for features down the road.

Mulki started as little more than a calendar for payments with notifications, and now it’s evolving into a full-fledged task management system for property owners. It’s also expanding in other ways.

To make this possible, our developers focused hard on creating a highly flexible architecture for the app, one that would allow us to smoothly slide new functionality in.

property addition

contract creation

Results

Unique real estate mobile app for MENA
Support for Islamic Hijri calendar
Smart scanning with ML technology

We launched the Mulki MVP in September 2022.

Since then, we're seeing a steady increase in overall number of users as well as in monthly active users; the feedback has also been predominantly positive.

Soon, Mulki will include not only the landlord side of the app but a tenant side as well. We’re also working on more intricate features that will become part of Mulki Premium that will generate revenue, so stay tuned for future updates to this case study.

Feedback from client

Impressive responsiveness! They are generally responsive to all requests and will go out of their way to do jobs and tasks not in the initial proposal without charging such as designing a website and launching it.

Ibrahim Said

Mulki

All-in-one real estate platform

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