Company background

Green Street Advisors is an independent research and consulting firm specializing in publicly traded real estate securities, namely Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)—among others. The company sells its research online to subscribers. Their mission is to “provide exceptional research products and consulting services that lead to superior investment performance and insight” for their clients.

Nuts & bolts

• PHP
• MySQL
• Archipelago Framework
• Google Analytics
• Wrensoft Zoom Search Engine + XML
• Subversion
• eAccelerator
• PDFlib
• Linux & Apache Web Server

About the project

This project truly encompasses the collaborative philosophy of Pelago—we worked closely with the client’s internal development team to take Green Street’s suite of tools and analytical models online and make them user-friendly. This was a highly complex project that required us to be intimately familiar with the company and their business model in order to adapt their products and services to an interactive online environment.

A key part of this effort involved the development of a secure, password-protected (SSL) area that controls distribution of the client’s research products, and tools to reach subscribers via email. The application integrates with their internal, custom CRM tool and allows Green Street to easily tier access levels and personalize which pieces of research subscribers receive. We also built a web- and handheld device-enabled email distribution and tracking tool that generates reports to help Green Street monitor customer usage. The user-friendly site administration tools include the ability to create and manipulate PDF files on the fly.