Aviv Unifies 25 Years of Disparate Legacy Data to Shape the Future of Digital Real Estate
With Snowflake, Aviv drives better business strategy with consolidated data, provides instant insights to business leaders through agentic AI and dramatically reduces its data estate maintenance.
6Months to consolidate 25 years of legacy data infrastructure
15Full-time equivalent (FTE) data engineers redirected from maintenance to value-adding work
Industry
TechnologyLocation
Berlin, GermanyBuilding a platform for the future of real estate
Whether it’s finding a forever home or looking for the perfect rental in a new city, the decisions we make about where we live impact every facet of our lives. The Aviv Group is on a mission to make these decisions easier and help everyone find their “perfect place.”
Aviv is one of the world’s largest digital real estate tech operators, providing valuations, classifieds and realtor services in France, Belgium and Germany. Central to its offering is a dedication to delivering innovative products and services that shape the future of buying, selling and renting. And those models require timely, accurate data at scale.
However, with seven different brands operating in different countries, Aviv’s data was spread across numerous stacks built on a range of technologies, from 2002 Microsoft SQL servers to Google BigQuery.
“Everybody had data in different places, so if we wanted a top-level view of basic key metrics like revenue or our customers, it used to take weeks of effort,” says Kshira Saagar, Chief Data and AI Officer at the Aviv Group.
To remedy this, Aviv built a new infrastructure from the ground up on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud with a goal of consolidating data, ensuring it had the integrity and availability to support AI use cases, and improving organizationwide decision-making. As a result, it has dramatically reduced engineering effort, now delivers consistent information to all brands from a single source of truth and has reduced time to insight from days to minutes through AI agents.
Story highlights
Driving business strategy with companywide visibility across seven brands and three countries: With Snowflake, Aviv has replaced several disparate data infrastructures with a single version of the truth to gain a better overview of activities and improve group, country and companywide decision-making.
Accelerating innovation by reclaiming time: Aviv’s previous infrastructure required 15 FTEs to maintain and optimize. Today, just two people are required for maintenance. And when Snowflake is fully rolled out, all of Aviv’s engineers will be free to focus on driving innovation instead.
Democratizing insights through natural language queries: Using AI agents built on Snowflake CoCo, business leaders can now explore data in natural language using Snowflake CoWork via a Slack interface, and receive updates nearly instantly rather than waiting days for reports.
Consolidating 25 years of disparate data in just six months
Aviv’s ambition was to transform its data estate as quickly as possible. To facilitate this, the company brought in António Costa as a Director of Data Engineering to oversee the project. His goal? To replace 25 years of legacy databases across three countries and seven different brands.
“We had a choice going into this,” says Costa. “We could either iterate one of our existing legacy solutions until it works for everyone, or we could buy something off the shelf. The first option would take a lot of engineering effort, and those engineers could be adding business value instead. We decided the fastest and most future-proofed way of ensuring data integrity and availability was to start from scratch.”
Looking to build a new infrastructure from the ground up, Snowflake offered time to value, scalability and simplicity that met all of Aviv’s requirements, along with advanced AI capabilities that promised to transform efficiency across the group. With the assistance of Snowflake’s Data Superheroes, a cohort of expert users and community leaders on hand to provide key advice, it took only six months to unify 25 years of disconnected infrastructure. And to make Aviv’s data clean, granular and reliable enough to support AI and machine learning at scale.
Twenty-five years of data, six months to unlock it. Snowflake didn’t just help us clean up our past, it has given us a platform to build the future on.”
Kshira Saagar
Chief Data and AI Officer, Aviv Group
Replacing complexity with simplicity and rapid time to value
Implementing a new technology across seven brands can be a huge undertaking, and one of the most important aspects of ensuring successful adoption is change management. With Snowflake established as the group’s new data platform, Aviv needed its employees to fully understand the vast scope of its capabilities.
To facilitate this, Aviv hosted a “Snowday” hackathon, where around 70 internal users were tasked with using Snowflake in a secure sandbox environment to solve a business problem of their choosing. The idea was to get people working with Snowflake straight away, and it paid dividends. From that hackathon, 10 standout ideas were identified and are now being explored further, with three being developed into permanent data products. These include sales enablement tooling, a category management agent and an automated pitch generator for those selling and seeking properties. But perhaps most importantly, the hackathon delivered a huge mindset shift among users.
“The enthusiasm we saw from people was great,” says Maxime Jayyosi, Senior Director of Data Engineering at Aviv. “People realized that if they have all their data in one place and all of the capabilities within Snowflake, almost anything is possible.”
It wasn’t obvious to people how much complexity Snowflake would remove for them until they used it. Simple things, like having a searchable catalog of data, instead of having to figure out where data resided and how to get it, were transformational.”
Maxime Jayyosi
Senior Director of Data Engineering at Aviv
Delivering real-time real estate insights with granularity and context through Snowflake CoCo's AI agents
When migrating to Snowflake, one of Aviv’s primary goals was to build a basis for the modern AI tools that could help drive new efficiencies and improve decision-making. For this to happen, the company needed a foundation of governed, consistent data. After just six months with Snowflake, the group has already spun up five key AI use cases aimed at elevating business performance and delivering on-demand insights. These range from classic reporting use cases and clickstream insights that deliver a better understanding of customer behavior to classifieds insights to monitor ad performance and data from Salesforce to gain visibility into customer behavior.
For each of these examples, Aviv has built an AI agent on Snowflake CoCo that allows users to explore data in natural language through Snowflake CoWork embedded in a Slack interface. This accelerates time to insight hugely compared to navigating various spreadsheets and dashboards. Now, activities that would normally take a data analyst 4–6 hours take only 15–20 seconds.
“Dashboards contain lots of information, but not all of it is the information you need,” says Jayyosi. “These agents can help users really target what’s relevant to them, providing more detailed insights and saving hours of effort.”
Speed is key here. Previously, senior decision-makers would request data on a Monday morning and that data would take a day to arrive. This meant key strategic meetings would be pushed back until Tuesday or Wednesday. Now, that information is available almost instantly. But it’s also more granular and contextualized, which means decision-makers don’t just get numbers, they get to understand what’s actually happening within the business.
“All our data is now connected. Users can ask for results, but with CoWork they can also gain insight into why those results are the way they are. What’s causing them, and what should they do next?” says Jayyosi. “Once you show people what’s possible now, it’s amazing to see how excited they get.”
The magic word here is efficiency. Our goal is to do more with less. With Snowflake we’ve made huge efficiency gains today, and have a platform that will simplify innovation and experimentation for the future. Insight used to take days and a spreadsheet. Now it takes a Slack message.”
Kshira Saagar
Chief Data and AI Officer, Aviv Group
Reduced effort, greater efficiency and the AI-powered future of real estate
Having a single version of the truth is integral to AI exploration, and Snowflake has provided a platform that enables all seven brands within the Aviv Group to explore their data confidently — both now and in the future.
As Snowflake is a managed service with minimal engineering requirements, its adoption has also transformed the lives of Aviv’s data teams. Where its previous infrastructure required 15 FTEs just to build pipelines, maintain systems and fight fires, Snowflake is now managed by just two people who also have the time to perform various other roles. The rest of that resource has been redirected to driving innovation.
“Having everyone on that one technology, and having all that complexity stripped out has changed everything,” says Jayyosi. “We’re not even a year in, but three months from now the possibilities will be endless. It is very, very exciting, and we’re still in the foundation phase.”
With its data platform in place, Aviv has big ambitions aligned with its ultimate strategic goal of shaping the future of its industry. Using AI alongside connected, governed data, it will be able to better match people with their “perfect places,” improve the performance of listings for clients based on accurate, timely performance metrics and dramatically reduce the time it takes to create listings, delivering faster time to value for realtors. All of this is really just the start of a more innovative, efficient and data-driven future.
“With Snowflake, we’re going to scale our experimentation capability a lot, combining data sets and connecting with other tools,” says Saagar. “The sky is the limit. We now have 25 years of data about real estate listings and sales at our disposal. By unlocking that data with Snowflake and turning it into actionable insight, we can start to completely reimagine what the future of online real estate looks like.”
