Kontakme and KEFA Help Deliver Government Services Online

Last December 2018, Kontakme together with our partner, KEFA Information Technology Services (Philippines) signed a contract with The Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board or HLURB, the government agency in the Philippines tasked to regulate the housing and land use for the whole country. KEFA and Kontakme are tasked to upgrade and optimize their system that handles the registration and regulation of more than 20,000 real estate professionals nationwide (Real Estate Broker/Salesperson Information System - REBIS). Kontakme's role is to provide the design, create the application and provide technical consulting services. The system is now operational with over 22,000 real estate broker and salesperson accounts migrated into the new system. The system promises to make it very easy for real estate professionals to apply online for a real estate license as well as make it easy for the public to verify the credentials of a real estate broker or salesperson during the property buying process. The agency stands to benefit a lot, too in terms of increased operational capabilities, faster processing of applications, better utilization of personnel, and having a platform that is poised to make it easy to launch and manage online services. We are now in the process of training the agency personnel on how to use the system.

The specific area that we were tasked to "make efficient" was to implement a paperless registration service for all Profession Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople involved in the selling of properties nationwide. The current system requires the applicants to fill up a PDF form online, but they still have to download and print the form at home, then bring it back to the nearest Agency Office so that the Agency personnel can encode the applicant's information once the legal documents that they need to submit are verified and approved. The solution that we implemented aims to simplify the process into 3 easy steps.

1. The applicant applies online for an account at the Agency's website (to be revealed soon) using any Internet enabled device (smartphone, tablet or PC).
2. Once their account is created, they will need to complete the details of their user profile.
3. The user then saves the changes and they're done!

However, all applicants are still required to go to the nearest HLURB office to submit the required legal documents for verification. This is Phase 1 of the roll-out. Phase 2 aims to make it more convenient for applicants to do everything online, without the need to travel to an HLURB office unless there are things that needs to be cleared.

When submitting documents at the agency, the applicant informs the agency personnel that they applied online and the agency personnel follows 3 simple steps to verify the documents and approve the application. What used to be a 2 man work comprising of at least 15 to 30 minutes of encoding and verification per applicant, we reduced it to a single person doing everything at an average of 5 minutes or less not including the paying time which we hope to help optimize, too in the very near future.

Aside from reducing the work load and eliminating paper printing at the customer side, we also introduced the following major benefits :

1. A real-time, public search and verification service protects real estate buyers from bogus or unlicensed real estate players.
2. Easy to use user interfaces for both the agency personnel and the public.
3. Device agnostic allows the agency or the applicant to use almost any device (smartphone, tablets and desktop computers) to run the service.
4. Increase security tracking when handling user data. All agency users are provided with their own user accounts that facilitates the monitoring of who does what.
5. Flexible integration with other systems and agencies using prebuilt API's
6. No supplier dependency.
7. Works on any web hosting platforms will allow the agency to easily migrate or expand services to any platform when needed (cost efficiency and expansion).
8. Online support for the lifetime of the service (paid technical support without breaking the bank)

The system is also already capable for processing uploaded legal documents using the smartphone camera as the scanning device. This makes the system truly paperless and convenient for the public and HLURB.

Once the agency starts accepting online payments or will support payment through banks, an applicant will not need to visit the agency office anymore to apply or submit docs. We are increasing the convenience factor by bringing the service at your fingertips anywhere, anytime, as long as there is Internet access.

We will update this article once we have passed the User Acceptance Test phase. We are now training the agency's personnel on how to handle the new system. Once they are ready, the system will be open for public service, hopefully in a few weeks from now. We are very happy to take part in improving public services which is key to nation building.

The project was delivered in partnership with KEFA Information Technology Services and by Vibralogix Ltd. of UK.

Kontakme LLC is leading the development of open source contact information services for managing contact information for use in online directories that are self managed, pet tagging services, luggage tagging services, personal items tagging services, live-self-managing corporate directory solutions and new generation of business cards.

KEFA Information Technology Services is a Philippine based company with expertise in government projects and public community building activities essential for nation building using technology as enablers and optimizers of public services.

Vibralogix Ltd. is a UK based company with extensive rollouts of their well known PHP based, subscription based platform called Sitelok that can be integrated on any website running on any hosting platform. Easy to use, economical to maintain and easy to learn. This product can save you time and money when developing subscription based services.

Tags :Governement Services, HLURB, KEFA, Philippine Goverment, Real Estate, Self Service Registration, Sitelok, Vibralogix