JLL is sending a clear signal about proptech: software providers have to build resilient apps that can handle a market that changes on a dime. The real estate sector, which has been notoriously slow on the uptake, is finally demanding tech that works and lasts. This means development needs a real strategy, one that bakes in stability, scalability, and security from day one. So, how do app companies get their development process in line with what JLL wants to see in high-performance, durable technology?
Key Takeaways
- Get automated testing frameworks running early in the dev cycle to find show-stopping bugs before they go live, which can cut post-launch problems by as much as 30%.
- Use a microservices architecture with independent failure domains so one broken component doesn’t take down the entire system, letting you hit 99.99% uptime for your main features.
- Lock down your APIs and data. Use proven protocols like OAuth 2.0 and AES-256 encryption to protect sensitive real estate info from the constantly shifting world of cyber threats.
- Set hard KPIs for app performance that your team can actually measure, like keeping all response times under 500ms and error rates below 0.1%, and track them with tools like Datadog or New Relic.
- Build a real disaster recovery plan with daily backups and multi-region deployments so your business doesn’t grind to a halt when something inevitably goes wrong.
1. Architect for Scalability and Modularity
An app’s resilience is built on its architecture. By 2026, the market’s need for flexible, expandable software is going to make old-school monolithic applications look like dinosaurs. The answer is a microservices architecture. This approach means you break your app into a set of smaller, independent services, where each one runs its own process and they all talk through APIs. For a property management app, you might have separate services for user auth, another for lease management, a third for maintenance tickets, and a fourth for financial reports. Pro Tip: When you’re designing these microservices, try a domain-driven design approach. This method ties services directly to what the business actually does, which makes the whole system more logical to build, deploy, and scale later on. Just make sure every service gets its own database to stop data coupling that can cause one failure to cascade into a total system meltdown. Common Mistakes: Don’t go overboard and create too many tiny services. You’ll just drown in the complexity of managing all the deployments and chatter between them. You want a good balance where services are small enough to be manageable but big enough to handle a meaningful piece of business logic.
2. Implement Strong API Security and Data Governance
In proptech, data is everything. Protecting it and making sure services can communicate securely is absolutely non-negotiable if you want a resilient app. You need to build strong API security measures in from the very beginning. This means using authentication protocols like OAuth 2.0 to handle access securely and something like JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for stateless authentication between your services. Every single API endpoint must enforce HTTPS to encrypt data in transit. For data governance, start by classifying your data by its sensitivity (e.g., public, confidential, restricted). Then, use role-based access control (RBAC) to make sure users can only see the data they absolutely need to do their jobs. Any sensitive data sitting in a database should be encrypted at rest with an industry-standard algorithm like AES-256. And don’t forget regular security audits and penetration testing. Groups like OWASP offer great checklists for finding and fixing common vulnerabilities.
3. Prioritize Automated Testing and Continuous Integration/Deployment (CI/CD)
Resilience is about detecting and recovering from failures fast, and preventing them is only half the battle. Your first line of defense is automated testing. You have to integrate solid unit, integration, and end-to-end tests directly into your development workflow. You can use tools like Jest for your JavaScript code or JUnit for Java to automate unit tests, while things like Cypress or Selenium can handle the UI automation. Then you pair that automated testing with a solid CI/CD pipeline. Doing this makes sure every single code change gets automatically built, tested, and pushed to production, which cuts down on human error and speeds up your release cycle. Platforms like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or GitHub Actions make this possible. A well-oiled CI/CD pipeline makes your deployments way more stable and reliable, which is exactly what JLL is looking for. Pro Tip: Put code coverage metrics into your CI/CD pipeline and don’t let it pass without at least 80% coverage. It’s a good benchmark to make sure most of your code is actually being tested, giving you more confidence that your changes aren’t breaking something else.
4. Design for Observability and Proactive Monitoring
If you’re flying blind, you can’t fix anything. That’s why observability is so important for resilient apps. This is more than just basic monitoring. It’s about being able to truly understand what’s happening inside your application by looking at the data it produces. You need to implement thorough logging, metrics, and tracing across every single service. Tools like Datadog, New Relic, or the open-source OpenTelemetry standard are perfect for pulling all these insights together. You should set up proactive alerts for any weird behavior in performance, error rates, or resource use. For instance, an alert that fires on a sudden jump in 5xx errors or a slow, creeping increase in database query times can let you know an issue is brewing long before it ever affects a user. Your dashboards should give you a real-time view into key performance indicators (KPIs) like API response times, transaction throughput, and what users are doing, so your dev teams can jump on problems and fix them fast.
5. Implement Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
Things will break. It’s a guarantee. Even with perfect architecture and monitoring, outages are going to happen. Power goes out, networks fail, and sometimes even a major cloud provider has a bad day that can knock your service offline. A company that builds resilient apps must have a well-defined disaster recovery (DR) plan. This involves practical steps like regularly backing up your data to geographically separate locations and having a clear strategy to restore service fast. For your most important services, you should be looking at multi-region deployments, so if one data center or cloud region goes down, traffic automatically fails over to a healthy one. For databases, you need replication strategies like active-passive or even active-active setups. And you have to run regular DR drills, at least once a quarter, to make sure the plan actually works and to find any holes you missed. Your whole goal is to shrink your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to almost nothing. Common Mistakes: Too many companies write a DR plan and stick it in a drawer. An untested DR plan is a useless DR plan. You have to treat your DR drills with the same gravity as you treat a production deployment.
6. Cultivate a Security-First Development Culture
Building resilient apps isn’t just about the tech stack. It’s about how your team thinks and works. You need to build a security-first mindset directly into your development teams. This means security is part of every single stage of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), not just a final check before launch. Hold regular security training for your developers that covers secure coding practices, common vulnerabilities, and data privacy rules. Make threat modeling a standard part of the design phase so you can spot potential security risks before a line of code is even written. Your CI/CD pipeline should automatically run static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools to scan code for vulnerabilities. A tool like SonarQube can catch code quality and security problems automatically. Taking this kind of proactive approach to security drastically reduces your app’s attack surface and makes it more resilient from the ground up. To deliver the kind of enduring, high-performance technology that JLL and the rest of the real estate sector want, app companies need a well-rounded, proactive strategy focused on modular architecture, tough security, automation, complete observability, and tested disaster recovery.
What is a microservices architecture?
It’s a way of building an app as a group of small, independent services. Instead of one giant block of code, you have separate pieces that talk to each other over APIs. This makes the whole system more flexible, easier to scale, and less likely to have a total failure.
Why is automated testing important for app resilience?
Because it catches bugs and other problems early, before they ever get to production. When you automate your tests, you’re constantly checking your work, which leads to much more stable and reliable software that doesn’t surprise you with unexpected failures.
What is the difference between monitoring and observability?
Monitoring is about watching predefined metrics to see if a system is working or not, like checking its pulse. Observability goes deeper, it’s about having enough data (logs, metrics, traces) to ask any question you want about what’s happening inside the system so you can figure out *why* it’s not working.
How often should disaster recovery plans be tested?
At least once a quarter. Your systems and data are always changing, so you need to test your DR plan regularly to make sure it still works. Frequent testing is the only way to find weak spots before a real disaster does it for you.
What is a security-first development culture?
It’s when security is everyone’s job, not just a final step. It means developers are trained in secure coding, you’re thinking about threats during design, and you’re using automated tools to scan for problems all the time. You build security in from the start.
