Real Estate IDX Platform
One of our first ever clients asked us to help them build a real estate website. In order to get this done we had to have our developer qualify with the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) in Washington state. Once that was complete, we became an authorized MLS provider. Because the MLS requires an authorized provider be in charge of the data feeds, we realized that this could create a situation in which we would have a constant feed of clients looking for this service. Now that we were certified, our system was available to anyone in the state of WA that was interested in having an MLS feed showing listings on their site. This also positioned us to apply to other MLS feeds across the country and, as of today, our system has a waiting list of over 200 agents.
Pulling down the MLS code
…& the complexities of learning how it all works
Approach
When we built this project, we didn’t originally look to existing frameworks and, instead, we built the entire platform from the ground up. In hind site, was not the best approach, however, it gave us a ton of insight into how the existing systems worked and it allowed us to refine and improve when we rolled out our V2.
Conversion from stand alone to plugin
When we built this out, there was no documentation so, to make it easier for us to use, we modularized everything and documented our process. In doing so, we realized that what we should be doing was building a plugin that could easily be added to any existing website. We chose Wordpress as the obvious first release and began building out our custom plugin. As a plugin, this took a lot of requirements off of our plate. We were then able to focus on managing a system that allowed brokers to have a custom website that was SEO friendly, Quick to load, easy to use, provided all the appropriate functionality, offered lead generation, and provided a means of on-boarding their agents quickly and easily into an approved web page of their own.
Broker to agent on-boarding.
In order for this to work - we needed to remove ourselves from the need to on board each person individually. When we signed up a broker, that broker may have 100 or more agents and that amount of work would be cost prohibitive, time intensive, and a burden to manage.
What we ended up doing is building out a master site with key pieces that all agents and brokers alike, wanted to include in their own websites. We created our own replication system that branched out from the master website and gave each agent their own starting template based on the master broker page. The agents could then, co-brand and edit these websites (using wordpress) to make them their own. This simplified the onboarding and we could effectively build hundreds of websites off of the master template that we built out for the brokerage. This also meant we weren’t starting from scratch each time, we were simply customizing from the primary template. Each brokerage had their master template built from scratch so that we did not have the problem of all of our sites looking too familiar or “Cookie Cutter”.
Some of our biggest challenges
Image compression and management. Each search customer submitted search called tens of thousands of images to show with each listing. We had to manage compression and load times for all these images to ensure they didn’t slow load times.
Lead generation is incredibly important in the real estate world. We needed to create options that allowed agents to quickly respond to potential leads. We also needed to look for ways to qualify lead and offer creative ongoing relationship building options that would allow brokers and agents to foster that growth.
Permission levels for all agents, brokers, & customers/members
Wordpress no provided our back end interface for developing the website. We did have to lock down our feed and several pieces of the product so that no one could interact with something they weren’t qualified to work with and effectively take the system offline for everyone. We made sure that nothing goes back up the pipe and locked down the pages that could potentially knock an agent out of compliance. The rest of the website was theirs to play with. This included offering a theme, co branding options, and total control over the rest of the pages.
Long term data storage for properties sold. We needed to determine what we would hold and for how long. Most agents would like all of their listings from the beginning of time to be shown - however, that was going to create massive storage problems for us and make things cost prohibitive. We currently have a solution that has allowed long term data storage but limits the amount of detail associated to sold homes.
