Real Estate Website Design

Over past couple years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with a variety of real estate websites.  The majority of these sites have centered around Maryland, DC, and Virginia Real Estate.   These sites are not simple brochures pages for a local real estate agent, but rather complex search engines such as The Best Home Seach Ever, or search engine friendly directories like DROdio.com, or a combination of both for I-Agent Realty.  We’ve also built mobile applications for Long & Foster.  One thing we’ve learned over this time is that pulling the property listings is a complex and time consuming process.

The way these systems work is by pulling all of the property listings from a specific geographical area to a database on our clients’ servers.  We do this by connecting to a service such as the Metropolitan Regional Information Systems or MRIS.  Using broker specific credentials, we write a script that connects to the MRIS servers and downloads updated data each hour.  This interaction is based on the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) which is a communication standard used by listing services nationwide.  This means that we can connect to servers in Chicago and California the same way we connect to servers in Maryland.

This all sounds great right?  Well, in reality, it’s a little more tricky than it seems and we’ve seen companies spend a lot of wasted time and money working with development firms that are new to RETS development.

This is because of a few different reasons.  First, while the transactions are similar, the data provided by each system is not, so that an in-depth knowledge of how real estate systems work in general and the terminology involved saves a large amount of time in aggregating this data across resources.  Secondly, the transactions involved with keeping your database up to date are not very well documented and there is little activity in developer support communities as the information is somewhat proprietary.  If this portion of the process is not handled correctly, you end up with expired listings showing as active on your site which can effect your sites credibility.  Finally, the resources involved with storing these listings on a server and optimizing the process to keep your searches running quickly is no small feat.

Successful real estate websites are all about search engine optimization and lead conversion both of which are driven by property data.

If you need help getting a real estate site online, including pulling from a RETS feed, or working on SEO or lead conversion, please contact us for more information.

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