Managing real estate listings - any ideas?

@sharkbait
this is excellent, thanks.

I actually went through all of Evo’s extras one by one looking for elements for this project. It was a very informative exercise. I strongly recommend all MODx novices to spend a couple of hours doing that. But somehow i missed this one.
It’s exactly what i need.

Thanks.

Great Thread! I was thinking about this very topic this morning before turning on the computer. Anyone willing to share links, ideas, processes of how to connect to MLS feeds? I live in a place where real estate is the biggest industry and I definitely want to grow my skillset in this direction.

Many Thanks and have a great weekend!

-Noah

Sharkbait, despite his somewhat disconcerting name, always has some cool ideas!

It’s funny, I DO real estate a bit, as in owning properties, but I don’t typically code for it in my web work. As I recall from discussions with RE friends, the MLS is restricted to RE agents. But there’s stuff like Zillow and things like that, which may offer some kind of data feed, XML or otherwise. Who knows, some ace may be able to work that out, and have a full-blown RE system.

But for a single RE practicioner, who is just displaying his/her stuff, and doesn’t need to have thousands of people subscribing and listing their own properties, MODx would probably be great.

AFAIK, the MILS is for licensed real estate pros only. There are several outfits that offer these kinds of feeds, but they require that license.

This makes "dabbling" and learning in a test environment difficult. Some of these services include a CMS of sorts as part of the package. I think some agents like these as they are used to them. I think many of these sites look awful though.

As others have noted MODx might be a good platform for smaller real estate firms or individuals working with a smaller number of listings in the database. The other benefit is that there are no fees.

I plan on taking some of Sharkbait’s listed options for a spin. I have done one real estate site with MODx so far and might be doing another soon. I have done a number of static sites for individual listings but clients expect more functionality now. My main occupation is photography and I do custom real estate photography on the side.

What I would like to do is build a test sample site using MODx that has most of the features that real estate pros would want. I could then demonstrate this site to folks and see if there is any interest. I am very week in PHP but designing and using CSS are skills I am comfortable with. My potential target market here are small firms and individuals.

It sounds like there are several other MODxers who have similar project ideas. Maybe we can pool our learning?

@Photowebmax and @noahlearner hit the nail with their remarks re: MLS (Multiple Listing Service).

For those who may not know, most real estate agents work for a broker who is affiliated with one of the larger brandname agencies, eg: Century21, Keller Williams, etc. These agencies usually offer their agents linkage to some local MLS database. More than likely, your real estate client will want to have his/her website link to this MLS so web visitors can search available properties based on any criteria they choose.

At the same time, your client may wish to "feature" specific properties. These may be "exclusive" listings by only your client (or his/her broker), or they may be just properties in the MLS that the agent wants to showcase.

There are a multitude of ways to handle featured properties in modx: tvs, individual pages, ditto, etc. Your choice will depend on how many properties, frequency of updates, and how you connect to the MLS feed, limited by what that feed offers in way of online connections: iframes, xml, etc.

In this modx example (http://www.bozemanmontanarealty.com/), my client offers the MLS "search" tool as a simple iframe. But he also wanted a column on each page that featured three properties that he chose from the MLS. We set up this column as tv that he controls, and each property links to the MLS for the property "detail" page.

Puffin, good stuff...

I like that site by the way.

Can you provide a little background on accessing the MLS feed? How did you get access to it while you were developing the site? I think each service handles things a little differently.

I know most MODx folks like to build their site projects locally at first. Is this even possible with the MLS? For developers this sort of becomes a "chicken or the egg" dilemma: how do you prove you can handle adding the MLS to sites to that first real estate client without having fulling explored and tested the system first?

I have one client I have done photography for. She is an older agent who specializes in expensive waterfront homes. Her husband manages her current site and it gets the MLS feed from her parent firm (one of the largest real estate firms in the country.) Her site looks like it was done in 1997 with Front Page though: its just hideous. We have talked about redoing her site with MODx: creating a more modern web standards look. She is not very computer savvy and needs a great front end solution for managing her own listings and text etc. I think I can deliver this for her but I am hesitant about all the database interaction and adding the tools that most modern real estate sites have. Building a solid working test site as a demonstration is the key to my efforts here.

Quote from: outre99 at Mar 05, 2010, 10:03 PM

Hi there.

Interestingly i’m working on a real estate site right now. After a lot of thinking, consulting with MODx gurus, and looking around i decided to do the site with Evo.
My client is not in the US so MLS was not an issue but supporting multiple languages/countries was.
So here’s my approach so far. It might change if i reach some dead ends.

Each property is a separate document organized in the tree by country, city, area, neighborhood.
The big advantage of this is that each property can have a unique SEO-friendly url. Property attributes are TVs of appropriate types. I’m using YAMS to add multi-lingual functionality.

I looked at AjaxSearch for the searching functionality but it proved impossible to do the multi-tv search similar to Century 21 site. So currently i’m trying to use Ditto filters to accomplish this. The advantage of doing search with Ditto and the Request extender is that search pages can have bookmarkable urls.

I’m also using Ditto tagging to add secondary property classifications.

If your Ditto aggregation yields bookmarkable urls, then I would assume you could use these urls for other things like adding a map function with a custom generated iFrame?

Can you provide a little background on accessing the MLS feed? How did you get access to it while you were developing the site?

@Photowebmax, you are correct, every MLS service seems to handle feeds a little differently so it’s difficult to generalize. But most have to make the feed relatively easy to use since, afterall, this is the service they provide agents. So I wouldn’t be too worried about jumping in. In some cases, the service is available to agents only for an annual fee. In others it’s part of their contract with the broker. Usually the agent possesses the broker info about porting the feed to a website; the agent may have to ask the broker again for this info, but it’s usually readily available.

Mileage varies with each MLS feed service. Some are excellent; others are poorly coded. But at the least they should offer you an iframe link so you can port the data directly into your own pages.

I think the biggest problem with these services are the agents themselves who post their listings to the MLS. Often agents use lame photos or poor language skills in describing their properties. That makes it difficult for other agents who pull these directly from the MLS feed to post on their websites. In this case, one slipshod agent can spoil the feed for all the others. Like any database, the quality of data is only as good as each entry.

Good points!

I hear you on the subjective quality of how these services generate content though. Sometimes the quality issue really smacks you in the face. For example: one of the MLS scripts that generates picture galleries was taking the images that I shot for my real estate client and crunching them to the point that the images looked terrible. I looked into it and decided we needed to size the images that the MLS was displaying photos at, namely a small 400 pixel width. This I did with Photoshop and the quality improved but the MLS version of the images still looked like crap when compared to the saved files I had created.

This actually turned into a business opportunity. The client became fed up with the poor presentation that his MLS was delivering and he opted for more when it came to presenting his own personal property listings. To that end I shot custom photos of his listings and then built a custom stand alone site (with URL) for each listing. These sites used a CSS template that I built but it was all static XHTML for the markup. The client loved these sites until the economy tanked. He has stopped using this service.

So, this gets me back to this topic and figuring out how to build nice feature filled sites that will attract real estate pros who want their presentation to stand out from the pack...

Sharkbait, despite his somewhat disconcerting name

;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krdFR5a6a5o