Building a Real Estate Portal?
I know international entrepreneurs are reading (I’ve met/spoken to a few of you), some of whom are working on real estate portals in various countries.
A real estate portal is a fairly defined technology product, which includes:
- A home page with search
- Search results & filters
- Property details pages
- Location/place pages
- User accounts
How many times has that been built? I’ll wager a guess, the answer is “far too many”.
Transmitdata recently released a “portal in a box”. I know that’s a challenging proposition, since most teams seek to customize virtually everything with deep integrations into your own systems. As well as the fact that there is generally a significant learning curve for any developer to understand another codebase.
Challenging, yes.
That said, could it be save you money considering the alternative costs of building from scratch? Yes, in some scenarios I have to imagine it would.
The portal works for any classified marketplace, such as cars or jobs — though real estate is probably the strongest use case for such a platform.
Interested? Learn more here: http://transmitdata.com/portal-start-up/
ocLuke
Posted at 16:11h, 17 OctoberI like the idea of this if it was built on WordPress and could take advantage of all of the 3rd party plugins. Being locked in to a proprietary platform doesn’t sound appealing or freeing, or dissimilar to many real estate website portals available at the moment.
I really hope someone steps up to provide database and portal solutions for independent brokers to be able to push their own database + MLS RETS data to their own website.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 16:16h, 17 OctoberWhy do you want your own database?
Imran Esmail
Posted at 12:07h, 19 OctoberI second this…heard of anything yet? I’ve come across SimplyRets and Onboard Informatics…they standardize the feed coming in and you can plug in multiple MLS feeds.
Sep Niakan
Posted at 08:25h, 18 OctoberIs it open source? If so, that is an interesting option. Being able to have a strong starting point and then go in and mess with the guts to customize it (and also offer improvements back to the original source code) would be an interesting proposition. It could allow tech-minded independent brokers to collaborate to compete with the big guys.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 12:12h, 19 OctoberI like the idea. That said, being someone who’ve open source a project (https://github.com/oh-hey-world/ohheyworld-platform), I can say an open source approach is destined for failure without a considerable community building effort.
A group of brokers should consider making a bid on Seth’s portal:
https://geekestateblog.com/available-complete-national-property-search-portal/
…and then open source it.
Sep Niakan
Posted at 09:22h, 05 NovemberDrew, if you know some likeminded tech-oriented brokers, I would love to speak with them, especially if they are in condo-heavy areas.
Dan Marusin
Posted at 11:47h, 19 OctoberWow!
Great idea indeed! Few option i find very interesting. A fine collaboration will be happen!
[removed]
Joel Leslie
Posted at 07:46h, 20 OctoberWhat great feedback. I am the CEO of the product, we are definitely interested in moving on your ideas…
Of interest, our Transmit product standardize’s the feed into any portal website, providing a full comprehensive db to manage listings.
africajam
Posted at 06:11h, 06 NovemberWow, this is super timely. I’ve just spent most of the last year creating a real estate website builder called PropertyWebBuilder but I now realise its a very very crowded market.
Looking at my options recently, I decided to explore making it an open source project. Just this morning I posted a question on hacker news ( ‘Ask HN’ ) for feedback / advice about the open sourcing process.
I’ll spend the rest of this week exploring ways I might be able to get sponsorship or in some way get a return on the effort needed to open source PropertyWebBuilder.
Any advice from you guys here will be appreciated. I hope I can come to a decision by the end of this month.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 16:01h, 06 NovemberCan you post the link to the HN discussion?
africajam
Posted at 02:10h, 07 NovemberSure, its
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884532
I didn’t post it initially because I thought there might be some penalty for posting to your HN post but it seems it only invalidates upvotes from that link.
I’ve been quite surprised. I thought most people would encourage me to open source but so far no one has….
BTW, if anyone wants to contact me its etewiah at hotmail
africajam
Posted at 10:13h, 27 DecemberSo I did go ahead and open source my code for creating your own real estate portal. The best thing about it? You can deploy it with a single click of a button (with a free heroku account). Check it out here:
https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder
If you need any help at all using it, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to help. Enjoy it 😉