Project Scope
An SEO-driven real estate search engine for San Diego listings.
- I co-founded San Diego Real Estate Experts, a real estate marketing company that focuses on referrals.
- The company site features fully detailed listings, search, neighborhood information and helpful guides for consumers to learn about best practices when purchasing a home.
- Using RETS technology, I created a custom, reusable backend for populating Django models with listings data from the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS), Sandicor.
Technology Stack
Color Palette
Atomic Tangerine
Acapulco
Typography
Montserrat
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Building the Site
SEO
Since this site is the main consumer-facing marketing tool for San Diego Real Estate Experts, search engine optimization informed every decision. The site features a range of articles and neighborhood detail pages, each with keyword-rich content.
In addition, each property detail page is designed to achieve high organic page rank for searches on that property address. This is accomplished though targeted headers, meta tags, image & anchor alts and robust property features content.
RETS
The biggest challenge in this build was creating a backend that can sync, store and normalize listing data for a massive real estate market. Having no prior experience working with RETS (the data serialization standard for real estate) made this challenge especially difficult.
Although RETS ably provides normalized sources of real estate listing data across US markets, it is deeply lacking in accessible documentation. On a small timeframe, I had to learn to search, download and normalize the data stream from the local RETS server.
With effort, I managed to create a Django application that can regularly search, download and normalize listing data into models that enable more robust, programmatic access than would otherwise be possible.
SEARCH
After completing the data-gathering application, the next challenge was to create something useful with it. Taking inspiration from national real estate search engines, I created a powerful search tool that uses Django, jQuery, Google Maps API and AJAX.
Users can search for homes for sale by city, neighborhood or zip code, and can filter the results by features, commuting distance to user-specified locations, or other property meta details. Please feel free to pick apart the frontend code at http://sdrealestate.expert/search.