Which software for a property portal mass uploads? - (Vebra,Reapit,Desres,Jupix etc)

[propertymovingtoday]

Hi there,

Im looking into starting a property portal that estate agents can pay a small premium to display their properties on, with search engine etc.. but the initial hurdle is the mass uploading of their images & information from their database from ours, each time they adjust or modify their costings etc.. there are many types of software that carry out this task - a software interface on the estate agents computer that holds the current stock (as it were) & an upload facility to send any updates across any portals they may be registered to (ie rightmove, zoopla etc..) all in one go, as & when they need to.

Im unsure which software is the best, or most commonly used - does anyone know, or can advise please? - its a grey area as most seem to use one, or the other, or a combination of several.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, many thanks

 

[darren atkinson]

If you want information to be 100% up to date at all times then you need to be looking at some kind of feed which pulls info out of their databases in real time, this will likely be either very expensive to setup, very slow for your end users or both.

The other option is to create your own data structure and pull across property information on a schedule and upload it into your DB. The problem is that your data will only be as up to date as the point of your last pull.

I have a project ongoing which pulls property data from just one vendors system and to be honest it has been a lot of work to setup. The data vendor had an API setup with XML feeds being able to be accessed but we found that pulling the XML feed for just 500 - 600 properties at run time was just too slow.

To get around this we created some SQL databases to hold the data and then execute a pull every night to populate it. The speed improvement is massive doing it this way but we have the overhead of maintaining the DB. Also our data is not 100% accurate but it's accurate enough for our requirements.

I'm not sure how estate agents manage their properties, whether its with a standard tool that they all use or if there are loads of different solutions. If they are using different solutions then you are going to have an enormous job on your hands attempting to pull data in automatically...

I'm not trying to put you off at all, just trying to give you an insight into a similar project of mine.

 

[propertymovingtoday]

Hi Darren,

Thank you for your speedy reply, there are some interesting points - good to read into - thanks. I can definately appreciate that such a volume of information could take a while & cause a few problems along the way.

We were looking into the tailored software in place for these uploads, without my having massive knowledge of programming codes & such - I was was under the impression that some programs/methods of mass uploading (Jupix/Vebra etc) would ease & speed up the whole procedure, but Im not sure which to go with - if even a few would be the solution as there isnt a select or industry standard which blurs the lines a little. There doesnt seem to be any way of finding out who uses what, or what is best to use from a users point of view as they all claim to be the largest most user friendly - a tricky conundrum!

Thanks again, hope that makes sense

 

[DotNetWebs]

To get around a similar problem I wrote my own .blm parser that takes the agent's existing Rightmove [upload] feed and uses it to populate our own data model.

The .blm spec can be found here:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/adf.html

Regards

Dotty

 

[propertymovingtoday]

Hi Dotty,

Thank you for your post, thats a great angle - Ill look into that with the techy folk & see whats possible

Refreshing indeed, great stuff.

All the best

 

[propertymovingtoday]

Additionally, does anyone know which are the most used upload softwares? - its a tough one as there seem to be so many, all with expensive subscriptions. Setting up & running 4+ seems about right, but I could be wrong - does anyone have any information on the best examples to look at please? (if I cant source writing our own coding to receive RM (+ other) streams)

Many thanks in advance