The Problem

You’re a Realtor and you’ve found social media to be a great tool to reach countless people and market your listings from rentals to homes for sale. But you’ve found it’s time consuming to login daily to all these social media sites to view and post information. You have your real estate website you maintain too that gets in the way of being a realtor which includes a daily grind of countless meetings, showings, contracts, events, and meetings. You wish there was a tool to do help you leverage social media and the internet so you can get the word out about your listings.

The Solution

Addressing this issue was no easy task. So we created Esolist, a web application that lets Realtors connect and view feeds from social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. A realtor would sign up for a free or paid account (with more features) and simply add their social media accounts. They can then create a website for their listings using an intuitive wizard adding listing details, descriptions, images, and video. The application had to be easy to use, so we created a UI (User Interface) that had big tabs, easy to access buttons, and wizards for setup.

Integrating Social Media

The first problem to solve was bringing in the data from the social networking sites. Each network mentioned above provided us with API’s (Application Programming Interface) that allowed us to authenticate a user’s account and make use of the network by pulling and pushing information to the sites. This allowed us to let the realtor click just one button to add the network. We were able to create a simple UI to view multiple feeds (i.e. Twitter Timeline, Facebook Activity) in one page. It’s no easy task to do this or to maintain the application since those companies are constantly changing their API’s. So we built an easy to maintain and scalable infrastructure for the application.

Creating Websites for Listings

We solved one problem by integrating social media, but what about incorporating some real estate features? Listings are what the Realtor needs to market so we gave them the ability to set up single page websites for their listings that are built to showcase information of the listing. Each website is enabled with features like slideshows, Google maps, listing content, and optimized for lead capture and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The free account only lets the user add one listing but for just $19 a month, a Realtor can create up to 15 listing websites. If you compare that to what it costs to create and host a real estate website, Esolist provides a lower cost alternative to setting up a website for a real estate listing.

Analytics and Data

With a realtor creating websites for their listing and taking to social media to promote it, we had to provide them with the tools to benefit from their work and allow them to analyze their results. Each listing website provides an easy way for a website visitor to get in touch and find out more information about the listing. Each lead captured is managed in an intuitive interface that allows the realtor to view and download (to .csv) all their leads.

One of our favorite features about the application is how elegantly the analytics are tied into the application. The realtor can see who’s been visiting their website, how many leads they have, and which network is performing the best. They’ll be able to see if Twitter, Facebook, or Google are sending them more traffic and which ones convert best so they know where to focus more of their time. With this information at their disposal, Esolist allows the realtor to create and send reports to their clients showing them the results on how they are utilizing technology to promote their listing.

The Product

Esolist is a powerful tool. Built for the web and made to take advantage of utilizing social media for marketing, it’s an easy to use tool that Realtors can take advantage to market themselves and their listings. Since it is a SaaS product and required to scale, we built it ‘in the cloud’ allowing Esolist to serve 1000 to 100,000 users efficiently and effectively.