01 Starting point
An estate agent keeps their listings in the agency software — that is where the brochure, owner details, prospects and appointments live. If the website is maintained separately, a second truth appears: a property that sold weeks ago is still online, and a new listing shows up days late. With around two hundred active listings across four locations, that stops being a question of diligence and becomes a question of architecture.
The second point concerns the visitors. An agency site brings together interests that have little in common: one person is looking for a house, another wants theirs valued, a third is working out the yield on an investment. A single contact form for all three means a follow-up question with every enquiry — and, for the sender, the feeling of having written into the void.
02 Solution
The basis is a current WordPress with a page framework built for property. Every listing page follows the same order: summary, key figures, description, image gallery, location, enquiry. New listings get filled in rather than designed afresh each time — which is what makes comparing two properties possible in the first place.
The core is the OpenImmo integration. OpenImmo is the industry’s XML exchange format, which practically every agency package exports. Listings are taken in, mapped onto the site’s property structure and published with images, key figures and the energy performance details required by law. Whatever is marked as sold in the office disappears from the site on the next run. The website is an output channel, not a second data store — and where an industry standard exists, it gets used rather than rebuilt.
The contact paths are separated by intent: the listing enquiry carrying its property reference, the property valuation as a multi-step form that asks only as much as a first assessment needs, and the saved search for buyers. Images are served at several resolutions with lazy loading, so extensive galleries open quickly over mobile networks too. It runs on our own servers in Germany, with updates for core and extensions, backups, monitoring and TLS.
03 Result
The inventory is correct without anyone maintaining it twice. Whoever lists a property in the office, or marks it as sold, sees the result on the website — reconciliation is no longer a task but a property of the setup.
Enquiries arrive sorted: listing enquiries with their property reference, valuation requests with the details a first assessment needs. That saves the round of follow-up questions such contacts otherwise begin with.
Listings can be published at consistent quality regardless of who enters them and at which of the four locations. Prospects find the same information in the same place.