As most of you know, I have been out of the real estate biz for a while. I now manage the marketing and search division of a company in the for profit education space and absolutely love it. That said, I can’t completely stay away from the real estate technology aspect of the RE biz as I find the website and search component of the industry completely fascinating. In addition, I help out a few of my old real estate friends with their websites and marketing from time to time, so it forces me to kind of keep up with things.
The Displet IDX product is one of the technology pieces that I have been watching and is coming out of beta. I have been following the development of this product for some time now and am very impressed with the direction it has taken and the overall growth of the software’s feature set. I figured the best way to get this out to all my real estate folks was to do a quick interview with the Displet guy himself (and old real estate buddy) … Eric Bramlet. Here are some of the question I put to him in a recent interview.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you have been up to lately.
As you know, I’m first and foremost a real estate broker. I started as an agent in 2003, earned my broker license in 2005, and opened the doors to a boutique brokerage in 2006. Around the same time as I opened One Source Realty, I became very interested in online marketing. I took a continuing ed class on web design at Austin Community College and started researching the heck out of SEO. Along the way, I realized how important conversion is and realized that RETS/IDX is the best conversion tool you can implement on your site to increase buyer conversion.
In 2009, I started developing a proprietary RETS/IDX system for use on my own sites. In early 2010, some local Austin agents approached me and asked if they could lease the software for their sites. That’s what prompted the creation of Displet. We’re now in 15 markets and are rapidly expanding.
Can you tell us a little about RETS/IDX?
RETS/IDX is the technology and the agreement that allows real estate agents & brokers to display MLS listings of other brokers on their own websites. The agreements have evolved slightly over time, but the technology has really blossomed, especially over the past couple of years.
What do you see as the biggest differences between RETS & IDX?
RETS stands for “Real Estate Transaction Standard.” It’s an attempt by all of the local boards to standardize the way we fetch the property data from each board’s server. IDX stands for “Internet Data Exchange.” It’s the agreement between brokers on how you can display each other’s listings on your own site. It varies a little from board to board. For example, pretty much every board will require that you publish the listing broker’s office name along with the listing, but some boards will allow you to put Facebook “like” functionality on the listings and other’s won’t.
Tell us a little about your product?
Our product is built on Ruby on Rails and uses the Google Maps API to map listings, and allow the end user to search by map. What differentiates us is how developer friendly we are and how customizable our solution is. A lot of our competitors will allow you to choose from a handful of templates, or maybe customize the header of your RETS/IDX. We give you full control over the stylesheet (css) on the search, as well as full control over the html of the header, footer, and property detail page, and partial control of the html on the map search. We allow adding approved Javascript, as well.
So, a good example of how our users have leveraged this customization is the Facebook “like” button. One of our agents wanted to incorporate the Facebook “like” button on his property detail pages. His board allowed it, and it’s super simple to add if you have control of html. (Here’s how.) It took him about 5 minutes to add this button to his site. Later, he wanted to add “tweet this” and was able to add it just as easily.
We’re also a design shop, and we’re pretty much the biggest WordPress fanboys that you’ll find anywhere. Because of this, we’ve released a number of WordPress plugins that allow a WordPress webmaster to easily create area or neighborhood pages, a plugin that allows the easy creation of quick searches, and another plugin that auto-blogs new listings.
Why use WordPress?
Today, 14% of the web is powered by WordPress, so it’s here for the foreseeable future. It has a huge community behind it constantly making it better. It’s waaaaay past the old days of “just a blog solution” – you can create really powerful sites on it. It also has a really easy learning curve for new site owners. If you allow yourself 2 hours of frustration playing with it, you’ll be really happy with where you are on hour 3.
Does it only work with WordPress?
Not at all. It will work with Drupal, Joomla, or any hard coded html site. Here’s a sweet drupal implementation that the guys at The Wired Mouse did.
Which markets are you in?
ABOR, Telluride, NOMAR, GMLS (NC), JBORNC (NC), NNEREN, GHVMLS, Nashville, McAllen, CAAR, GAAR, Lexington MLS, SCWMLS (Madison), MLSPIN (Boston), Okahoma City.
What kind of success are you seeing?
It varies a lot by market and site traffic. We’ve seen brand new sites come out the gate and start getting a couple of leads a day within the first 2 months. An established site can see way more than that. One of the bigger agencies in a weaker market went from an old business card site to a really robust site and had 100 registrations and 10 property showing requests come in the first weekend. They are getting ~10% conversion rate, which is pretty sick.
Are you open to entering new markets?
Absolutely. If there are no hiccups with the RETS server, we can take a new market live in two weeks. The only obstacles we ever run into are restrictions from the local boards.
What plans do you guys have for the future?
We’re getting ready to roll out the Property Suggestion Tool, which is going to be killer (watch our blog for more details.) As soon as that is live, we have Facebook login ready to deploy and test, and then polygon mapping.
Do you think that RETS/IDX will become more or less important in the future?
I don’t think it will become less important, and I don’t know how it could become more important.
If you are a real estate broker or agent looking to integrate IDX/RETS into your website or are looking to start one from scratch, I highly recommend Eric and his Displet team to set you up with a top-notch product at an affordable price.
Great work on the property search. It is not often that you will see a Realtor who was once subscribing to a third party vendor for his IDX feed to actually develop his own IDX product for resale. I wonder what percent of his time he spends in real estate vs. serving the real estate industry as an IDX vendor now.
OK, this sounds like it could be a very useful app. And the fact that it’s WordPress friendly is a real plus in my eyes. Pretty sure I’m gonna try it out, and if it works as well as you claim, I will be recommending this to my peers here in San Diego. Thanks for the heads up!