Contact Point Case Studies

The Challenge

Collins Commercial & Industrial (CCI), a real estate firm based in Dandenong which has been in operation for over 60 years has recently been utilising a high traffic commercial property website to promote its available properties. This meant re-keying the property information, which is stored in an internal property information system, into the external website, one property at a time. CCI then decided to also promote their property listings on yet another even more popular real estate site, which is when they talked with Contact Point about achieving an efficient process for uploading the data to both websites, and keeping the data in sync.

The Solution

Fortunately both external websites provide an XML interface allowing bulk property upload, edit and removal. It was a large and complicated task to implement the automation with 2 sites, as they both have different mandatory fields, field definitions, and XML structure. New data had to be added to the internal property information system, and a good deal of data clean up was required. In addition, the internal property information system needed to know when to upload and remove properties, and to make it easy for the staff to carry out the synchronisation.

Committed staff ensured that all the property information was accurate and complete within the internal system, and all images were of a suitable quality. Contact Point provided a number of system generated reports allowing the staff to quickly identify and rectify problem data, and an image resizing tool was implemented to ensure appropriate file size and correct image dimensions were applied to all images.

The moment of truth was when the first automated synchronisation was kicked off by a CCI staff member, who was delighted at how easy the new process is, and how much time it will save. It is now a matter of a few clicks and waiting a couple of seconds while the information is transferred to each external website, and the job is done! This process will save hours of effort each week, and will ensure that information about the property listings in consistent across all information sources.

There was certainly some pain involved, but the gains are enormous. Significantly, from day 1 of having the properties on the 2nd and more popular external website, the volume of enquiries coming from the web increased markedly.

Contact Point is now an Approved REA XML provider for RealEstate.com.au and has successfully passed the requirements of RealCommercial.com.au to provide XML data to their website.

Automated Data Duplication - a Case Study