Everybody knows the difference between the virtual and the real. When it comes to real estate online ads, this difference acquires more significance. It is easier to buy property offline, when one can look and feel what he is going to have. Online property sales have certain pitfalls and web users are aware of them.

However, the Internet swallows up more and more businesses. Taking a real estate agency online becomes a necessity today, not an additional way of promotion.

With the development of technology, requirements to real estate scripts are getting stricter and stricter. Here comes the issue of real “real estate software”, which is not characterized by the adjectives “cheap”, “all-in-one” or “universal”. We prefer to use the word “real”

Thus, real estate software must be real from the point of view of performance, feature set, basic marketing built-in tools and price. That's how we see it.

Performance: Commercial or Open Source Technology

Real estate selling/rental portals typically have to process large number of queries, which might entail slow work of your script, time out errors and produce constant problems, when the database might be overloaded. One of the main aspects, which should be taken into account before choosing the framework for your business, is the technology, on which the script is realized.

Open source technologies are good and popular; it is a logical alternative to the commercial platform. However, the latter has certain advantages, which can be underestimated when considering the possibilities for serious business:

Open source technology is good when you have plenty of time and resources to enjoy the process of its self-mastering.
For a large company, where time is money and one can't afford to spend time on it, commercial solutions will be more cost effective - as dealing with the tried technology is safe, secure and reliable.
When your business is growing, you want performance with no surprises. You want the possibility to obtain timely and “real” support, if things go wrong.

In other words, commercial vendors care about building quality products and supporting their
customers/partners, hence, you'd better think twice before inclining to free technology.

Features

Real estate solutions don't differ much in the feature set; however, to give a good start, you should bring in something non-typical or new in online real estate portal to make visitors get interested. That's why in choosing the software for real estate portal, it won't be out of place to carefully study the list of features available with the program. The ideal variant is that they are neither redundant nor insufficient for your business.

Good is the solution, which is easy-to-install. Thought-out documentation plus post-installation support and training proves the professionalism of the developers.

Price

Price is not the number one decision making engine, but does play a role. Compare features with the price. It must be neither too high, nor too small. It should be real and correspond to the resources spent on the product development.

Marketing built in tools

Say, it may be short movies of your properties for sale, the option for customers to check the property item availability themselves or other ones. Also, flexibility of the solution contributes to the professionalism, which the solution was created with. One more advantage of the professional product is that their developers can customize it according to your needs or integrate it seamlessly into your existing web site.

Summary

Whatever real estate software you might choose, you shouldn't skip the steps described above. Everything matters: technology, functionality, features, price, and support. Long and careful research before purchasing will contribute to making the right decision. Do not rely on somebody else's experience; it is your business at stake.

Do not be guided by the temptation to test some kind of “affordable” real software solution, it might cost you too much of your time, which you may spend on generating income from your solution. Choose the “real” real estate solution.


About the Author
Anastasiya Shalayeva is an advertising copywriter and marketing consultant of DataX Solutions Company.
DataX Solutions is the software development company providing professional and high-quality services in database design, software and web-based applications development/re-engineering, and quality assurance.
Visit www.datax.com.ua
for further details.