The end of XML for Property Tech
This is a semi-technical post. If you’re interested in how the Domain Property API can work for you, check out our CRM getting started page or get in touch.
Why use a CRM
In the real estate industry a “CRM” builds web applications that act as intermediaries between agencies and the various portals and websites they use to market their properties. These CRM’s provide a central location to manage listings and media content, and to capture enquires about those listings across the various real estate portals like domain.com.au.
XML Bulk Upload?
Until recently, integration between a CRM and real estate website was conducted via “XML Bulk Upload”. XML is a widely accepted file format standard that allowed files and metadata to be transferred in a predictable way.
If you’re familiar with XML, you’ll know that it’s been declining in use for over a decade. The reason for this decline was largely due to the way files were generated, transported and ingested, or “read”.
An XML schema is relatively easy to maintain once the standard is met. But, due to XMLs rigidity it has always been hard to change the format if the party who defined the schema originally, wanted to add or retract an element from the existing schema.
For example, Domain adding a flag to denote a `ruralListing = true` becomes a major change management exercise with all existing CRM’s who upload to Domain.
Latency between changes in the CRM and the Domain Website also became an issue. CRM developers would create workflows where listings would be uploaded or changed in “bulk” as a scheduled job.
This means that agents would receive enquiries for properties that had already sold or leased, and on the flip-side would miss out on leads that they might have received while the listing was stuck in the CRM’s processing queue.
This isn’t a blemish on the CRM’s developers: it’s simply a representation of how technically mature the industry was at the time the XML standard was born, and how far we’ve come with real-time technology since then.
Ultimately, these issues have had the potential to affect the Agents reputation as well as Domains’ end-users satisfaction.
As Domain aims to provide the best platform for people to find their home, and a significant chunk of our revenue comes from those Agents who expose their listings on Domain — we had an opportunity to define a new norm.
Which brings us to the domain.com.au Property API.
Since the 2000s, adoption and acceptance of public API’s has grown exponentially. Organisations in almost all industry verticals now see the value of making their internal systems accessible to the public. Take Dropbox and Slack for example, who’s core products are not API’s, but are completely accessible via their public API.
Likewise, developers recoginise that they can take advantage of this access to benefit their core customers.
Our API empowers CRM’s to provide a better Agent and Customer experience by enabling a fast, reliable and secure way to integrate with domain.com.au, commercialrealestate.com.au and soon, allhomes.com.au.
From the start, we knew that access to the full listings life-cycle was crucial for our developer customers. Exposing just one or two endpoints would not be valuable enough for them to migrate to the API.
Our V1 API was the first real estate API that exposed the complete CRUD endpoints for our listings service, including functionality to check performance down to a single listing.
You could also search for an Agent and Agency, or locate all listings belonging to them.
Since then, we’ve built out our Webhook offering to allow real-time access to leads as they’re received from customers and included property evaluation data to help Agents have more informed conversations with prospects.
So why move to API?
Our Property API is the new benchmark for listings management — But as an Agent or a CRM, why would you be better off ditching XML?
Speed
- Know that new or updated listings will be available on Domain within minutes
- Receive webhook notifications for all Enquiries, to be the first to get in touch with prospects on via vendor and sales channels
- Access previous listings and enquiries on Domain for a quicker ramp up with a new Agency or CRM
Reliability
- Guaranteed notifications of every new lead received, without worrying about email template changes, accidental spam walls and proxy email addresses
- 1:1 listing create, update and archive with live processing and error report endpoints
- 99.995% service availability with a no planned outages policy and multiple layers of DDOS protection
Security
- Guaranteed safety of Agents leads and listing performance statistics through OAuth2 compliant Domain Membership service
- Agencies can revoke a CRM’s access at any time
- CRM developers can use our organisations feature to control who access to the production API
Feature Rich
- Build our property price estimates into your CRM to inform richer conversations between Agents and Vendors
- Leverage suburb performance statistics for better conversations with Buyers and Vendors
- Use our free property validation endpoint to verify addresses on the fly as listings are created in your CRM
Where to from here?
We have a number of initiatives on our roadmap including ability to check the Domain listing calculator via API and receive notifications once your listing has completed processing. We’re also working on SDKs in the languages most common in the industry.
Right now, we want to continue to work with more CRM’s to help them migrate to API.
We want to understand how we can make it easier for you to get started on the property API, and what else we can look to include to help you service your customers better.
You can check out our CRM getting started guide and reach out to our team directly on dev-relations@domain.com.au
