Capsule: Live Property Websites Without the Hassle of APIs

Rapid advances in technology and ‘digital disruption’ is all-pervasive, with technology now integrated into every facet of our daily lives – and the digital real estate space is no different.

Website and property portals are now commonplace for selling residential and commercial property. Nonetheless, there are improvements to be made. The apartment, house and land properties you often see on websites like REA do not actually reflect what is in stock. According to Rowan Kelly (Head of Research and Development) from Runway, the leading cloud platform for home builders and property developers, there are three reasons for this:

Problem #1: Delays of 7-21 days because data is delivered by email and entered by hand.

Developers email their property data and documents to builders and agencies who manually upload this to their respective software. The same goes for REA. The whole manual process is repeated every week or fortnight to update sold stock.

Problem #2: Properties are already sold

Land at present is selling quickly. We see house and land packages being created on lots that were sold a week prior, reducing packages to lead generation tools, not products. Likewise, the status of lots you see on some estate websites and master plans is more than likely to be incorrect.

Problem #3: Website APIs show old data

The existing technology method of using APIs to load properties onto websites means the data is uploaded daily, and is up to 24 hours’ old.

Kelly explains that in an industry at the tail end of a property boom, it’s not particularly difficult to sell regardless of efficiency: “A colleague in the industry recently remarked to me that ‘we are all heroes right now’ – properties are selling despite what we do. But when the music stops, inefficiencies and delayed customer experiences like these will become glaringly obvious. We figure that the companies investing in productivity and better customer experiences now will enjoy an edge when the market slows down.”

Mercifully, we have good news for the foresighted. Runway has recently released Capsule, a property website solution that does away with APIs, saving between 50%-70% of time and costs developing property-based websites.

Several years ago, the team at Runway embraced the motto, “load it once, make it live” and started building the technology to fulfil this goal.

In other words, the partner or customer should always be looking at live properties and related data. If the property was sold, then every touch point is updated instantly. Our solution for this is our Pipeline software.
What exactly is Capsule?

Finally, there is an alternative technology that eradicates the need for APIs. We call it Capsule.

Capsule uses the latest Angular framework (Google) and AWS serverless technology to access property data directly via Pipeline.

In a nutshell, instead of downloading property data into a separate CMS via a nightly API call, our clients and their agencies can load HTML page designs directly over the data in Pipeline. The result is a live property customer experience at a fraction of the development cost of traditional websites. Best of all, Capsule webpages are fast loading, blazingly fast.  

And if you need to update the design, as long as the new HTML pages have the Capsule hooks, the totally new look can be uploaded in minutes with zero downtime.

It’s like night and day. Have a look at our video demonstration.

For more information, call the team at Runway on 1800 779 964.

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