We’ve been busy with some custom design and development work for one of our real estate web clients, WeRelocateBcn. They use Inmovilla as their CRM and we’d previously integrated live property listings via the Inmovilla API a while ago which shows users a simple list and detail view for properties. But with an increase in the overall portfolio size we needed to implement property search functionality to give users better control of listings.
The scope and depth of a property search will depend on the variety of the portfolio. Our client Lucas Fox has thousands of properties and there we need to offer the user a wide range of search and filter options. For now though, the WeRelocateBcn portfolio is more modest in size and we decided to initially offer searching on the property class (sales or rentals), type (house, apartment etc.), location, price and number of bedrooms. This gives the user enough control to efficiently browse the portfolio.
Getting data back quickly from an API is so important and we always see very positive response times from Inmovilla. For the search we built a set of custom functions to request and process the dataset, to build our url query parameters and also to handle results pagination. Our code is robust and reusable and we are able to easily pass the response data through to our front-end display templates.
Using the content management system site admins can define the options shown in the search pricing and bedroom filters and on the front-end we also automatically show appropriate pricing options according to the current search class (sales or rentals).
The new search module is live on the website and it’s great to build in more functionality to projects and see how our client sites grow over time. With another project currently in production (and which is also using Inmovilla), we’ll be looking forward to adding another successful client collaboration to our real estate web design and development showcase.