Entegral Company Blog

Article by Adriaan Grove, Entegral

It is 2019, start investing in content if you are not already doing so
One of the best investments you can make for your real estate website (apart from creating a great user experience) is to create valuable content that's relevant to your audience. Most estate agents have resorted to integrating news articles and in some cases area articles into their websites to achieve some level of personalisation.

The main focus on real estate websites seems to be on the design (in most cases only the home page is customized), and not on telling your story, showcasing your expertise or giving visitors valuable sticky content. This goes skin deep when the rest of your website looks like that of your competitor. You need to start thinking further than the "one fit for all" template websites out there that doesn't encourage any creativity beyond the home page. In most cases customization beyond the home page cannot be done or you are charged an ar…

Start with a responsive base
Are you weighing up your options on a service provider for your real estate business' website? Ask yourself one simple question - will my website be responsive and automatically adapt to any screen size device? This really is one of the most important factors to consider in 2019 when you need to stay at the forefront of technology. Google recommends responsive design for a better user experience, something our team envisioned and has perfected over the years.

Customize the front end, the way you want
Flex real estate websites are responsive, and now provides a higher degree of customization for agencies wishing to do something different to the limited stock templates sites we see these days. We now offer 5 new unique templates to choose from and offer a greater degree of freedom to customise them further to accommodate your look & feel. If that is not enough, fully customized websites can be developed using our industry first real estate development …

Last year we introduced our new MyProperty South Africa property portal, that runs on our Flex Template Language real estate platform. FlexTL is a unique serverless real estate platform that allows for the rapid development of real estate websites of any size, and even allows you to use your own developers.

Since the launch we've been hard at work with some fine tuning, brain storming new functionality and coding enhancements for incremental roll-outs this year.


Today we've updated the home page which aims to highlight some key features:

The integrated Google search is kept. It allows you to type in any location in South Africa, and the system will search for properties in a radius around that point, allowing buyers to find more listings in the same area. A neighborhood feature highlights selected areas and gives insight into popular areas in South Africa including photos, map, latest listings and agents. This is already the largest selection of neighborhood info and photos for…

We are doing a bit of research, here is your chance to cast your vote on a general estate agent property portal survey. Open to all registered South African estate agents - the survey closes on Thursday 22 November.

Click here to complete the quick survey. 

Property portals seem to have perfected the art of creating a lot more buyers than what there currently are in the market. Thousands of leads can be generated to a single agency in a month, but judging by some agency’s lead reports, and social media comments, very few actually result in sales. Estate agents are frustrated. What gives?

Entegral's founder, Adriaan Grove gives his opinion on this, lead fatigue, the law of diminishing returns and Zillow's move as portal concierge service. Read more here.

Dear Clients,


First of all, thank you for your support through the years and help our team living the dream of running a fully independent company, serving you. I was planning to do a more formal press release, but thought I'd share what I've sent to my team this morning with you to see where we stand as company and the actions we've taken to protect your listing data.


Adriaan

Entegral CEO


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Dear ET Team

As you will know by now, news broke that South African Bank, FNB, has launched a new app that competes with our real estate clients. There has been an incredible social media outrage, to say the least and it promoted further investigation from us.
On Thursday 1 November clients contacted us and asked why their listings appeared on this FNB app as they didn't give any consent to feed their listings. After denials to us and clients that t…

Our team has managed to launch the new MyProperty South Africa property portal in July and have committed to making it the top property portal in South Africa. Not an easy task, as our CEO explained in this blog post, as it requires a long-term vision, relentless tweaking and working through lots of user feedback and analytics to perfect it.



You can read more about our 'Why' here, to get insight on how we are aligning the portal to focus more on the role of professional agents.

We got rid of subscription fees, and also ads that clutter the user experience, and provide the portal as a free to list portals for Entegral clients using the OMS or Base. We furthermore provide a free feed for major service providers through our standalone property listing syndication system called Sync. For a small fee, it provides you with the advantage to also feed to other free or paid portals to increase your online exposure.


We will continuously tweak the portal with unique new features and have…