Choose the right technology for your real estate franchise operation

More and more people are using the internet on daily basis. In effect, more people will also visit your site if your SEO and other online marketing initiatives are any good. For national real estate franchise groups this present a unique challenge. Not only do they need to centralise listings into a single database and make these properties searchable for the general public, but the website needs 99.9% uptime and the speed of searches need to be lightning fast. In general these franchise sites also attracts more visitors than your single agency websites and therefore needs regular tweaking to enhance the response times to visitors. This leaves the master franchise with a difficult question: which database platform is right for my franchise operation? Luckily the answer is a simple one…. Microsoft SQL Server.

Entegral has, since 2009, started international rollouts of its OMS system, including custom configurations for large USA based franchise clients.  This presented the Entegral R & D (research and development) team with new challenges in terms of data throughput into and from the database and onto websites.

Luckily for us (and our clients) we use the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database platform which is simply the best enterprise level database platform out there. It is simply incredible what you can achieve with this database.

Now this blog article gets a bit technical, but it aims to illustrates the power of this database platform and why your franchise operation should make this your #1 database choice.

We have recently started import of USA MLS (multi listing) real estate data and in a short timeframe had interfaces up for a lot of these MLS’s with the equivalent of 200,000 property listings imported on a daily basis.  The amazing thing is that we have perfected the system to import these 200,000 listings in just over 30 minutes. That’s 7000 listings a minute, or 116 listing per second. From our database dashboard view below you can see the stats, with the ‘SQL Batch requests’ peaking at 1600/second and the server CPU worked at +- 50%.

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This shouldn’t actually come as a surprise since companies like MySpace runs SQL Server and have 130 million active users (it is managed by 440 SQL Servers). Read the case study here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000004532

So unless your franchise website will attract more than 130 million active users I wouldn’t worry too much on whether SQL Server will be able to take the load :)

Now, even more fascinating is the way the development team have configured the MLS import to be configurable through the OMS, with statistics and statuses for each MLS viewable for head office:

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If you are looking to switch or upgrade your real estate franchise solution, contact us for some free advice, we will be happy to assist.

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