Entegral Blog

Entegral has, over the past 12 months, completely redeveloped their listing syndication platform. The platform is now known as Entegral Sync .  Sync simplifies the complexity of publishing listings to multiple property portals. It also greatly reduces the operational cost associated with maintaining multiple feeds and is the perfect solution for real estate organisations who have their own listing management system.  The platform is build from the ground up to use the latest cloud technologies, and automatically scales computing resources based on demand. Advanced features such as auto failover is provided. The platform is supported by a dedicated team while automated health checks continuously monitors for any problems.  Sync provides lightning fast listing updates to portals that provide real time feeds and has already been implemented by a number of national and individual real estate offices in South Africa. Sync's biggest client, is however Entegra...

When setting up a new real estate website, there is a lot to consider: Developing something from scratch vs using a tried and tested platform provided by existing service providers. Developing something from scratch may seem exciting but the associated risk and cost needs to be factored in. Bespoke developments also carries a longer development time frame and will take away a lot of your time that could be better spend focus on your core business. You also need to factor in maintenance costs. Once your system is developed, it will need to be maintained. Web technology standards are constantly evolving, browser features are updated, and your site will need small upgrades to keep a modern look and feel. Choosing a service provider. Things to take into consideration (apart from the service provider's track record) is setup and monthly running costs and time to setup. Choose a service provider that is open with their costs structures and yearly price increases. Ask about securit...

Countless internet studies have shown how a slow loading website have a negative effect on overall user experience and can ultimately lead to revenue loss. Slow web pages also lower perceived credibility and increases user frustration. Imagine the impact on your real estate agency knowing you can potentially draw more leads just by providing a better user experience? At Entegral we are obsessed with providing fast & reliable systems for our real estate clients, so with this in mind we’ve developed the new Flex Real Estate websites .  It’s responsive (so it works on any screen size device) and it is faster. Updates done today have further improved the overall search experience including page loading time for your visitors. So if you are looking to attract more leads … consider switching your website to Flex. Contact us today or visit our website for more info . Switching over is easier than you think.   An interesting infographic showing how website loading time aff...

Over the years Entegral developed some key products for the South African & Namibia real estate industry. Here is a summary of our key products & services: This includes: OMS (office management system) A complete online management system for estate agencies. It allows online access for the whole office, lets you list your properties once and advertise them on all the leading portals, print automated brochures, manage your contacts, referrals, draw Lightstone report and a lot more. The OMS is perfect for individual agents, agencies or national groups. There is even a free version if you want to try it out. It runs in the cloud, so there is 24/7 uptime. More info here: http://www.entegral.net/content/p159_products-oms.aspx Flex (responsive real estate websites) Real Estate websites have evolved. Highly optimized responsive websites that works on any device. Not only are the websites packed with cutting edge features, but roll-out is cost effective and a breeze. We offer them...

Our new Flex real estate platform (and all our other products) are built on the most advanced cloud infrastructure out there, Amazon Web Services. They have recently been named leader in Gartner's Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant...3rd year running! The result for your real estate business, compared to competitor products are: 1) Innovative - more awesome features in our products 2) Better uptime - you won't lose leads and we have state of the art disaster recovery processes in place 3) Lower cost - considerably cheaper and more bang for your buck through economies of scale 4) Scalability - grow your business without having to worry if your systems or website can handle it 5) Work from anywhere - built from the ground up to work on the internet & cloud 6) Environmentally friendly - we only use the computing resources needed to power your business

Post by Entegral Technologies .

  At then end of 2012 we reported storing over 5 million photos for property listings captured through the OMS. We’ve now passed the 7 million photos mark … 7 088 948 to be precise The OMS allows estate agents to capture an unlimited number of photos per listing, like this Dullstroom property with a total of 74 photos . We furthermore help with quality control by not allowing photos below a certain quality to be be uploaded. Agents can check this with the photo upload quality checker where a red bar indicated below par, yellow is acceptable, and green is great: All property photos are saved in the cloud. A big benefit of the OMS, is that agents don’t have to delete inactive listings. Keep your inactive, expired, and sold stock on the system and re-activated when it comes back on the market. All photos are kept and can be deleted/replaced if required.

  Having a great domain name and associated real estate websites is critical these days for estate agents since most people start their property searches online. At Entegral we handle everything, including the registration, renewal fees, hosting and DNS setup. We make sure: 1) You are listed as the registered owner of the domain (many service providers registers the domain in their own name which is not correct). 2) Your yearly fees are paid on time to the relevant authorities. Failing to pay your fees can result in you loosing your valuable domain name. 3) Your domain is hosted on our state of the art cloud-based worldwide anycast DNS network . It ensures the fastest access times to your website from anywhere in the world with multiple DNS failover points. It also automatically scales with large traffic volumes. If your domain is unreachable, your website is unreachable. The cost for this premium service is included in your yearly fees. 4) Provide additional domain servi...

Just over 3 years ago, Entegral was the 1st real estate technology service provider in Africa to move all of its products over to the cloud. It all began 4 years ago, when we researched and tested various cloud platforms available. We made a decision on Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) and switched over all our products in the course of 6-12 months to take full benefit of the unique cloud features offered. Our property portal, MyProperty , was our first product to switch over in January 2011. Stressful it was, at that stage cloud platforms were still in its infancy and we took a calculated risk with our business. Either that, or being boxed in by local service providers who couldn’t offer the amazing cloud features we wanted. Our monthly bandwidth costs also increased at alarming rates due to huge traffic. In the end, partnering with Amazon paid off, as can be seen in this 2013 magic quadrant from Gartner comparing the top cloud IaaS providers: It didn’t go all smoothly, we had...

Have a real estate website? Improve your SEO rankings with the new MyProperty Youtube service. This service will automatically create Youtube videos from your property listing photos and insert the description and link to YOUR website. This provides you with better ranking in search engines with external backlinks from Youtube to your properties (and the added benefit of additional Youtube exposure!). Search for property in your area, there is then a chance that people will find an additional Youtube search engine optimized link in the search results, as can be shown here on page 2 of Google’s results for a search. Clicking on the link will showcase your listing, with an additional link to your website, pretty clever! A video is created within 5 to 120 minutes after capturing the listing and a link automatically inserted on the listing. Here is a sample of what it looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl0kDhYYuz0 1 - Note the link here is to MyProperty but if you o...

See the press release here: http://www.myproperty.co.za/news/7977/New-Draw-a-search-feature-launched-by-MyProperty.aspx#close  

The new MyProperty has a unique Point of Interest search facility as demonstrated in the video below (or just try the property search yourself with this link ). We wanted to reinvent property search and make it easier to find your next home by simply typing in anything close to the area you are interested in: This was quite a tough technical challenge to solve. A visitor can search any suburb, road or place (as indicated by the search heading) and we had to find both geocoded and non-geocoded properties in that area. At the same time the embedded Google map will show the location after it is selected and in many cases even highlight the area, e.g. Hermanus below: The challenge, how do you ensure fast searches? Property portals (and other websites where any type of search is done and visitor traffic is significant high) would normally cache search results and serve up the same content from the web servers’ memory for everyone for time periods, rather than querying the datab...

We are proud to announce the launch of the new www.myproperty.co.za With industry first new search features including radius, place and road search we help home buyers discover more areas and find their dream home quicker than ever before. And with larger (and unlimited) photos, viewing homes online or on your tablet becomes more enjoyable than ever before. More awesome updates to follow throughout 2013 from South Africa's largest independent property portal.  Watch this space for a detailed overview of the new website.  

After months of hard work and lots of prototyping we are pleased to announce the launch of the new MyProperty website in beta format. You can visit the website at: http://innovate.myproperty.co.za/ Click on the ‘ discover’ tab on the site to learn about the most important new features and upgrades which includes: · Search any suburb, road or place in South Africa. A unique and industry first feature. · Search in a radius from any point and include surrounding suburbs. Another industry first. · Improved filter functionality and better performance. · Unique new flat user interface design. · New Property Rank algorithm. · Bigger photos, maps and street view. · Easier driving directions on geocoded properties. The site is about 75% complete and with feedback received from users and the last few items to complete, will officially launch in August. Quite a nice feature that we’ve built in is the mapping of popular towns on the integrated Google Map available at search:...

We are proud to announce the website launch of a new national franchise group, Urban Link. They offer residential rentals & sales plus commercial letting and business brokering services. Check out there website on: http://www.urbanlink.co.za/ For more info on our national group solutions check out this link: http://www.entegral.net/content/p202_real-estate-website-national-website.aspx or contact us for a free consultation and see how you can save on operational cost and admin time through our industry leading cloud solution. Powered by the OMS , all your franchise offices and agents have full access to an integrated property, contacts and documents management system.

by Adriaan Grove, CEO Entegral If you follow our Facebook page or Twitter social media accounts, you would have noticed our #NewMyProperty hash tags announcing our plans to launch a brand new MyProperty South Africa website . We’ve decided to do it this way to raise awareness of all the great features we are working on prior to launching the website. Development is under way and we’ve stacked our kitchen cupboards with enough coffee beans to keep our developers churning out awesome code till late at night. We will first launch MyProperty South Africa with a similar upgrade for MyProperty Namibia later the year. Some background MyProperty 1st launched way back in 2004 with a few listings. Without any funding, and focussing only on good SEO and great customer service, we’ve managed to organically grow it to where it is today as South Africa’s largest independent property portal. With over 100,000 listings our OMS and other systems are used daily by estate agents to also adver...

What is the cloud? The term 'cloud computing' refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Are there cost benefits? The cloud replaces upfront infrastructure investment with low monthly costs,pay for the resources you consume on a variable basis. What other benefits are there? The cloud gives you low ongoing costs, flexible capacity, speed & agility and focuses on apps, not the infrastructure. There are lots of other advantages including better uptime where most hardware resources have automatic failover. What has Entegral done in the cloud space? Entegral was 1st to launch a real estate cloud in Africa and in January celebrated 2 years in the cloud with its website, email, OMS and other offerings all running on the cloud. We've achieved a remarkable 100% uptime over the past 12 months, launched our very own cloud recovery tool for extra failover protection and attended the biggest clou...

How time flies. Just over 2 years ago we moved MyProperty over to our new cloud infrastructure powered by Amazon AWS and soon after that switched over all our real estate clients . Since then, we've enjoyed a remarkable and industry best 100%* uptime in web & email hosting ! Last year we’ve also increased the size of our industry leading PremiumMail cloud mailboxes to a whopping 25GB.  A big thank you to all our wonderful clients in taking this pioneering journey with us! * 100% uptime excluding scheduled downtime maintenance of about 1hr/month

We are revolutionizing online document management for estate agents, one step at a time, through our industry leading cloud infrastructure. Here is a look at our latest upgrades and other features that enables offices to work towards a paperless environment. CAPTURE EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT FOR A PROPERTY We are proud to announce an important upgrade in the property document management section of industry leading OMS for Estate Agents . Estate Agents can now save bigger and more files on every single property listing they capture in the OMS.  Read more about the upgrade here . Estate agencies can now enjoy getting up to 10GB of storage for files saved on property listings included as part of their subscription packages and if they ever run out of space, can purchase additional 1GB bundles to provide limitless space. Estate agents can essentially save everything related to a property, and since you can archive property listings, it is always available 5 or 10 years down the l...

Business Day reports that South African national electricity provider Eskom’s power drive is sputtering . “Not one of Eskom’s three major new build projects — coal-fired stations Kusile and Medupi and the pumped-water storage scheme Ingula — will be completed within initial deadlines or budgets” This is all the more reason to host on Entegral’s Amazon AWS powered cloud infrastructure and ensure your business is kept online and will not be affected by long electricity outages. Our clients are also not affected by the current & future increases in electricity rates, ensuring you get the best hosting prices, all the time. And along the way, your business will support a more environmental friendly approach to hosting, as cloud computing uses less electricity compared to traditional hosting. Either way, you win with us.