Entegral Blog

post by Adriaan Grové, Entegral Founder Back in 2018 we launched our 2nd generation Flex platform, internally called the  Flex Template Language .   Today we take a look back at the major upgrades, the way forward, and how this was all done by a small, dedicated Entegral team. We had several goals: Develop the industry's most flexible ( no pun intended ) platform for building real estate websites, giving clients and front-end developers creative freedom with design and integrations. Provide unmatched reliability through 100% uptime and a consistent experience, no matter where you are in the world. Ensure lower cost of ownership for clients by implementing strategies that include predictable costs and lower development fees. The ability to link Listing CRM systems (including Base ) to power websites. Develop websites that are highly optimised for speed and SEO, while providing the industry best security. Easy to implement in any country. Open up this platform to exte...

Invitation Homes, a joint venture between the Rabie Property Group and Kloof Capital South Africa, recently launched a brand new responsive website powered by our industry-leading Flex framework . Our team of highly skilled developers worked closely with the design team of Invitation Homes to create a custom-built Flex website for them.  The site is not only branded according to their corporate identity but is also armed with leading, custom-developed technology which will enable them to provide an online presence for their business. The website embraces responsive technology, secure browsing, and optimal UX design to deliver a unique browsing experience that is based on the latest design and industry trends. A lot of attention has been paid to make the property search experience as fast as possible. The website’s custom-built search functionality allows a user to search according to the various developments in particular Cape Town areas owned by the groups, ensuring that vi...

Slow speeds are continuing this week for South African users due to undersea cable breaks: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/broadband/335752-bad-news-for-south-africas-slow-internet.html If your real estate website is hosted on our latest generation Flex websites , you are however covered with our industry 1st Cloudfront feature which replicates your real etstate website locally and over 100 locations worldwide, more here .  The result is a quicker and more stable website. Technical details With the Flex solution, visitors to your website will be routed to the nearest hosting location to browse your website for super quick response times. For South African users, this will be  Johannesburg or Cape Town . If your website is only hosted in one location, e.g. US or EU, it will be served slower to users and the slow experience will be elevated through the current heavily congested and problematic international undersea link . If  your website is only hosted in South A...

We are excited to announce another industry 1st for real estate websites: integrated online payments. Our team has integrated a generic online payment gateway in our Flex real estate website platform that allows you to accept online payments including credit cards through your preferred payment vendor. It works in any country, as long as you have an online payment service provider available that provides integration options. Online payment order links can be integrated anywhere on your website. Our 1st integration in South Africa is through Sage Pay  which accepts no less than 6 convenient payment methods, including credit card and bank EFT.  You will also be able to integrate with other online payment providers we add in future. This has already been implemented on MyProperty South Africa , where you can promote listings via online payment  if you want to see an example of how it works. MyProperty runs on the same Flex framework as your office site and sin...

We are constantly refining the new MyProperty South Africa property portal and will introduce a range of new features throughout 2019. Here are some of the latest updates: New MyProperty Account Visitors can now create a free account on MyProperty which will allow them to manage their favourites, property email alerts and news alerts from any device. New account specific functionality that enhances the buying/selling experience will be introduced over time. It features a unique passwordless authentication feature . Users don't have to remember a password for MyProperty,the activation code to access their account is simply emailed to them. Quick access to history Visitors can now access their latest searches in a dropdown when they enter the search. We've also moved the 'my current location' feature here to simplify the user interface: Header and navigation improvements User interface tweaks to the header, search and action buttons at the bottom to fu...

Entegral is now making it easier and more cost effective to launch any type of real estate portal, anywhere in the world, using our new  portal-as-a-service platform .  The service provides a quicker way to get a new portal to market with a highly optimized, tried and tested platform. It removes the complexities and therefor the risk normally associated with setting up a new real estate portal under a predictable cost structure. The solution is perfect for: Real estate organisations like MLS's who'd like to launch a local portal with their members. Smaller real estate groups who'd like to establish a hyperlocal presence in a particular region. Larger franchise groups looking to roll out a national or international brands. Entrepeneurs looking to launch a real estate portal and associated services in their own country. The costs benefits can be quite significant compared to developing your own portal from scratch while providing cutting edge features by default...

by Adriaan Grove, Entegral Are you an estate agency looking for a fully customized website? You've probably received some eye watering quotes or think a customized website is reserved for large franchise groups? How things used to work until now Nowadays, most real estate website solutions give you a very limited choice in terms of customization. In most cases, one template is offered where the home page and overall colour scheme can be tweaked to create a more unique look and feel. This customization, unfortunately, disappears when you start to drill down to the sub-pages and realize your website is an exact duplicate of your competitor's. This is done with reason, as web development companies need to keep costs low, and having one set of code to maintain helps a great deal. Fully customized websites need to be built from scratch, which in turn means a large upfront investment, time, and associated delivery risk. It certainly puts a damper on any creative ideas or uniqu...

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 charg...

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 devel...

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 ...

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 continuou...

An a real estate industry first, all Flex websites built on the new Flex Template Language platform  now comes standard with HTTPS and CDN features: SSL certificate included with default routing to HTTPS for your domain. Great to boost your SEO a little with Google, and certainly inspiring more confidence for visitors to your website when they see the 'secure site' label next to your website.  Your complete website is replicated across the Amazon CloudFront CDN (content delivery network) to more than 100 edge locations. This results in faster access for visitors located anywhere in the world, as they will be routed to their nearest location to open your website. Your website is automatically replicated and any listing or other updates you do is also 'cloned' to all these locations. You can read more about CloudFront here and the benefits for your website .  Since Flex websites are responsive, the new features can be enjoyed by clients visiting your webs...

We are proud to announce the launch of Flex Template Language: a real estate website development platform . Open to all real estate companies, web developers and listing management systems. It is a game changer for the real estate industry, in that it provides more control for custom real estate website development, and opens up the platform to all web developers. Developed over a period of a year by Entegral, the new product is built on the latest AWS cloud technologies and provides a completely new way to build and host real estate websites. A new way of building custom websites FlexTL reduces the complexity of building real estate websites by shifting the focus from backend code and integration to focusing on the front-end. It allows for highly fine-tuned responsive front-ends to be developed using the Flex Template Language Framework . It also provides an admin interface which provides online access to website setup functions and even front-end source code. Use any ma...