Entegral Blog

If you need a website that can not only showcase your property stock but also provide vital information or helpful calculators to potential home buyers than our Flex responsive website solutions are just what you need. www.kristall.properties For Kristall Properties, their Vision-themed Flex website is a one-stop solution for all their business needs. Not only are they able to advertise their stock in areas such as Woodland Hills, Somerton Estate and Wild Olive Estate they can also provide vital information in their property news section, and help potential clients work out their affordability or bond repayments with easy to use calculators. They also boast with an interactive suburb map search to further enhance the way people search for properties. Backed by countless hours of development, their Flex powered website can do all of this no matter what device you are browsing on. This means that they do not need an extra mobile website and that the website will adapt to the d...

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...

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:...

by Adriaan Grove, Entegral founder. With the new MyProperty website currently being developed , we investigated revamping the logo. Back in February we started prototyping brand new logos but at the end decided to only make small design tweaks to the current one. Bringing out a complete new logo is risky and we felt that the current one should just evolve. I guess a bit of nostalgia also played a part. Sometimes a complete logo design is necessary and for the good, just have a look how Apple’s 1st logo looked in 1976 (also click here for an interesting view of the most drastic logo changes ever ): This took us on a trip down memory lane and I compiled a list of how our logos evolved through the years: Our first logo before 2005 was actually just standard text! Back then, every extra kilobyte on your page meant 1) extra bandwidth costs and 2) much slower pages for dial-up connections. Running a bootstrapped business , every page and image had to be optimized to save cost ...

How time flies! Exactly 1 year ago two of our key property portals, MyProperty South Africa & MyProperty Namibia went live on our new AWS Cloud platform . It was a big step for us filled with lots of technical challenges and late nights that would make for interesting conversation over a few beers! Looking back it has been a remarkable journey in the end that led us to (confidently) move all our real estate products and client websites to the Cloud.  The team stuck together and made it work. Effectively we have created Africa’s first real estate cloud platform. Being an early adaptor of ground breaking technology means taking risks, having confidence to stick it through and proving to your clients that it works.  We have proved our critics wrong and in the process opened new doors for us in the medical field. The cloud technology platform constantly challenges us to think more out of the box. So today we are really celebrating freedom: Freedom from dedicat...

We are proud to announce that we have moved all real estate products and websites (including the OMS) to our new Cloud Hosting infrastructure at Amazon AWS.   Entegral takes the lead by being the first real estate service provider in Southern Africa to make this bold move. Our new cloud infrastructure will allow us to scale our products and services to new levels and provide an unparalleled service uptime . Although we have an excellent track record with service uptime, the outages caused by last week’s hardware failures on our dedicated servers, prompted us to make the move earlier than the planned switchover in June.  With over 100 new SEO profile websites launched in November 2010 we were also quickly outgrowing our dedicated server environment. What is ‘the cloud’? Cloud computing provides Entegral with the power of a shared pool of configurable computing resources (i.e. servers, networks, storage, etc) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal manage...

A couple of months ago we had the opportunity to buy an investment property in Fourways, Sandton. It was subsequently put up for rent on MyProperty.co.za (where else!!) on a Monday morning. Within an hour I received 5 enquiries and a total of 12 for the day. In the end the Sandton bachelor apartment was rented out to on an enquiry received only 39 minutes after it was put on the property portal. Really satisfying to see your own product working! I guess in my favour was quite an active Sandton rental market. I also priced the rental slightly lower compared to other apartments in the area. Then based on historical stats I knew that there are more enquiries done on Mondays and Tuesdays compared to any other day of the week – so i listed it at +- 12pm on a Monday when there is a peak in property searches. Was I ‘lucky’? – maybe, but then a co-worker of mine listed his more expensive cluster home in Silver Lakes, Pretoria up for rent and within a week rented it out. If you have a...