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HouzQuest

Real estate mobile and web application like Zillow & Realtor.com

INTRODUCTION

HouzQuest is a real estate property search mobile and web application with mobile responsive PWA (progressive web application). Search millions of properties, save your favorite one, compare with other properties,schedule direct tours with local real estate expert and much more.

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A_ AdvanceSearch

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A_ AdvanceSearch

Advance Search

Search for the property listings by address, street, zip, city, state, county to see the properties in your desired location or at your current location.

03

B_ Map/ListView

Map/ List View

Search real estate listings using a map. Search on the map to find homes for sale and houses for sale by location. Toggle between Map & List view.

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A_ Map/ListView

EASY SORTING & FILTERS

Sort the properties by Newest properties in your location, hot properties to find the best recommended by HouzQuest. With the various filter options and structured data, the user gets the best properties in his/her criteria.

Property Details

The easy to access the comprehensive detailing of the properties with the high-resolution photos. All the necessary information about the home is just fingertips away. So the user can make the decision without missing out anything.

Saved Search

Saved Search helps the user to save the filters for the desired location to later get the update for the new properties, dropped prices in that area and all the related information.

Realtor Profile

Get to know the local real estate expert for that neighborhood and get the contact information directly dialing away to their cell number to get the additional information or regarding the queries related to properties.

SAVE, SCHEDULE, System RECOMMENDation

Loved the property? Liked it because it has a good kitchen or nice flooring or it’s in your budget. Save the property by clicking on the heart icon to later make an easy decision or to show to others.

Schedule the showing of the property with easy steps.

1. On Schedule Tour ClickButton from the Property detail

2. Select the Date & Time

3. Submit.

HouzQuest recommends the best similar properties as per the user’s action and interest using the machine learning on backend and displaying the most similar properties.

Progressive Web App

With the improved capabilities of modern web browsers which work with Service Workers, IndexedDB, Add to Home Screen, and Push Notifications, HouzQuest provides a fast, efficient, and reliable user experience.

Database

Ever wonder why all the websites like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Realtor.com has the same property details? To get the information about all the properties we have to find a platform that provides the database for all the properties. We figured out that these data for the real estate market in the USA come from the different MLS (Multiple Listing Service) services. All these different MLS have their different data points and different ways to provide the data. Only with the approved license, one can ask for this data, and to get the license is not the problem. The challenging part is to exchange this data between the MLS database and your website, for which one has to implement the IDX (Internet Data Exchange) within its rules and regulations. To fetch the data from MLS and display it on the website, we implemented it with RETS, the XML based framework is used to access the data. With this, we can create the database and map the property fields from all different MLS services.

On the server side we used different tech stack

LLaravel

The PHP Framework

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We've already laid the foundation — freeing you to create without sweating the small .

PPostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.

MMySQL

open-source relational database management system

MySQL Cluster enables users to meet the database challenges of next generation web, cloud, and communications services with uncompromising scalability.

AAWS ElasticSearch

Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Highly scalable and available. Amazon Elasticsearch Service lets you store up to 3 PB of data in a single cluster.

AAWS

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.

Mobile App Technology Stack

CCross-Platform

React Native

A framework for building native apps with React.

PPayment Gateway

Stripe

Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for online businesses of all sizes

CCrash Reports

Fabric

For crash reporting we used Fabric. The most powerful, yet lightest weight crash reporting solution.

SSocial Login

Facebook SDK

User can sign in to our app with their Facebook Login

PPush Notifications

Firebase

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a cross-platform messaging solution that sends notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention.

Backend and Web App Technology Stack

CCloud Server

AWS

Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.

BBackend Server

PHP-FPM

PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser.

FFrontend Server

Nginx

Nginx is a web server which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

LLoad Balancer

Nginx

Nginx is a web server which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

AWS Elastic Load Balancer

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a load-balancing service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments

NNotifications

Firebase

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a cross-platform messaging solution that sends notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention.

AWS Simple Notification Service

Amazon Simple Notification Service is a notification service provided as part of Amazon Web Services

IInfrastructure Orchestration

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure as code software, it allows users to define a datacenter infrastructure in a high-level configuration language.

AWS Cloudformation

AWS CloudFormation is a comprehensive templating language that enables you to create managed 'stacks' of AWS resources, with a growing library of templates available for you to use.

SServer Stack

Docker

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud.

AWS Elastic Container Service

AWS CloudFormation is a comprehensive templating language that enables you to create managed 'stacks' of AWS resources

LLogging & Monitoring

AWS Cloudwatch

AWS CloudFormation is a comprehensive templating language that enables you to create managed 'stacks' of AWS resources.

AWS EC2 Cluster

AWS EC2 cluster is a logical grouping of tasks or services.

SServerless

AWS Lambda ( Python & Node.js )

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services.

MMedia Service

AWS Elemental Media Convert

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. It allows you to easily create video-on-demand (VOD) content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery at scale.

AWS Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert media files that you have stored in Amazon S3 into media files in the formats required by consumer playback.

Vimeo

Vimeo is a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view videos.

CCDN

AWS Cloudfront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network offered by Amazon Web Services.

CCI/CD

Gitlab

GitLab is a web-based Git-repository manager with wiki, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline features.

Elastic Container Registry

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.

CCache & Message Queue

Redis

Redis, RE-dis is an open-source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

AWS Simple Queue Service

Amazon Simple Queue Service is a distributed message queuing service.

DDatabase

AWS Relations Database Service (MySQL)

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

FFile Storage

AWS Block Storage

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud.

AWS S3

Amazon S3 is a cloud computing web service offered by Amazon Web Services.

TTechnologies

PHP ( Laravel )

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller architectural pattern and based on Symfony.

FEATURES

Map/ List View

Filters & Categories

Saved Search

Saved Property

Contact Agent

Schedule Tour

Similar Properties

Virtual Tour

Compare Properties

Direct Contact and Messaging

PWA (Progressive Web App)

CHALLENGES

Property Data from Different MLS

All different MLS has its own method and way to provide the data exchange with the IDX rules and regulations. Fetch this large amount of data. When I’m saying large data, we’re talking in millions. Process the images and update the properties in no time when the agent updates this in MLS.

Property Data Mapping

All the states/ counties use the MLS as a real estate listing service but the different MLS are the different data types are there to match them for the database and later via data exchange display it on the website. Data points like property details, utilities information, 3rd party information against the property, images, routing and geo locating on Map.

Schedule Tour and Contact

The HouzQuest platform is not just only about displaying properties and their details, we needed to provide easy contact to local real estate experts and the functionality to schedule the tour of any property users liked with min response time and surety.

Advance Search

The challenge is to create an effective advance search that should let users quickly get the most relevant results quickly either they search for home address, street address, city, county or state.

Mobile Responsive

With the study for other business & relevant websites and as per the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 73% of users are from the mobile device, we knew that we needed the prominent solution to stand out in business with mobile responsive layout which should be fast, reliable and and should work with poor internet connectivity as well.

Image Processing

The main concern was to build a system that is fast, reliable and robust. With all the large images and millions of data we needed to find a way that system should load fast in any type of internet connectivity or even find a way to work offline.

SOLUTION

To overcome the above challenges we made sure we’re building the system with latest and reliable technologies and created the decoupled server architecture so the components and instances are not dependent on each other and the system can work flawlessly in any situation. This helped us with the downtime as well. Because now if we make any major changes in the system/ add new modules or change in the database. There won’t be any downtime.

With custom development of a completely separate project of MLS using the RETS APIs and MongoDB we are able to add any new MLS with data mapping very seamlessly. The different AWS services like ElasticSearch, Redis Database the result to display when user search for the property or location became very efficient.

The all hardwork and dedication to develop the system that is user friendly and loads fast for desktop and mobile applications was alright and on the plan, but for mobile responsive usage we found an even better solution with developing the website as progressive web application using the advanced techstack.