Ferndale Real Estate
Jake Drake of Ferndale Real Estate is an independent real estate agent whose fresh new easy-to-use site helped her attract enough business to keep her head above water despite the recent shake-up of the real estate market.
This is actually the second real estate site I’ve worked on, but it’s the first I’d want to put in a portfolio. When I first joined Precision Intermedia, one of my first jobs was working on a site for another agency which shall remain unnamed - I’m not proud of it. The problems stemmed from trying to get the real estate listings from the listings provider, which provided the listings using a protocol called RETS. Though there was copious official documentation on how this all should work, two off-site programmers that the company worked with before hiring me could not make heads or tails of it, and the project was way over-budget and over-deadline. As I dove into it, I was eventually able to make sense of it, even though this company’s implementation of RETS often differed from the documented standards. (I would later learn that flexible interpretation of this “standard” is quite a regular occurrence in the real estate industry…) We eventually developed a system called PIRETS (Precision Intermedia RETS… get it?) to communicate with the RETS server, and built some semblance of a functional site around it. But thanks to our hackneyed and frustration-induced implementation of a RETS client, problems with working with two off-site programmers with divergent visions and skill levels, my dealings with the frustrated client, and just the ugliness of the code in general, I wasn’t really happy with the end product at all.
Fast forward a year and a half. I’m a wiser man, having spent the last eighteen months or so working forty hours a week coding at a professional level, and having fully partaken in the Drupal Kool-aid. Then we’re approached by Jake Drake to redesign her site, adding full, self-updating local listings with the ability to contact Jake about any listing with the click of a mouse. I crack my knuckles and dive in. This time, I’m ready.
Taking my previous knowledge of working with RETS, I craft PIRETS 2.0 as a Drupal module. It’s so much nicer - check out this article I wrote for the Real Estate group on GDO for more info as well as screenshots of the back-end. Together with a crisp new look by Simon “Stir Fry Willie” Krieger (inspired by the original design by Chris Stroud; both talented in-house graphic designers here at PI), the new site has kept leads coming in to Ferndale Real Estate despite the economic downturn. It’s easily the cleanest, simplest-to-use and best-looking northern California real estate site on the internet - though I might be a bit biased in that assessment.
