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Pioneering property activity analysis

“With Talend, we aggregate big data on real estate listings to provide better sales results to brokers and agents.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Real Estate

INFORMATION• HQ: USA • 51-200 employees

USE CASE• Property management

CHALLENGE• Providing more transparency on real estate listing to broker and agents

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Data Integration AWS

RESULTS

• $51 billion in system wide sales in 2015

• 100 to 125 million Property records and adding millions of records per day

• 10 to 15 million records loaded into Amazon Redshift. 4 million per day

”Darren Bailey, Vice President, Technology Solutions & Engineering, Bright MLS, Inc.

Bright MLS, Inc is a leading provider of real estate information technology and one of the leading multiple listing services (MLS) in the United States, facilitating nearly $51 billion in system-wide sales in 2015. Founded in 1993, the company supports over 45,000 real estate professionals in the Mid-Atlantic region and provides its customers with a portfolio of best-in-class desktop, mobile and cloud-based technologies to improve the real estate transaction process for both real estate professionals and homebuyers and sellers.

The company manages the flow of data from brokers, agents and partners that appears as real estate listings on such portal sites as Zillow. com, Realtor.com, and Homes.com, as well as on broker websites and in newspapers such as the Washington Post.

Collecting and analyzing data to serve the right metrics to customersAccording to Bailey, web-savvy real estate brokers and agents from the millennial demographic are driving the demand for more data to support decisions. “Our company has been on the leading edge in the industry in collecting information on listings for several years, even though it’s been behind the scenes,” says Bailey. “Now that everything’s moving online and mobile is essential, we’re ready to start exposing that information, which can help realtors make more informed decisions.”

Bright MLS, Inc already syndicates listing data to several locations, and its big data strategy is to answer for real estate professionals such questions as, Where are the listings going? How many times are they being viewed? The company wants to provide other transactional information as well.

“We’ve embarked on a project that leverages the power of Talend to collect data from 15 to 20 websites and from other organizations in a variety of ways,” says Bailey.

Bailey says Bright MLS, Inc leverages the Talend platform to monitor or request data on a timed basis from locations. That data goes into a powerful Amazon Redshift instance, using out-of-the-box connectors from Talend. “We have our analytics and business intelligence platform sitting on top,” says Bailey, “leveraging the power of Amazon Redshift to do all the aggregation and statistical calculations in order to serve the right data and the right metrics to our customers, the brokers and agents.”

Bailey says Bright MLS, Inc has been running Talend in a production environment with Amazon Web Services (AWS), while continuing to populate the Redshift instance on the Amazon platform. The project also includes proprietary software Bright MLS, Inc has built.

Exposing key information to inform decisions“If a prospective buyer visits Zillow.com and looks at a property, there’s a form on the page to contact a real estate agent. What we want to do is capture—not just on Zillow but on a number of sites—all the activity on a listing, then make it all visible to the real estate professionals selling the property and the sellers themselves.” “The project provides such information on listings as the number of page views, unique visitors, and “lead forms” being completed and submitted.”

In addition, Bright MLS, Inc is running proprietary algorithms to find similar listings within a given geography. It can then show how a

subject property compares with other similar properties on price, web traffic, page views, leads and more, across 15 or 20 different locations. “To do that,” says Bailey, “we bring in data from several systems and link it all together through Talend and Amazon Redshift so we can surface this information via a self-service portal for brokers and agents.”

Over 100 million records and growing exponentiallyBright MLS, Inc has implemented custom tracking scripts in Google Analytics as well as other custom tracking scripts to enable acquired information to be relational, as it is within Amazon Redshift. The company already has 100 to 125 million records and could soon be adding millions of records per day to its data warehouse.

The system currently runs on an Oracle 12c database. Several Oracle data sources pull data into Amazon Redshift and more are being added all the time. Bright MLS, Inc loads 10 to 15 million records from its Oracle database into Amazon Redshift, in addition to collecting data from multiple third party sources. In addition, Bright MLS, Inc has implemented custom Google tracking within the applications it’s collecting from. “We’re also collecting data from other sources, such as the organizations that manage lockboxes placed on houses to permit entry, and data from third-party services that coordinate showings of a property.”

“That enables us to derive the number of times a listing was accessed or shown, the number of times accessed by a real estate professional, the date those events happened, and more,” says Bailey. Ultimately, we want to provide a true 360-degree view of what’s happening with the listings in real time. Right now, our data is set to aggregate once a day, so it can be as fresh as possible. Clearly, with Talend, we could have that data updated on an even more frequent basis.”

Why Talend?Regarding why Bright MLS, Inc is using Talend for its big data project, Bailey says that “the out-of-the-box solution, the organizational support behind the product, and the capabilities of the platform are all key factors that played into the decision to replace prior competitive products with Talend. We felt there was no better solution than Talend Data Integration. We’re also licensed for Talend Data Quality and ESB. We plan to use those on initiatives we have in the works.”

As part of making the selection, Bailey says Bright MLS, Inc built jobs using the open-source version of Talend. “We were impressed by how quickly we could build those jobs, so we bought the enterprise license, and found that migrating the jobs to the enterprise version was a very simple export and import,” he says. “There was no downtime, no impact, and no issue from a data security or data quality perspective. In fact, we’ve been able to implement Talend Data Integration and get jobs and integrations running in production without needing any help from the Talend support staff.”

According to Bailey, other key reasons Bright MLS, Inc adopted Talend Data Integration include richer functionality—specifically around redundancy and built-in source control capabilities—and enhanced capabilities for administration, monitoring, and load balancing. “Those functions are highly critical to the success of our analytics projects going forward,” says Bailey. “And we were able to build upon the modules we already own in the areas of big data, data quality, ESB, and master data management.”

“Without a doubt, the overall level of satisfaction is a ten out of ten. The partnership is perfect and it really is a great fit.”

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