An agency site is downstream of somebody else's database. The feed syncs on a schedule, listings change without warning, and a property shown as available after it sold is a phone call you do not want.
Almost every real estate problem is a freshness problem, and freshness is decided by a scheduled job nobody watches.
A portal feed can carry thousands of properties with dozens of images each. Sync runs get their own execution and memory limits so an import finishes rather than stopping half way and leaving the site partly updated.
Cache lifetimes on listing pages are short enough that a withdrawn or sold property stops being shown soon after the feed says so, rather than lingering because a page was cached for a day.
Feeds arrive with large photographs per property. They are resized on the way in, so a hundred new listings do not become a hundred slow pages.
Price band, bedrooms, area and type are all meta fields, and buyers combine them. Those lookups are indexed so a filtered search stays quick as stock grows.
A lead form that fails is revenue gone with no trace. Notification chains have room to complete, and submissions are stored on the site as well as emailed.
They complain that a property they enquired about had already sold. On an agency site, correctness of stock is the customer experience.
Buyers arrive with a price range and an area and immediately filter. That query is the whole experience, and it runs against a dataset the feed rewrites nightly.
This workload is unusual in that the site's content is written by a scheduled import rather than by a person, and everything follows from that.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Feed import runs | Own execution and memory ceilings | A portal feed rewrites thousands of properties in one run, and a half-finished import leaves the site advertising stock that is not there. |
| Listing cache lifetime | Short, unlike the rest of the site | A property's status can change between syncs, and a day-long cache keeps a sold house on the market. |
| Image processing | Handled during import rather than on request | Feeds deliver many large photographs at once, and resizing them on first view means the first buyer to click waits. |
| Search indexing | Indexed on price, bedrooms, area and type | Buyers filter on those four in combination, which is a multi-condition meta query on every search. |
| Enquiry handling | Stored locally as well as emailed | A lead that only existed as an email is unrecoverable if delivery fails, and nobody finds out until the seller asks. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the agency site across — migration is free, feed configuration included.