Product overview

Christine Gauthier, a real estate broker for more than 18 years has always been concerned about serving her clients excellently and efficiently. With her team passionate about the business,in 2011 they set up to meet the needs of customers wishing to buy or sell properties in Montreal with the cherished desire of honestly advising the clients and helping them to make the best possible choices.

Problem

Christine Gauthier was a real estate agent in Remax. With her handful of experience in the real estate industry, she wanted to leave her mark in the real estate field through an online website which automatically scrapes data from the other websites available for real estate and displayed on her website where clients could reach her to make their best choices of real estates according to their situations.

Challenges

Among all the challenges posed by this project the language barrier of developing a website in French was the most challenging experience met. Despite this scraping data from other available real estate websites presented contrasting features regarding currencies, size of the images and the format they were displayed.

Solution

The core concept was to implement an automated website displaying online available real estate properties. We decided to develop with PHP and MySQL to scrape data and use wordpress which is a PHP based open source CMS to display the content on the web. We created a scraping bot using PHP to save all the contrasting data of different currencies, sizes of images and the format of display to a Mysql database. This bot runs using a cronjob at midnight every day and collects all new posts on websites related to our database. Then a wordpress plugin was developed to display those scraped data on our client’s website.