In life, many people tend to look back on their mistakes and wished they had approached a situation differently. It’s always so much clearer when looking back, what a better choice might have been; as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Thankfully these “lessons learned” are not always as painful in programming as they can be in life. When it comes to programming, particularly when dealing with 3rd-party data, you have to learn to expect the unexpected. If you happen to miss something, well… just roll it into version 2.0.

We quietly released version 2.0 of our listings system last week. The change was (hopefully) transparent to the everyday user. However, it will mean great things for us in the near future. After dealing with two separate sources (Toronto Real Estate Board - TREB and Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver - REBGV) in version 1.0 of our listing system, we quickly realized that we were going to have to revamp things down the line. Each board can have a very different way of displaying data. For example, for a building’s age, TREB uses year ranges “15-30 years” whereas REBGV uses a single integer “15 years”.

With the number of boards there are across Canada, we were bound to run into more of these unique situations. Time for version 2.0 to compensate for these types of situations. I am happy to say we now have a system that not only is more consistent but also more flexible.

Our listings system revamp has provided us with:

• Data Abstraction
  - In addition to common data among all boards we also have another layer of abstraction. This layer allows for customized fields per real estate board so we can have virtually any data type and can easily accommodate for it.
• Listing Redundancy
  - We will have better control over every REALTOR®’s and Office’s listings.
  - Because we deal with several 3rd party data sources, in the past our listings were not working as consistently as we would have liked.
  - Now, generally if there is a problem we can just “flip a switch” to a different data source so we should always have something to show for listings.
• More consistent visual presentation of the listings
  - We revamped the template system to use common templates throughout all sections of the site which display listings.
  - However, if needed, we have allowed for separate CSS (style) files and images per page allowing for some flexibility.

Now that we have an improved and more consistent platform for our listings we have starting contacting many of the boards across Canada to obtain 3rd party data agreements. Before long, you’ll be able to see our advanced listings in your area and virtually every area Sutton has an office. At that point, we’ll have the most complete and most advanced listing aggregation system in Canada.

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