Overview
A leading real estate portal had established itself as a content platform in the property sector with over 400,000 monthly visitors. The platform already offered extensive guides, market analyses, and editorial content around real estate. What was missing was the logical next step: its own marketplace where users can search for properties directly and brokers can market their listings professionally.
The challenge was to integrate a full-featured real estate marketplace into the existing platform – with seamless connections to industry-standard interfaces such as OpenImmo, a powerful search across millions of address records, and a billing system for broker subscriptions. The result: a solution that turns the platform’s existing traffic into real leads for real estate brokers.
My Role
As CTO and technical lead, I was responsible for the entire technical implementation of the project over more than ten months (02/2024–11/2024). My team consisted of one developer and one designer. In addition to architecture planning and the central technology decisions, I implemented the more complex system components myself – in particular the OpenImmo integration, the geo search, and the search infrastructure with Meilisearch. At the same time, I coordinated alignment with stakeholders and ensured that the technical solution met the domain requirements of the real estate industry.
Tasks
- Technical leadership and architecture: Defining the system architecture, technology selection, and coordination of the development team
- OpenImmo integration: Development of an FTP server and a fault-tolerant XML parser for automatically importing listing data from common broker software
- Geo search: Indexing the entire German street network and building an optimized database structure for millions of address records to enable precise location search
- High-performance property search: Integration of Meilisearch for fast full-text search with filters, facets, and real-time indexing
- Broker interface: Development of a listing management system with an automated billing system for subscriptions
- CRM and newsletter integration: Connection to a CRM system for structured lead management and automated email communication
- AWS integration: Integrating the new real estate marketplace into the existing CMS via a complex AWS routing architecture
Technical Highlights
OpenImmo XML parsing: The OpenImmo standard is the common exchange format of the German real estate industry – however, broker software vendors implement the standard differently. The parser had to handle these deviations in a fault-tolerant way, log faulty records, and still continue the import reliably.
Geo search with millions of addresses: The entire German street network was indexed for location search. The challenge lay in performant querying across millions of records while simultaneously supporting autocomplete and radius search. An optimized MySQL structure combined with Redis caching delivers response times in the millisecond range.
Meilisearch as the search backend: Instead of a classic SQL search, Meilisearch was used to give users a fast, typo-tolerant property search with filtering by price, area, number of rooms, and location. Real-time indexing ensures that newly listed properties are immediately findable.