Listings that keep themselves up to date
How a real estate agency stopped copying property details between two systems. About 52 updates a day now sync on their own.
- contract updates synced a day
- ~52
- contract updates synced a day
- updates in 30 days, none failed
- 1,567
- updates in 30 days, none failed
- fields copied by hand
- 0
- fields copied by hand
The problem
The agency runs two systems. Their real estate CRM is where listings and contracts live. A shared tracker is what the office actually works from every day. Every time a contract changed, someone copied it across by hand: price, agent, deposit, settlement date, status.
It was slow, and one wrong date in the tracker meant a wrong answer to a vendor on the phone.
What I built
Two automations, one in each direction.
- CRM to tracker: when a contract changes in the CRM, the tracker updates within seconds. Price, agent, deposit, dates and status, all in the right columns.
- Tracker to CRM: when the team adds a new property to the tracker, it gets created as a listing in the CRM with the right agent and category.
How it works
- 1A contract changes in the CRM.
- 2The CRM sends the change to the automation.
- 3The automation finds the matching property and agent in the tracker.
- 4It updates the row, or creates one if the property is new.
- 5If anything doesn't match, I get an alert. The team doesn't have to.
What changed
In the last 30 days the CRM-to-tracker side ran 1,567 times, about 52 updates a day, and every one went through. Nobody in the office copies contract details anymore.
The other direction pushed 24 new listings into the CRM. Two hit a snag. The alert came to me, I fixed the cause and re-ran them, and the team never had to chase it.
When things go wrong
Real data is messy, so most of the work after launch is handling the odd cases properly instead of quietly skipping them. A few I've fixed along the way:
- A property that comes back on the market used to create a duplicate. Now it finds the old row first.
- An agency missing an ID in the tracker used to be skipped without a word. Now the team gets an email telling them what to fill in.
- A one-letter typo in a suburb name used to break the match. Now it corrects itself.
That's the part people don't see: an automation is only useful if you can trust it when nobody's watching.
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