In this post
Building Agent Inbox to Fix Real Estate Messaging #
The story of building Agent Inbox’s mobile and desktop messaging platform.
In a 2017 talk to the MIAMI Association of REALTORS, Elliot Koolik (“Agent Inbox: New MIAMI Service - Communicate & Collaborate to close MORE Sales!”, MIAMI Association of REALTORS channel) said the part of selling real estate he had found most frustrating was how agents communicate.
He had been selling real estate for 25 years, in Boca Raton, Florida. Texting and emailing, he said, “it’s all over the place.”
Too many channels to keep up with #
About three years before that talk, Koolik says he took his frustration to his partner, and they started Agent Inbox, a communication platform embedded in the MLS. Tyler Gordon is Agent Inbox’s CEO and co-founder. They asked: What if there was a way to centralize all communication into one platform?
This was the start of Agent Inbox. We were hired to rebuild the product and deliver mobile versions for the Apple App Store and Google Play, as well as an enterprise version for desktop.
Agent Inbox connects agents, brokerages and customers, using Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data to bring a realtor’s deal-making into one place.
Starting From a Stalled Build #
After a year of building the product in-house, Agent Inbox still didn’t have a market-ready version, and the platform needed to be rebuilt from scratch. We were hired to do that on proven technologies, with clear communication and an aggressive but realistic timeline.
The first MVP was live in 60 days, which gave the founders something to show investors and customers. Gordon later said of the work: “With their help, we were able to quickly scale up into our market and land new clients… They also helped us raise millions of dollars in funding over multiple rounds for the project.”
Five of our full-time engineers worked on the project, and Agent Inbox’s own developer team grew from one to six while we worked together.
What We Built #
We worked with Agent Inbox for more than 50 months. The product added 100,000+ users in under a year, and it launched on mobile and desktop.
On the back end, we worked to migrate data from Spark (an MLS data API platform) to a custom, in-house RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) aggregator. We also moved Agent Inbox to a hybrid solution using React.js and Ruby on Rails, replacing their single-page-application solution with server-side rendering. (This move came from our experience that small teams working on various platforms simultaneously often end up inadvertently wasting time and money.)
On the front end, users got secure file and document sharing and a way to keep track of detailed conversations.
We designed a non-trivial algorithm for finding the best routes so agents can plan out their busy days to include traffic-related travel time, meeting duration, lunch breaks, and more. Being aware of how often plans can change throughout the day, especially in real estate, we also developed push notifications to alert them of any shifts in schedule.
The client write-up is at Agent Inbox.
Paul Keen is an Open Source Contributor at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.
