For over two decades, Nations Home Warranty has provided residential warranty contracts to home sellers from unexpected home appliance repairs. In 2016, Nations introduced an increasingly successful marketing strategy that offers listing agents a home warranty contract at no charge. When the house is sold, Nations is positioned to continue the coverage with the homeowner.
Each day, Nations receives emails from the North Texas Real Estate Information System with listing information covering 48,000 square miles, over 6,000 real estate offices and 30,000 Multiple Listing Subscribers (MLS) in North Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area.
From the very start, the manual processing of the incoming emails from NTREIS was painful.
- Each email had to be manually checked against Nations’ dat abase whether the MLS listing was already in the database or not.
- When a new record was manually created, it required the entry of 19 individual datapoints, many essential for calculations, parsing and developing other data.
Veronica Anzaldua, Nations’s database manager, needed help to remove the painful process:
- Extract relevant data from each email.
- Identify data to be updated.
- Update the existing MLS listings.
- When required, create the new records.
Using PHP and FileMaker, the Harmonic Software Production Studios created a tool to “scrape” each incoming email from NTREIS, even when those emails contain more than one listing.
Today, the automated manipulation of inbound NTREIS emails has enabled Nations to expand their FREE warranty program for listing agents. What was once a labor-intensive, multi-hour undertaking is now virtually effortless.
Veronica said it best: “When a search that normally takes 10 minutes is turned into a click of a button, the time it saves is worth its weight in gold.”
In the process, Harmonic has added a new tool to the toolbox, scraping an email of its relevant data and importing it into FileMaker.
“When a search that normally takes 10 minutes is turned into a click of a button, the time it saves is worth its weight in gold.”