Watters International Realty

The Situation

Watters International Realty is a global real estate firm based out of Austin, Texas with teams of talented real estate professionals who assist individuals and families in the acquisition and disposition of residential and commercial properties. Their skilled agents have a comprehensive understanding of the local real estate market and use the best marketing and sales tools available in the industry and deliver exceptional customer service in matters such as traditional brokerage services, property management and investment consulting. Watter’s specialty is in successfully selling properties at the best prices in as little time as possible.

In November 2021, Watters came to ATAK after growing tired of using out-of-the-box real estate websites and CRMs that had limited design options with no back end customization ability. Watters already had a Salesforce instance, so they needed something that could easily integrate, and something that could scale with them as they grew. Initially, data had to flow into the website from 6 different MLS’ but with infrastructure in place to support data from additional markets as they scale.

Watters International Realty Homepage

The Solution

We onboarded Watters with multiple strategy sessions to fully understand their business and what they wanted out of a custom real estate website + CRM setup. From there, we developed a list of key areas we needed to address and overcome:

• UI/UX Site Design with multiple lead generation paths for buyer and seller leads
• Back-end application infrastructure and development to house tens of thousands of real estate listings from multiple MLS’
• Custom API development that would check each individual MLS every 5 minutes for new real estate listings and download them to a custom database solution
• A review of their existing Salesforce instance to see how data was currently being stored so that matching data points could be created in HubSpot to allow for a seamless integration between both systems.

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Our Process

In order to push things forward, we ATAK-ed the list. The first thing we tackled was the website design. Our team of highly skilled designers created a UI/UX heavy redesign of Watters International Realty that focused on improving the conversion rate optimization with multiple lead conversion paths for both buyer and seller leads. And with most real estate searches originating from mobile devices, the website needed to be fully responsive with the same home search functionality as the desktop version of the website. 

After a design was finalized, we moved to coding the new Watters International Realty real estate website on HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise. The website needed to be lean, as speed is critical in the real estate industry and we had multiple API integrations to tackle to give home buyers the search functionality they demand in the current real estate marketplace. We also needed to fully integrate the back end application we were creating with the HubSpot CMS to enable all of the listing data to flow into the website in real-time. 

We then began setting up a custom back-end application from scratch to store real estate listings from each market Watters does business in. Each Multiple Listing Service has its own API that needed to be custom-coded so that we could store all of the real estate listings needed for their powerful home search website. While this initially resulted in the download of tens of thousands of real estate listings, the application we created needed to be designed with scale in mind as this could easily turn into millions of listings as Watters expands into new markets. 

The final step of this project was the implementation of HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise as we aimed to help Watters optimize their marketing tech stack to create a seamless consolidated HubSpot ecosystem. We imported lead data from their existing real estate CRM, BoomTown, and integrated Salesforce, Zapier, Sakari SMS, Postalytics, and Sly Broadcast. We also wrote and implemented multiple lead nurture campaigns, built out a lead scoring model to help the Watters team prioritize leads, and built out a custom website chatbot.

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