Realty Austin scales their content management with ButterCMS

Executive summary

Real estate brokerages get a larger share of the commission when they generate leads for agents, and agents often rely on brokerages to do just that, since it’s tough for individuals to get out there and be heard through the noise. 

The team behind Realty Austin wanted to become the premier local real estate platform, positioning themselves as a brokerage partner that could help agents manage their brands and generate business. However, they knew they were going up against big competition, and that a solid SEO strategy would make or break their success.

As Realty Austin tried to build new functionality into their platform to improve their customer journey and, therefore, bring in more leads, they soon realized their existing SaaS partners just couldn’t work fast enough to keep up with their needs. 

“We really just needed a CMS that we could work with so we wouldn't have to move a mountain every time we want to make something happen,” says Gabe Richtor, Director of Technology at Realty Austin.

Once Realty Austin decided to build out its own microservices architecture, it was only a matter of time before they discovered the power of a headless CMS. Once they began interacting with the team at ButterCMS, they were sold on its reliability, scalability, and reusability—and were able to get their MVP up and running in less than three months. 

The challenge

For years, Realty Austin relied heavily on SaaS platforms that created a disjointed publishing process and SEO challenges. 

While Realty Austin has always prioritized responsiveness, they were struggling to achieve it with their previous solutions. “Most SaaS products have custom backend CMS platforms that are just horrible. They don’t give you any sort of dynamic capability to control schema or microdata on a page,” explains Gabe.

For some time, the team had to maintain a completely separate WordPress instance for their blog environment, even hosting it on an entirely different domain. Without a doubt, that created major SEO challenges.

Gabe Richer, head of technology, said, "We did our best to provide as much cross-traffic as possible, but we didn’t have a CMS that allowed us to control our content in a scalable way around our polygons and shape files."

Those polygons and shape files he refers to have become vital to modern real estate platforms. 

“If you go back 10 years, you would type in a zip code and start browsing listings, but people don’t necessarily know where they want to live. Now, people are able to zoom in and out around a map and draw shapes in the areas that interest them,” he explains.

So, offering an interactive search experience was crucial to Realty Austin’s continued success, but the team really started to struggle with the time-consuming processes associated with creating and managing all of that content, especially as they grew. 

Today, Gabe says the company manages close to 20,000 built-in shape files, each one linked to pages that are vital to SEO. Finding a way to manage and create those schema pages in bulk was critical if Realty Austin wanted to maintain its competitive edge.