Propertynews
Northern Ireland’s most popular property website, propertynews is one of the most visited sites in the country.
www.propertynews.com
Built for iOS devices
Integrations with key services
Cross platform implementation
One site responds to all screen sizes
User centered design approach
Having worked with GCD Technologies since 2005, we rely on their professional guidance, innovative solutions and creative understanding of our business. Their consultancy and knowledge of the industry is second to none - and the benefit to Propertynews is priceless!
Propertynews is the busiest website in Northern Ireland, with monthly page impressions of over 22 million*. It boasts the country’s largest database of property for sale or rent, and requires both a seamless front-end experience for customers and clever back-end processes to manage data.
We first worked with Propertynews to redevelop their estate agent software (EDGE), and since 2005 we’ve overseen the design and development of both the Propertynews website and mobile apps.
The website is one of the countries busiest websites, with over 22 million page impressions per month it presents huge challenges handling that amount of traffic and data. The latest version of the website is the most technologically advanced to date, with in-page faceted refines, fast and powerful search and responsive layouts. We’ve harnessed advanced indexing technologies, capable of processing over 2,000 queries a second, on top of traditional mysql database infrastructure to give greater search flexibility for present and better scalability for the future.
With property records going back to 2001, the website has the country’s largest collection of online property sales data. Maintaining a database of this size carries its own challenges, and we revised the infrastructure in its entirety to make the data fully searchable and make those searches fast. This infrastructure not only powers propertynews.com, but dozens of estate agent websites. Processing over 3 million searches every month.
A multi platform approach
Like others, Propertynews has been impacted by the upward trend of mobile usage over traditional desktop usage and has responded with a multi platform approach. Beginning with an iPhone app we have enabled Propertynews to expand their mobile offering to include an iPad app, dedicated mobile site and a fully responsive website. This considered approach enables the property portal to increase audience reach across multiple platforms.
Propertynews has truly set the standard for property websites throughout the UK with our innovations being adopted by our peers on multiple occasions.
Key Integrations
The front end is only one half of the puzzle, the platform relies on a free flowing stream of accurate, live data which syncs with the website and mobile apps. This data is provided mainly by the estate agent software EDGE, which powers the majority of estate agents in Northern Ireland. As both the website and software are supported by the same team it ensures the link between the two is maintained on a daily basis.
