A positive byproduct of my quest to revamp my personal website is that I came in contact with some great companies that will be the innovators of tomorrow’s real estate tech industry.  One website designer and custom IDX provider that caught my eye in a big way was the Dislpet RETS/IDX  and their highly customizable solution that I came to study as a result of the comment thread in my brutally honest case study here on GEB.

They are a relatively new company but it’s founder, Eric Bramlett, has given the company an impressive vision.  I thought it was pretty clear that they understand what agents really want out of their websites.  Loads of leads and great branding.  Not to mention control over their own website to create landing pages for communities.  This means I could have a page that would target just Tierrasanta real estate or any other area I wished with inedexable MLS data.

My new site is under development and I won’t reveal yet what vendor I want with but I thought Displet should be on everybody’s radar so I interviewed Eric Bramlett about his company.  Here it is:

Q. – What are the advantages of the Displet platform?

A. – What sets Displet apart is is customization features & its lead capture. We’ve developed the most customizable RETS/IDX solution, short of a ground up build, which typically cost $10k plus (and often much more.) We give you control of 100% of the CSS, 80% of the HTML, and we allow you to insert approved Javascript libraries. Basically, you can get the look and feel of a full custom, for much less. You’ll still have to pay a developer (unless you are one) to build off of our platform, but you get to piggyback off the work we’ve already done building out the RETS/IDX features, including our lead capture features. Our lead capture features include our property suggestion tool, phone number nag, light window login, Facebook registration, and a ton more. I could literally talk about them for hours. Oh, we also love and support WordPress. While we integrate with any website, you see a ton of WordPress freebies from us.

Q. – Your website says that you can integrate your solution into an existing site.  Please expand on that.

A. – While we love WordPress, we’ve also integrated with Drupal, Joomla, and hard coded sites. We’re super developer friendly, so coders can user our API to do some really cool stuff. Quick searches, stats widgets, an almost infinite number of landing page queries, featured listings, etc… We specialize in RETS/IDX and we’ve opened up our work to outside developers through our API, effectively.

Q. – Most people know about IDX but please explain what RETS is and how that plays into your solution.

A. – IDX is the agreement between brokers that allows you to advertise other listings on your site. It’s also what they called the old FTP feed. RETS is the Real Estate Transaction Standard. It’s the new technology that we use to get the data from your board. The old FTP sucks and the new RETS feed is pretty cool.

Q. – Please talk about the fact that your system allows agents to customize the Title Tag and meta description in listing details pages.  Why is that important?

A. – There is a lot of longtail traffic to be had for direct address match queries & mls number search queries. A page’s title tag is arguably the strongest SEO signal you can send to Google, and the meta description is effectively your call to action to get someone to click on your organic link. So, we think it’s very important to give agents the strongest tools they can use to organically rank for high traffic queries, and then get browsers to click on their link.

Q.  What other SEO advantages does Displet offer?

A. –  You can optimize your property details pages to the Nth degree, since you have control of 100% of the HTML on those pages. We also provide some cool WordPress plugins to help your neighborhood and property details pages get indexed and rank.

Q. – How much of the front end look and feel can be customized?

A. – If you (or your developer) is a javascript ninja, then you could build a completely unrecognizable search from our system. Without Javascript, you can do quite a bit w/ advanced CSS and the HTML control we give you.

Q. – What do you offer in terms of lead management, drip campaigns, and CMS?

A. – Our property suggestion tool automatically creates saved searches based on a user’s browsing history. So, you’ll send out relevant properties to pretty much every user that registers on your site, without doing any work. It’s pretty cool when you get a reply email from someone you’ve never talked with, thanking you for all of the listings, and asking for an appointment.

Historically, we’ve focused on lead conversion, rather than CMS features, so we integrated with third party CMSs like Realtiva, Highrise, Heap, & RealtyJuggler (who all have drip mailers.) However, we’re banging out some pretty sweet CMS features right now. I’m really excited to put them in action.

Q. – I know you offer listings results in both list and map format.  Does either one see a higher conversion rate than the other?

A. – They’re fairly even. We see the biggest difference in conversion rates based on when you request registration. People all have opinions on the subject, but the numbers say to require/request registration on the first property detail view.

Q. – Please talk about your many WordPress plugins and what they offer. 

A. – We offer a DispletSearch plugin that allows you to easily insert quick search widgets into any sidebar, and that allow you to create more elaborate “advanced searches” that aren’t live searches – they’re the old school “enter your criteria and then click next” that seem to convert well in some markets. Our DispletReader plugin allows you to add featured listings to a sidebar and to create really cool landing pages with very specific queries. If you want to build out a landing page for “waterfront modern style foreclosures from $1m – $2m” you could do it. DispletReader has 5 different display views, if I remember correctly. We have another plugin in alpha called DispletPost that allows you to automatically create blog posts based on different search criteria.

Q. – Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience?

A. – It’s a good time for agents right now! When we started the project, the playing field for RETS/IDX was pretty weak, and the real estate market was down. It looks like the real estate market is quickly swinging back up and the RETS/IDX technology companies have started bringing their A games!