FlippBidd is a real estate auctions website that we built from the ground up using Drupal 7.
Our client envisioned his future website as a direct real estate marketing source where sellers (or their representatives) could put up for auction their properties across the USA, while potential buyers could bid on them online (thus “eliminating” the middleman from the equation).
Given the website's major growth potential, Drupal was the publishing framework that came with 2 key features that this specific project required: scalability and flexibility:
- The first one we knew that would enable the future website to cope with the ever growing amount of traffic and content.
- The second would enable editors/publishers to efficiently update content on the website in real-time. None of the parties involved in online real estate auctions would want to miss great selling/buying opportunities caused by delays in displaying fresh real estate deals, we were fully aware of that.
About the project
Goals
Building a real estate auctions website that would display properties for sell nationwide (USA). Owners could sell them quickly, while buyers could quickly search for them on the FlippBidd, bid on them and buy them at good prices.
Editing content quick and easy (thus enabling publishers to quickly update the properties inventory on the website) and getting the website fully "equipped" (able to scale) for the high volumes of visitors and content to come, were 2 key goals that we committed ourselves to achieve.
Challenges
Implementing an after-auction functionality, that our client requested, was one of this project's main challenges (in addition to the scalability and the easy content editing/adding-related challenges that we've already pointed out here).
This key functionality would have allowed sellers putting up their properties for auction to be able to choose a bidder even though he/she had not won the auction.
This lead to another challenge that we had to respond to: the bidder should have been able to visualize the status of a certain auction showed on FlippBidd, status which could range from"won but not chosen", to"won", from "lost" to "expired", from "winning" to"losing".
Outcomes
We successfully managed to develop the website that our client envisioned. FlippBidd sets up the perfect “environment” for online real-time bidding:
- it displays a constantly updated inventory of all the auctioned properties
- it displays the names and number of cities where the real estate auctions take place
- it displays the accurate no. of involved bidders and all that in real-time
- it eases content editors' work, rendering content management time-efficient
- it's ready to cope with even more content-rich pages and even higher amounts of traffic
Why Drupal was chosen
As already mentioned, FlippBidd was expected to grow in both content and traffic, so integrating a powerful and highly flexible CMS that wouldn't hinder its growth was of key importance for our client.
Luckily, Drupal 7 was the the type of framework that enhanced the website's organic growth. As FlippBidd's functional requirements were expected to get more and more complex in the future to come, we know that Drupal (and Drupal 7 was, at that time, its best version) could easily scale to the site's expending potential.
We knew that as the site would have expended, new and new features could be added to boost its functionality and to scale the framework to its new amounts of traffic and to its new loads of heavy content, without having to rebuild a new site from scratch with every new traffic/content challenge!
Moreover, as we've previously stated: Drupal 7 came with more than tempting improvements for content editors, too. Since time-efficiency was vital for any real estate auctioning website, content had to be created, edited and published with great ease, inventory on the website had to be updated in real time. Luckily, Drupal 7, with its improved administrative interface, “spoils” both admins and content editors, streamlining the whole content management workflow.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Auctions are entities with start / end date, starting price, minimum price and instant buy price. Auction content type with auction reference field is created upon installation.
