Client Profile.
Leading property consultant from United Kingdom helps residential and commercial clients to sell, let, and manage their properties through detailed online listings of residential homes, retail buildings, offices, farms and estates.
Business Need.
The company provided accurate and detailed property listings including price, location, amenities and photos to customers on its Multiple Listing Service (MLS) portal. Potential buyers, sellers and brokers across geographies took advantage of these listings to gather deeper property insights and intelligence.
To keep their property listings relevant, accurate, validated and updated, the company followed an exhaustive set of data capture and cleansing activities. This included capturing, compiling and standardizing huge volumes of unstructured and inconsistent property information from multiple sources.
They partnered with HitechDigital to support them in building and maintaining a comprehensive, standardized and high-performing database using automated tools and technologies.
Challenges.
- Integration of property details from multiple brochures collected from various agencies was complicated due to use of different formats.
- Error-prone, inconsistent and duplicate entries across brochures.
- Identification of exact buildings for mapping was difficult.
Solution.
HitechDigital captured and verified unstructured real estate data from multiple sources to build a user-friendly, highly accurate and updated database for all property listings.
Approach.
- Scanned and extracted data related to property names, address, locality, lease rate, lease time, floor and amenities, square footage, zip codes and photos from hundreds of digital brochures received as input from client.
- The data extracted into multiple spreadsheets was integrated, standardized and cleansed to remove duplicates. Used PG Admin tool to identify and remove junk characters and check adequate number of characters across fields.
- Verified and validated the data against multiple online and offline sources using a series of well-defined manual steps.
- Custom scripts, macros and bots were also used as a further validation check process.
- Used Google Maps and Google Street View to resolve navigation mapping issue, verify building images, and capture any missing image related property details.
- The final deliverables in an integrated excel-based format were imported into the client’s system.
