For over two decades, Nations Home Warranty has provided residential warranties for unexpected home appliance repairs to home buyers and sellers. In 2016, Nations launched a new marketing strategy offering home warranty contracts to listing agents at no cost, positioning Nations to continue the coverage with the new homeowner when the house sells.
When a search that normally takes 10 minutes is turned into a click of a button, the time it saves is worth its weight in gold.
The Problem
To effect their strategy, Nations receives daily emails from the North Texas Real Estate Information System (NTREIS) containing listings across 48,000 square miles, over 6,000 real estate offices, and 30,000 Multiple Listing Subscribers (MLS) in North Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area.
In the beginning, this immense amount of continual information had to be manually, painfully processed. Every listing in every email was checked against Nations’s database to determine if the listing was in the database, and if it wasn’t, each new listing was added manually, requiring the entry of 19 individual, critical datapoints.
The Solution
Veronica Anzaldua, Nations’s database manager, needed help to alleviate this agonizing process. For each email, four things had to be done: 1) extract relevant data from the email, 2) identify data to be updated, 3) update the existing listings in the database, and 4) create new records when needed.
Using PHP and FileMaker, Harmonic Software Production Studios created a tool to sift incoming emails, even when those emails contain more than one listing.
The Future
Today, the automated handling of inbound NTREIS emails has enabled Nations to expand their free warranty program for listing agents. What was once an extremely labor-intensive, multi-hour undertaking is now effectively effortless.
Veronica said it best: “When a search that normally takes 10 minutes is turned into a click of a button, the time it saves is worth its weight in gold.”