- What does a listings schema need beyond a price and an address?
- Split the address into components and keep latitude and longitude beside them, because a map viewport query is a bounding-box comparison and a single address string cannot answer it. Give price its own history table rather than one column, since reductions are the signal buyers watch and overwriting them destroys the story. Media wants a table with an explicit sort order and alt text, not an array. Add status as a defined set of transitions, and relate each listing to an agent and an office.
- Can this real estate website builder connect to an MLS feed?
- The worker can call the RESO Web API, which is the modern OData-flavoured standard most boards now expose, so the integration itself is ordinary HTTP work. Access is the hard part: feeds are licensed by the local MLS or board, applications are reviewed, and credentials arrive with terms attached. Plan for a sync job rather than a live passthrough -- a request-scoped worker cannot page through a full feed on demand -- and store a cursor so each run collects only what changed.
- What are IDX display rules and do they affect my build?
- They do, and they are contractual rather than technical. Boards specify how often data must refresh, what attribution has to appear next to a listing, which fields may be shown publicly, whether sold data can be displayed at all, and how listings from other brokerages must be identified. The rules differ by market, so read the agreement covering yours. Practically, that means your schema needs somewhere to keep the attribution text, the source office, and the timestamp of the last successful sync.
- Where should listing photos be stored?
- Not in the database. The app templates do not bind an object-storage bucket by default, and encoding images into SQLite rows is a decision you will regret at the second open house. Host media with an image provider or CDN that resizes on request, and keep the URL, the dimensions, the ordering, and the alt text in D1. That gives you fast thumbnails on the search grid and full resolution only on the detail view, which is what makes a listing page load quickly on a phone.
- Will my property pages rank in Google search?
- Be clear-eyed about this one. Generated apps are client-rendered single-page applications, so each listing has a route and a title, but the HTML assembles in the browser rather than arriving complete from the server. Crawlers do execute JavaScript, though not always promptly, and there is no automatic sitemap or per-listing structured data. If organic search is the main channel for your inventory rather than a bonus, plan for pre-rendering or a static export of detail pages as part of the project.
- How do saved searches and new-listing alerts work?
- Store the search as structured criteria -- price bounds, bedroom count, a polygon or bounding box, property type -- rather than as a saved URL, because a URL cannot be evaluated against tomorrow inventory. When a sync run brings in new listings, match them against saved criteria and queue the notifications. That match is a scheduled job, not a page load, so it needs a scheduled trigger. Keep a record of what you already sent, or a buyer receives the same house every morning.
- Can I embed virtual tours and video walkthroughs?
- Yes, as embeds. Store the tour identifier or URL on the listing, validate that it points at a host you expect before rendering it, and load the iframe only when the buyer asks for it rather than on page load -- a tour widget is heavy and most visitors scroll past. Treat the tour as one more media row with its own type so the gallery can interleave photos, floor plans, and the tour without a special case for each.
- How should enquiries and leads be captured?
- Into a table, first, and into your inbox second. A leads row should carry the listing it came from, the source and campaign parameters, the message, a timestamp, and the agent it was assigned to. Validate on the server rather than trusting the form, rate limit by address so a bot cannot flood the queue, and make assignment explicit. Email as the only record is how enquiries get lost, and a buyer who did not hear back does not send a second one.
- Can I offer a map search with filters?
- Yes. Index the coordinate columns, translate the visible map rectangle into a bounded query, and combine it with the other filters in one statement rather than fetching everything and filtering in the browser. Keep the map provider key in the worker and proxy the request, since a key shipped to the client is a key somebody else will use. Cluster markers above a certain count -- a thousand pins on a city view is slow to draw and useless to read.
- How do I model a brokerage with several agents?
- Agents, offices, and a relationship from each listing to its listing agent, with permissions derived from that relationship rather than from a role flag alone. An agent should be able to edit their own inventory and read the rest; an office administrator needs a wider view. Public agent profiles then become a query, not a hand-built page per person, which matters the first time somebody joins or leaves and you would otherwise be editing files to reflect it.