The whole market, on their own pages.

The build

Scope

Real estate site for a Bandon brokerage. Listings pull straight from the RMLS feed, so the page shows current inventory with no third-party IDX widget. Map, search, and dunes-distance context built in.

Result

Live with real RMLS listings, mobile-first, with Lighthouse and the security grade measured live on the wall.

Stack

Astro · Cloudflare Workers · D1 · direct RMLS listing feed

What a rented widget costs you

An IDX widget is a business decision disguised as a technical one. The listings inside it are not on your site in any way search engines count, so the traffic they earn is not yours. The look is set by the vendor, so it drifts from your brand every time they redesign. It loads after everything else, so the slowest thing on the page is the one thing the visitor came for. And you pay for it monthly, forever, to have a worse version of your own inventory.

Pulling the feed directly costs more to build once and nothing after that. Every property becomes a real page at a real address on their domain. The search strip filters by price, type, beds, baths and area across nine South Coast towns, and it filters against the brokerage's own database rather than someone else's server.

Their listings first, the whole market after

Their own listings lead. Below them sits the rest of the market, every South Coast property the feed carries, so a visitor who arrives looking for one house can see everything else without leaving. Grid and map views share one filter. Each property has its own address on their domain, its own photos and its own page, which is what makes it findable at all.

A price change or a new listing shows up on its own, without anyone touching the site. If the feed is ever unreachable, the page still shows the brokerage's own listings instead of an error, because a real estate site that looks broken looks like a brokerage that is not paying attention.

The maintenance nobody sells

Two months after launch the site's security grade slipped from A+ to B with no change to its code. I traced the cause, fixed it, and the grade came back at A+ 130, higher than before. A rented site would have shown the same drop and nobody would have looked.