StreetEasy, NYC’s Leading Real Estate Marketplace

Story behind

StreetEasy was acquired by Zillow in August 2013. At that moment the Anadea team had successfully been working on another Zillow project, Buyfolio, for 4 years. Consequently, the Anadea Buyfolio team was asked to join the StreetEasy project.

StreetEasy started as a digital showcase of the NYC housing market. In time, the product evolved into the real estate marketplace which provides comprehensive information about NYC neighborhoods and a spectacular user experience that makes the process of apartment-hunting less stressful.

Anadea’s work on StreetEasy

The idea behind StreetEasy was much bigger than a real estate advertising platform. The project’s aim was to change the real estate landscape by offering consumers an experience of searching based on well-known options (like price, amount of bedrooms, or amenities), but neighborhoods as well.

Location has always played a key role in where people buy and rent real estate, which is why this is key to the growth of StreetEasy. Development was iterative and test-driven, with the team striving to own the solution, and make the delivery flow reliable and predictable.

The team used behavior-driven development to create and refine the most accurate user scenarios to make sure that implementation meets client expectations. Taking continuous feedback from the production site allows the team to predict and prevent potential issues.

Main features

Search

Users can search for properties by price, keywords, addresses, number of rooms, and other advanced options.

Contact with an agent

StreetEasy users can see agents responsible for property listings, and those that cover specific areas of NYC, and choose the one they want to deal with through the app.

Communication

Communication between users and agents is performed through messages within the app, and phone calls, which are tracked using Twilio, a cloud communications platform.

Agent tools

Real Estate agents benefit from useful listing management opportunities. They can create listing drafts and share them with other agents, analyze users’ interest in them, and promote property listings to reach more potential customers.

Integration with nyc.gov sources

A crucial part of the project is an API-based integration with nyc.gov sources to obtain up-to-date information on New York City’s building landscape, and neighborhoods. It allows StreetEasy to build a precise map of NYC buildings and neighborhoods.

New development

It’s a name for a feature that allows users to express interest in properties that are “newcomers” on the market as well as the sale/rental of apartments which are expected in the near future.

Notifications

A wide range of editable user notifications are implemented using Sendwithus and Iterable services.

Scraping

Adding listings from third-party sites is achieved with the help of scraping, a technology for obtaining web data by extracting it from external websites.

3D tours

StreetEasy supports 3D tours that help potential buyers and renters view properties they’re interested in without viewing in-person. This is proving really useful and essential in the era of Covid-19.

More than just a solution

Anadea engineers continue their work with StreetEasy, improving the product from both a business and technology perspective. It allows the app to keep its market-leading position in the NYC real estate sector, since new updates to StreetEasy are being delivered consistently ahead of competitors.

Technology stack

MySQL, GraphQL, Elastic Search, RoR, Redis, Memcached, React, Splunk, DataDog/Newrelic