I have been working with Timothy Toye, a realtor, for a long time. Originally I was able to buy some software that would display Lake County properties for sale by pulling from the California MLS system. However, over time, the software didn’t keep up with California standards so I decided to build a real estate project by myself. (I could have paid $$ to get a custom version, but that seemed like too much per month.)
I started with using a Lamp stack on the backend with a Laravel library for accessing the MLS data. Then I used a lot of small php routines and bash scripts to create all the materials to create a website carousel property display.
Finally, I mounted a raspberry pi to the back of a large monitor, and put that in the realtor’s front office. I set the pi software to boot up into a chrome browser that points at the website. Everyday a script runs to update the website.
It’s surprising how much work goes into creating a product that seems simple on the surface. Such is programming!