82,937 listings from a legacy RETS feed.

Abilene Association of REALTORS® - full association platform with MLS property search. Live at abileneaor.com.

82,937 listings synced
64 minutes full sync
0 errors

Visit the site

The Abilene Association of REALTORS® website homepage

What they needed

A public website to replace the previous GrowthZone build
Live MLS property search and open houses from a legacy RETS feed
Member resources behind the MLS credentials members already use
Every old page, document and link still working after cutover

What we built

Property search with live MLS listings and open houses
Directories for REALTORS®, brokerages and affiliates
Member resources behind Clareity single sign-on
Events and classes in one calendar
Association news, stats and member benefits

What it looks like

Association news, stats and member benefits on one homepage.
Live property search from a legacy RETS feed. 82,937 listings.
Public directory, searchable by name, brokerage and city.
Brokerages listed from the same member data, so the two directories never disagree.
Newsletters and the rent list in a searchable document library.
Member benefits on one page, behind the login members already use.

Visit the site (opens in a new tab)

The situation

Abilene’s previous website was a GrowthZone build. The membership side of their operation wasn’t the problem - the public website was.

The hard part

Abilene’s MLS runs on RETS - a data standard that was formally retired years ago and is still in widespread use.

Working with it meant digest authentication, session-based transport, and a compact record format unlike anything modern. The documented login endpoint no longer resolves, so you have to know the working one. The server reports modification timestamps in US Central with no offset, which will silently break an incremental sync if you assume UTC. Record payloads contain XML entities that need decoding.

None of that appears in a specification. All of it is what “we still use RETS” means in practice.

The first full sync brought across 82,937 listings with zero errors in 64 minutes, along with nearly two million photo references and open house data on 4,943 properties.

Migration

Before cutover we crawled and archived the entire existing site - every page, document and link - and mapped the old addresses to their new homes so bookmarks, newsletter links and search results kept working. After launch we re-crawled and checked every link and asset.

Darren and the team at Dazlab were wonderful to work with. Our association launched a new AMS (Tangilla) and Darren was ready to make the migration on our new website simultaneously. There were some additional technical things we wanted to add related to some IDX feeds that went seamlessly. Their service was impeccable and I would highly recommend Darren and Dazlab.

Ken Hogan, MBA, RCE, CAE

Association Executive, Abilene Association of REALTORS®