Custom Middleware Opens a New Market for a Real Estate Services Firm

Serving More Than Before

First American provides a wide range of real estate transaction resources, including and far beyond the title insurance and professional settlement services that have made up the heart of their business for decades. Their enterprise clients can access an array of reports, billions of recorded documents, and complete databases of property records.

But enterprise-level companies aren’t the only ones that can make use of this information. Small and mid-sized real estate businesses – including underwriters, insurers, investment companies, and realtor groups – also have a pressing need for the kind of data First American can put at one’s fingertips. So, First American they decided to create a brand-new division and product line, making their resources more accessible to the SMB real estate market. The goal was to wrap a new website around their existing DataTree product, and provide access to their database through monthly subscription tiers.

BigCommerce (First American’s ecommerce platform of choice) didn’t have the out-of-the-box functionality to support this subscription business model. However, BigCommerce is a flexible platform, allowing for customizations that can provide additional functionality. This also makes it easier to connect with systems that don’t have their own BigCommerce apps. First American engaged Guidance to create the solution for them, while also designing an elevated user experience that would complement First American’s existing branding and meaningfully engage the SMB audience.

Staging the Front End

In real estate, staging is the act of decorating a home to present it in the best possible light for a sale. In the case of this project, the front end experience needed its own kind of staging, to deliver a fresh, convenient interface. It also needed to look like it was aligned with the existing website; however, the process afforded the opportunity to reconsider some of First American’s existing branding elements.

For the new site’s shopping experience, Guidance created an elevated look and feel that featured helpful product icons and report samples, plus an easy-to-use search interface. For the property reports, Guidance enhanced their presentation by pulling images from Google Street View into the reports. Adjustments for formatting purposes were automated, including exposure levels, aspect ratios, for example.

Guidance advised First American’s internal design team on the changes from the existing branding that were made for the new site, and documented them in a detailed style guide. The guide was also created for use as a resource to apply styling changes to other areas of the First American web presence.

From One to Many

The design of First American’s subscription model is straightforward. Clients choose from a set of subscription tiers, and receive a certain amount of credits for downloading reports each month. Individual reports have a fixed price, and each subscription tier offers a discount on the fixed price. More expensive tiers offer greater discounts.

However, First American’s existing platforms presented a challenge to creating this model. BigCommerce could accommodate orders for multiple SKUs with digital delivery, but only if the content of those SKUs was predefined (no SKU variations). However, First American needed to offer an exponential number of variations on a given SKU – one for every property address nationwide. Further, any solution that directed clients to a third-party’s website, or directly called back end data from the front end, wouldn’t be feasible because of the security risk.

Guidance determined that a custom middleware integration could make the subscription model possible for First American. The middleware solution was built using .NET Core within their pre-existing Azure environment, which was the easiest way to assure they could manage it on their own after deployment. The middleware proxies to other services used by First American and mediates between them, including BigCommerce; their proprietary SSO service; and their DataTree property records database.

Searching and Ordering

From the front-end perspective, customers begin a property search on the website. The list of records, documents, and reports available for a given property are displayed, along with links to an example of each. Multiple items can be ordered at once, with a direct payment or a deduction from subscription credits.

Behind the scenes, auto-complete functionality assists with the customer’s property search, and a Google Street View image is injected into the product display page for the search result. An API call is validated through the middleware and passed to DataTree, which returns a list of available items for purchase. Adding selected items to the cart is also cued with an API call from the front end, connected by the middleware integration to DataTree and BigCommerce’s own API. Order completion is handled, depending on the payment type, through First American’s payment gateway for individual purchases, or through the subscription management features built into the custom middleware solution Guidance created.

Fulfillment and Upsells

After the items are ordered, customers can view them online in their account and download them as PDFs. Occasionally, these items include links to purchase other documents, records, or reports related to the one they’re viewing. With a couple of clicks, customers can make their “purchase within a purchase” and view these new items in their account.

On the back end, DataTree receives a real-time API call (again, validated through the middleware) to display the item that the customer has purchased and now wants to view. To enable the upsell links, Guidance uses JavaScript to inject HTML into the page where the purchased item is returned for display, during the page rendering. The custom front end functionality listens for an event trigger – specifically, a click on one of the supplement record links – to execute an add-to-cart event.