Building a custom integration to Right Move
When you think of Boatshed.com, you probably don’t think houses, however, Boatshed.com has a vast array of houseboats for sale across the UK and so we were tasked with feeding and keeping synchronised the details of those houseboats onto rightmove.co.uk.
With extensive experience in feeding boat data to other aggregator sites, including YachtWorld, The YachtMarket and Apollo Duck (in fact to 21 different sites in total!), we anticipated that we’d be needed to output an XML feed of (house)boat data for rightmove.co.uk to come and consume. Instead, we were tasked with communicating with the rightmove.co.uk API.
The Rightmove API is nicely documented with comprehensive documentation available from http://www.rightmove.co.uk/adf.html
The API relies on three main calls:
- Send property
- Remove property
- Get branch property list
Each property is sent as a separate transaction and receives an immediate response to indicate success or failure.
Failure messages are well defined and readable, highlighting where the data you are sending has failed to pass their validation.
One of the key challenges we faced was in adapting the boat data to fit fields designed for storing information on houses. Even basic terminology, such as the word ‘Heads’ to describe the toilet, needed adapting to fit the property buying market rather than the boat buying market.
Our integration between Boatshed.com and RightMove is proving to be very popular with Boatshed brokers with large numbers of house boats in their territory.
Angus Rose, from Boatshed London, commented “Being able to now market our range of houseboats on Rightmove gives Boatshed the unique advantage of giving maximum exposure for our clients across marine and property websites. As more and more people start to look at houseboats as an alternative to conventional bricks and mortar, our expertise is regularly being sought in this fast-changing marketplace”.