Anywhere Real Estate Powers Digital Transformation with MongoDB

As the real estate industry continues to expand its digital offerings, agents often rely on multiple apps and systems. These digital solutions are often disconnected from one another, which makes it difficult for agents to provide a seamless, high-quality service to their clients. Anywhere Real Estate (Anywhere), the parent company of well-known brands like Century 21, Coldwell Banker, and Sotheby’s International Realty, experienced these challenges daily.

Anywhere oversees multiple systems for managing marketing and advertising as well as a suite of tools designed to support the needs of its agents, brokers, and customers. Agents may use 15–20 different applications per day to manage their sales from lead to close.

“To create a listing agreement, agents may use one app or website,” said Damian Ng, Senior Vice President of Technology at Anywhere, in an interview with theCUBE at MongoDB’s .local NYC event. “To order marketing materials for a given property, they go to another app. To sign the agreement, yet another app. Our technology team tries to build solutions to consolidate these disparate systems, but we end up with multiple source systems for agent and listing information.”

Anywhere wanted to consolidate these apps and services into a single system to increase agents’ productivity. To do this, the company needed a flexible, scalable, and modern database to support these capabilities. Anywhere turned to MongoDB to transform and centralize a disparate set of systems into one unified experience.

The Anywhere technology stack is expansive, covering a wide range of services and applications. At the core are its agent API and listing API, which provide the foundation for many of the company’s digital offerings. These APIs support key functionalities, such as property search, lead management, and transaction tracking.

As part of its digital transformation, Anywhere began migrating these services to MongoDB Atlas, a fully managed suite of cloud database and data services. This move brought several benefits, including increased reliability and scalability, reduced operational overhead, and the ability to deploy across multiple cloud providers. “MongoDB is the backbone of our new services and has become our transactional system,” said Ng. “Most of our use cases are read-heavy with minimal writes, making MongoDB a perfect fit.”

To facilitate a smooth transition and optimal performance, Anywhere engaged MongoDB Professional Services at the start of its journey. “We worked with MongoDB Professional Services to ensure we got it right the first time,” said Brian Hanks, Vice President and Chief Engineer at Anywhere, during a presentation at MongoDB’s .local NYC event. “The team helped us with all of the challenges that we faced, such as cluster sizing, search query optimization, and performance testing.”

One of the most visible ways Anywhere uses MongoDB is in its property search functionality. Across its many branded websites, the company offers robust search capabilities that let potential buyers browse and find homes that fit their criteria. Behind the scenes, this is powered by MongoDB Atlas Search, which facilitates fast, relevant searches across millions of listings.

“With MongoDB Atlas Search, you don’t need to provision infrastructure or do any setup,” said Hanks. “Simply create the index, and it automatically starts the necessary processes. Within minutes, you have a fully functional MongoDB Atlas Search index.”

Anywhere indexes its property listings, which are stored in MongoDB Atlas, and uses Atlas Search to provide fast, relevant results to users’ queries. This includes support for geospatial searches, allowing users to search within a specific area by drawing a shape on a map. Agents can also quickly find properties that match their clients’ criteria, including location, price, number of bedrooms, and other attributes.

“We use MongoDB Atlas in various places for our listing data, but primarily, we have our own schema,” said Hanks. “We take data from hundreds of different multiple listing services and other sources and normalize it into a schema that we use consistently.”

With MongoDB, Anywhere can consolidate data from multiple disparate apps, from marketing tools to contract signing software, to gain a more unified view of its operations. The company can seamlessly integrate its foundational agent and listing APIs — built on MongoDB — with the various applications used by agents and brokers, from listing management to marketing and advertising. This has led to increased efficiency and productivity for agents, who can now access all the information they need in one place.

Anywhere also takes advantage of MongoDB’s near real-time capabilities to keep its applications up to date. Using change streams, updates made in one part of the system are synchronized with all other relevant applications. As a result, agents always have the most current information about listings, leads, and transactions.

Looking ahead, Anywhere is exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance its services even further. The company is conducting various proofs of concept around MongoDB Atlas Vector Search for AI and ML applications. This service makes it simple to build intelligent applications powered by semantic search and generative AI. Anywhere plans to utilize MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to support natural language querying and build embeddings on listing photos to expand the attributes available for search. This will help users ask even more sophisticated and intuitive queries, such as “Show me three-bedroom houses with a pool under $1,000,000” or “Find condos with a fitness center and in-unit laundry.”

“We want our technologists to embrace AI as a solution to business problems from the ground up rather than taking a top-down approach,” said Ng. “We plan to build AI models to predict agent productivity, help our recruiting team find more agents, and match leads to the right agents for the best customer experience.”

To accelerate its AI adoption, Anywhere plans to utilize the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP). Through MAAP, the company will gain access to various large language models that are integrated with MongoDB and receive expert support to accelerate generative AI development. By tapping into MongoDB’s expertise, Anywhere will continue to future-proof its tech stack and thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world.

“We can see a lot of potential with AI and we’re looking forward to it,” said Ng. “As we explore proofs of concept, MongoDB is a great partner in helping us conduct these projects. It’s going to be an exciting journey.”

To learn more, visit mongodb.com/atlas