RealPlus' Real Estate Listings System Picks Up Speed, Goes Mobile With IBM

Linux World Conference and Expo -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that New York City's RealPlus LLC, a residential real estate software development firm, has upgraded its IBM software to significantly improve information access in mobility and faster response times. Queries on the multiple listings service that originally took two to three minutes now produced results in less than six seconds.

Specializing in up-to-date solutions for the New York residential real estate market, RealPlus' base of approximately 250 real estate brokerage firms in the world's largest real estate market, can access their listings system through RealPlus Lite Mobile, a wireless version of the upgraded IBM Informix software and a supporter of web-enabled devices including PDAs and cell phones. The listings are running on open technologies including Linux.

In real time, agents and brokers can: access data and run queries on the database; quickly and efficiently browse the multiple listing service application to review; enter new ones or receive automatic notices of new listings based on individualized, predefined criteria. Access is secured over a virtual private network. The new IBM solution increased the reliability of RealPlus' applications as well as the performance of the database.

"IBM's solution allows the agents to do more searches and try different variations of the same search in order to find the right properties to show their customers," said Eric Gordon, managing director of RealPlus. "By reducing response times so substantially, agents can service more customers and get out to appointments on time. It also helps us by reducing support calls and by increasing the goodwill of the application."

With the help of IBM Business Partner, One Point Solutions, RealPlus upgraded its existing IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) V7 database to the IDS V10 database server software, running on Linux. The server platform hosts many essential applications and sends real estate listings to Web portals, customer sites and newspaper classifieds. It also provides front-end user query screens and database cleanup, and acts as a server for wireless users.

"I am more comfortable placing double the amount of users on the IBM Linux servers than our previous systems," Gordon said. "The migration was seamless. We did not need to recode anything in our application and the learning curve for both products was negligible in order to get things up and running."

About RealPlus LLC:

Based in New York City, RealPlus develops and markets real estate software applications for the Manhattan residential real estate brokerage community. Its full features management listings system is used by over 250 firms and eliminates the need for faxes and emails by automatically sending and receiving real estate information. For more information about RealPlus, visit www.RealPlusOnline.com.

About IBM: For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com