Uploading Properties to RightMove.co.uk

I'm putting the finishing touches to a recent project for an estate agent and thought I would blog about the process:

Summary: My client, an estate agent, was currently adding their properties to their own website and then also adding them to RightMove and basically repeating the 'addition' process for every property. Very tedious and time consuming so they approached me about uploading to RightMove automatically...

Started off by contacting RightMove and asking whether it was possible, and yep it was and many agents are now doing it this way as it makes a lot of sense. So they gave me their Automated Datafeed specification and my work had begun!

In a nutshell, I had to extract the data for all their properties from the database on the website, get everything in the right format and then upload it to RightMove. Yeah, easier said than done! :)

Here's how I've done it...
1. Wrote a PHP script that will extract all the properties from the MySQL DB at the end of the working day to grab all the latest properties. It then save the data into a delimited file with all required RightMove fields.
2. Now we have this data file, we need to 'Zip' it up along with all the photos for the properties. Did this with http://www.7-zip.org/ and wrote a batch file for the process.
3. The batch file then runs FTP and uploads the Zip file to RightMove.
4. A Scheduled Task will then run the batch file each night.
5. RightMove receive the datafeed file, process it, and Bobs Your Uncle, the properties all appear on RightMove.

I also had to increase the amount of validation on the estate agent website so that when they add their properties, all of the data is good. Else otherwise when it gets to RightMove they will not be able to process it properly.

Client is now more productive as they only have to add each property once to their own website. And I'm happy as its been quite a nice project to work on.

If there are any other estate agents who can benefit from a process like this then please give me a shout! In fact, AutoTrader allow the same bulk data upload for any car dealers who may be reading.

Cheers,
Swof