Built for real estate associations

TaliCMS is a website platform built for one kind of organisation: real estate associations.

Not associations generally. Not membership organisations. REALTOR® associations — the ones with a member directory that has to be right, an MLS feed that speaks its own dialect, market statistics members and local media rely on, and a communications director who has four other jobs.

Why we built it

We didn't set out to build a product. We built a website for an association, and then another one.

By the third, a pattern was obvious. Every association needed the same eight or nine things — a directory built from their member data, listings from their MLS, monthly market statistics, an events and education calendar, advocacy content, committee documents, a document library, member-only areas. And every one of them was being quoted for those things as if they were custom development.

Meanwhile the platforms that did serve associations were membership systems with a website module attached, where the website was never the priority and it showed.

So there was a gap: the association-specific parts already existed and kept being rebuilt from scratch. TaliCMS is that work, made into a product.

Who we are

TaliCMS is built and run by Dazlab — Dazlab Digital Pty Ltd, an Australian product studio. We design, build and operate software — TaliCMS is one of several products we run, alongside work in recruitment, professional services and construction technology.

That matters in two practical ways.

We operate what we build. We're not an agency that hands over a codebase and moves on. The platform your association runs on is the platform we maintain, improve and are still responsible for in three years.

We're small and direct. You'll deal with the people doing the work. There's no account manager between you and an answer.

What we've built

Four REALTOR® associations run on TaliCMS today, at very different scales and on very different underlying systems.

• Columbus REALTORS® — 9,400+ members. Full platform delivered in twelve weeks, plus a companion mobile app.
• Texas REALTORS® — one of the largest associations in the country. 146,014 members and 35,951 offices syncing from NAR's M1 Gateway, with search that reads inside the association's document and research archive.
• Abilene Association of REALTORS® — 82,937 MLS listings from a legacy RETS feed, with member content gated behind the credentials members already use for the MLS.
• Coastal Bend Association of REALTORS® — monthly housing reports converted from PDFs into live market data by city and county.

Between them, three different MLS data standards and two different member sign-in systems. None of those associations got to choose what they inherited. The platform is built to attach to whatever you've got.

We also built Unlock MLS for the Austin Board of REALTORS® — an earlier project, on a different technical foundation, and the work that TaliCMS grew out of.

What we believe

Your AMS isn't the problem. The industry's habit of bundling a website into a membership system has produced a lot of associations with good member records and websites they apologise for. We don't sell an AMS and we don't ask you to replace yours.

The admin matters more than the homepage. Every vendor's public site looks good in a demo. Your staff spend the next five years in the admin, and that's where a platform is actually won or lost.

Specific beats impressive. This category is saturated with vendors promising to do everything for everyone, in the same three phrases. We'd rather tell you that search reads inside your PDFs and that your directory comes from your member data.

A launch shouldn't break your members' links. We crawl and archive your existing site before we touch anything, and map every old address to its new home. It's the least glamorous part of the work and one of the most important.

Say what's hard. If something about your project is going to be difficult — a feed nobody has integrated, a timeline that doesn't fit, a requirement we'd have to build — we'd rather tell you before you sign than discover it together in month four.

Talk to us

The useful first conversation isn't a demo. It's fifteen minutes on your specific situation — which MLS you're on, what your member data lives in, what's actually annoying your staff, and when you need to be live.