TRIBUS Source Highlights

• A centralized, schemaless data warehouse for your listing data, agent data, consumer data and more
• Easily plug in all kinds of external data sources, from your MLS to countless third-party integrations like Zillow and Google Suite, often with Single Sign-On
• TRIBUS Source powers the entire TRIBUS platform using its API, or brokerages can use the technology as a standalone product for your brokerage’s data warehousing needs

Why TRIBUS Source?

At TRIBUS, we’ve long held a core belief about needing real estate brokerage software to work together. More importantly, because our team is comprised of former brokers and agents, we know that brokerages need a single place where not just some, but all of their data is stored and easily accessible. Back in 2009, we created the original idea behind one of the first open application programming interfaces (APIs) for real estate. Many enhancements and updates later, we call that TRIBUS Source.

We know all brokerages operate differently, and unlike other solutions that make companies conform to their product, we wanted solutions that can be custom tailored to fit your brokerage. Our technology unifies and normalizes all of your data including MLS data, your listings, transactions, roster information, leads / contacts, emails, and more. Essentially, it contains all of the data, systems, and applications that matter in the day-to-day operation of a brokerage. This process allows for single data entry while still giving your brokerage complete control over the data and where it needs to go in real time. Using a powerful API and customized, schemaless data architecture, we built a centralized data warehouse.

TRIBUS: An ‘API-First’ Company

We’re always looking for ways to make the work lives of our brokerage staff clients and their agents easier. This is a big reason why we have integrations with more than 150 third-party tech vendors — we want to provide as many options for you and your agents to use the tools they like the best.

But it’s really more than that: TRIBUS is an API-first company. What does that mean? Our entire platform, from our custom real estate brokerage websites to our brokerage CRM, is built upon the strong foundation of this TRIBUS Source API which offers a RESO Web API complaint option. Everything you see on one of our clients’ websites is flowing through our API. This is what allows TRIBUS to create solutions that independently work the way you do, without reinventing the wheel. TRIBUS Source can also be purchased separately for brokers who want to keep their own website and backend system, but want to take advantage of all that our data warehousing solution has to offer.

The TRIBUS Source Data Warehouse

What Is a Real Estate Data Warehouse?

Data warehouses have become popular for large companies to manage their information. Previous to the last few years, companies found that their data was in silos and often not normalized. Data warehouses allow companies to continue using the tools and applications to collect their data, while pushing all of it to a centralized source where it can be normalized and best used across the company. TRIBUS created the first data warehouse with connections to hundreds of other tools.

For example, our integration with Buyside shares all leads and listings with their system, and their system pushes leads back to TRIBUS. In the case of our Homespotter integration, meanwhile, your leads’ activity (viewing, saving searches and properties) on their platform are kept in sync with TRIBUS’ CRM.

How Our Real Estate Data Warehouse Works

To expand further on TRIBUS Source, within this real estate data warehouse, there are three buckets that our API data falls into: listing data, agent data and consumer data.

Your agent, team, office, and staff rosters, your listings — both internal ones and those pulled in through your MLS — your transactions, your leads and all their activity (emails and text messages you’ve sent them, showings you’ve done with them, their visits to to your website, what links they clicked on, et cetera) and more are all contained here.

Beyond that, though, we wanted to make TRIBUS Source future-proof. So we built TRIBUS Source to be schemaless, meaning if you have a vendor or developer that wants to push certain kinds of data into our system we haven’t considered yet, they can do so right away without TRIBUS even needing to be involved. They just set a namespace for the event / activity, and start pushing it into TRIBUS Source. Meaning any vendor you decide to work with in the future can begin using TRIBUS Source immediately upon you delivering them an API key.

Listing Pages To Match Your Brand and Objectives

Perhaps where TRIBUS Source’s data warehousing shines brightest is when it comes to your brokerage listing pages. A good listing page is no longer just a few photos, a couple sentences and a number to contact the listing agent. It’s an aggregation of numerous components, some internally designed, some coming in from trusted sources. A good listing page should inform the visitor about everything both within and near the property. Using TRIBUS Source, we can append data to the MLS or internal listings from any data source you’d like including Onboard, Great Schools, and more.

Furthermore, we can append data to past transaction information and build machine-learning systems to identify buyers and sellers that are likely back in the market.  Then we can load that data into custom audiences in advertising platforms like Facebook to do custom tailored marketing. Here are just a few of the data sources that are live on our clients’ listing pages and in their data warehouse right now, and we’re adding more all the time:

• Market evaluations
• Local schools nearby each listing, with crowdsourced ratings
• Mapping services from a provider of your choice
• History of the home’s previous sales and price changes
• A calculator using Inrix DriveTime for estimated commute times to and from the user’s workplace

TRIBUS Source Means Endless Mix-and-Match Possibilities

TRIBUS Source is more than a single product — it’s the bedrock of an entire interconnected platform. Where many other platforms have all kinds of information flowing around them — like your agent data, showing dates and listings on one side, and on the other, lead info, external reporting services and more — TRIBUS Source allows for all these kinds of processes to communicate with one another. When lead data comes into our system, we can simultaneously send out information to print and marketing partners, mortgage partners, business intelligence systems, agent marketing tools and more. It allows for plug-and-play with all kinds of third-party technologies, while still keeping all of your brokerage’s data safe and secure.

How TRIBUS Source Will Boost Productivity in Your Daily Business

So let’s say a new lead comes in through a chatbot like Roof.ai that you’ve integrated with your custom real estate brokerage website, which then directs them to a listing on your site. Using TRIBUS Source, that chat provider can simply connect to our API to find what listings they might be looking for instead of them needing to setup a new connection with your MLSs.

When that lead is then generated the chat provider can use our leading routing API to figure out which agent you want them assigned to.  Then, that agent can receive a text and email message alerting them they have a new lead – which is reported back to TRIBUS Source that they opened and accepted it.

The agent then emails the lead a comprehensive market report for the that listing’s neighborhood , and follows up with a quick, friendly text – all which is recorded into your data warehouse, even though the agent might be using a third party tool. Later, the agent logs into their brokerage CRM to get a reminder of all the listings the lead has viewed, saved, commented, or liked , and sees all the notes and system emails for this lead. After a few emails back and forth with the lead, the agent types in a note to the lead’s profile that they seem to be a year or two away from seriously considering a purchase. So they add a “long-term lead” tag in the system, and the lead is automatically added to a drip campaign for those kinds of leads in TRIBUS’ or a third-party email marketing software of the agent’s choosing — let’s say MailChimp. Several months later, the lead gets an automatic email from the agent wishing them a happy birthday, and gives the agent a call to talk real estate.

Millions of variations of this story happen every day for our clients.

TRIBUS Source gives real estate brokerages the a flexibility that’s hard to find elsewhere. Meanwhile, your agents are enjoying a user-friendly experience with our applications, while still using other technology they already know and love.  From listings to leads to transactions and roster data, TRIBUS Source is not only flexible, it’s fast. Within sub 200ms response times for even 1000s of records, it gives your brokerage access to any of its data when and where you need it. It’s one of the biggest reasons why some of the top brokerages in the country have chosen TRIBUS — we can be anything a modern real estate brokerage needs us to be.