Homebid.com, an industry leader in online real estate sales, who was purchased by Realtor.com, had an existing product that was the Internet’s elite real estate offer management tool. It allowed listing agents to negotiate offers with potential buyers until an offer was accepted. Homebid.com needed to enhance their product’s functionality by providing the online completion of real estate sales contracts.



Develop document management and revision control system for updating real estate transaction forms online.


Ephibian built “forms functionality” on top of Homebid's existing application. It required the integration with Adobe Acrobat so that the online versions of the real estate forms could retain the same presentation as the original form, and be printed out to look just like the original form. This integration was accomplished through the use of Adobe’s FDF technology.

Once an offer is accepted between the listing agent and a buyer’s agent, forms can be added to the transaction, depending on the brokerage and the State. Each form is automatically pre-populated with all of the data that is already known about the buyer, the seller, the property and the real estate agents.

Part of the challenge was building the abstraction in the application to allow any number of forms to be added to the system. There are literally hundreds of different real estate forms in the United States alone, and each has its own data.

Ephibian created a relationship whereby data in the Homebid.com database and data in the real estate form could be defined in an XML file. When a real estate agent adds the form to their transaction, the XML descriptor is used to map data from the Homebid.com database into the form.

• Revision control for updated to online forms
  

• Integration with Adobe Acrobat for PDF forms
  

• Pre-population of form data