Hawaii property search, in Japanese
A productized property-search system connected to live Honolulu MLS data, built for Japanese- and Chinese-facing real-estate sites — US market data, presented with a Japanese UX. Live today for a Japanese brokerage.
- Product
- Embeddable Hawaii real-estate property search
- Data
- Honolulu Board of Realtors IDX · RETS-standard MLS
- Languages
- Japanese & Chinese (auto-translated from English MLS data)
- Deployments
- Three to date — two in Honolulu, one in Japan
- Status
- Live, in production for a Japanese brokerage
Japanese buyers interested in Hawaii property want to search it the way they search anything else — in their own language, on their phone, inside a site they already trust. We built a property-search system that connects live Honolulu MLS data to a client's own website, translated and styled to feel native.
The challenge
MLS data is authoritative but awkward for this audience: it's in English, it lives behind a US real-estate standard, and it doesn't natively fit a Japanese company's site or the way its customers browse. A generic embed feels foreign and converts poorly.
What we built
An embeddable search product that draws from the Honolulu Board of Realtors IDX tool over the RETS standard, and adapts to the client rather than the other way around. In production it lets buyers search by budget, layout, floor area, and property type, and drill into any Oahu region — Waikiki, Ala Moana, Kakaako, Diamond Head, Kahala and more — with the MLS data refreshed daily.
- Filtering by property type (single-family, condominium), budget, layout, floor area, region, and view
- Ownership-type filters specific to Hawaii (fee simple vs. leasehold)
- Multilingual — Japanese and Chinese, auto-translating the English MLS data
- Search and detail screens that adopt the client's existing site design
- Smartphone-ready, with favorites and inquiry forms for lead generation
A capability, not a one-off
Because it's productized, it deploys quickly and repeatably. There are three implementations to date — two in Honolulu and one in Japan — each embedded into the client's own site for lead generation.
Operating a Hawaii property-search service requires a Hawaii real-estate broker license, which the operating client holds. Aloha Works provides and integrates the technology.