How StreetEasy Boosted Sales Lead Generation by 115% with Custom Search Tools
This case covers Anadea’s 12-year engineering partnershipwith StreetEasy, NYC’s leading real estate marketplace (a Zillow brand). The core milestone was migrating a legacy monolith to microservices, enabling the platform to easily handle 180 million annual visits. Overhauling the search infrastructure with Elasticsearch cut page load times 33x — dropping from 10 seconds to just 0.3. Meanwhile, launching new features like interactive maps transformed the user experience and drove a 115% spike in sales leads.
Challenge
Rapid user growth hit the ceiling of StreetEasy’s legacy monolithic architecture, causing performance dips during traffic spikes and stalling new feature rollouts. The outdated stack also triggered security vulnerabilities, while dropping search-page CTRs signaled that the platform was falling short of user expectations. Finally, real estate agents lacked the modern tools needed to run and track promotions, causing the company to miss out on key monetization opportunities.
Solution
To modernize the platform without disrupting thousands of daily users, the team executed a multi-year technical roadmap:
- Migrated the legacy monolith to microservices. Broke down core workflows incrementally to ensure zero downtime, utilizing Docker and Kubernetes for containerization alongside Kafka for messaging.
- Upgraded the entire tech stack. Modernized the platform from the ground up by transitioning the frontend to React and updating the backend to Rails 7.
- Rolled out advanced product features. Built and deployed an interactive map tool, a personalized listing ranking algorithm, and a dedicated Seller Dashboard with real-time valuation calculators.
- Integrated enterprise third-party services. Streamlined operations by embedding Zuora for automated billing, Salesforce for CRM data, and Iterable for user notifications.
Results
Over a 12-year partnership, the engineering updates yielded clear performance milestones and business growth:
- Cut search results page load times 33x, dropping from 10 seconds down to 0.3 seconds by overhauling the search architecture with Elasticsearch.
- Drove a 115% spike in sales leads through the deployment of the new interactive map tool and custom search filters.
- Maintained zero downtime at scale, allowing the platform to reliably handle over 180 million annual visits (15M+ monthly).
- Boosted search-card CTR by 80% and lifted rental Home Details Page (HDP) views by 24%.
- Raised contact conversions by 18% for real estate experts and 14% for general sales.
- Generated a 15% annual revenue increase by introducing a Paid Inclusion model for rental listings.
Technologies & Tools
Project Details
2026
12 years
