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Outgoing Leads API for Developers

This document is directed to developers implementing a destination for Real Geeks Leads. If you're a client trying to connect to a destination visit this page

How to create a destination for Real Geeks Leads

First send a message to our Support asking for credentials to create a Lead Router Destination. We will give you a Real Geeks website and Real Geeks account.

Then visit our Lead Router config, login with the Real Geeks credentials given and follow the steps to configure a Custom API as destination.

At first your Custom API destination will be available only for your test site, so you can use your website, sign-up, perform searches, etc, to trigger requests to your API.

When you're ready to go Live let us know and provide the following information:

  • Description: a description of your destination that will be visible to users connecting to it
  • Partner ID Label: a label for your Partner ID field, what it means to your system, ex.: “Account ID”, “Site Code”
  • Partner ID Help: is a longer description with instructions on how users will be able to access the Partner ID from your system, ex.: “In order to access your Account ID visit Settings from your Dashboard”

Request Types

We have two main entities: Lead and Activity. A lead is somebody with name and contact information that signed up in a website. An activity is something a lead has done, like performing a search, viewing a property, marking a property as favorite, etc.

A destination is a single url that accepts HTTP POST requests with a JSON body. There are four types of requests sent to this url:

  • New Lead: a new lead signed up on the website
  • Update Lead: some contact details of an existing lead was updated on the website
  • Add activities: one or more activities were added to an existing lead
  • New Potential Seller Lead: a lead attempted to use the property valuation tool on the website but didn't complete the signup process. More on this later.

We identify which type of request is being sent with the action field.

New Lead

Somebody signed up on the website, it will contain contact information and at least one activity. See Lead fields below.

Lead action field will be set to “created”. activities field is always present too, indicating the first actions the user performed on the website.

Update Lead

Lead contact details were updated on the website. Lead action field will be set to “updated”. Lead identification fields will also be available: id, site_uuid, site_domain and partner_id

activities could be present too, in this case the lead details should be updated and these activities should be added. Activities are never removed or updated, only added.

Activity Added

One or more activities are being added to a Lead. For this request the following fields are set:

  • id: Lead id, same as given on creation
  • site_uuid
  • site_domain
  • action: “activity_added”
  • partner_id
  • activities: list of one or more activities. See Activity fields below.

Activity Added requests are always sent after the corresponding New Lead requests. But sometimes they can arrive in a different order since the network isn't always reliable.

New Potential Seller Lead

Real Geeks websites have a property valuation tool, users enter an address and it provides an estimate sale value for that property. It also shows the last sold date and price.

In order to visualize this information users have to sign up, giving their contact details. If the user doesn't finish the sign up process their contact information is unknown, all we have is the address they looked for. This is called a Potential Seller Lead.

Lead Fields

All fields a lead could possibly have. If a field is optional it might not be present in the JSON.

Field name Type Presence Description
action string required Identify what type of request this is, one of “created”, “updated” or “activity_added”. Sometimes the value “unknown” is given, this is not common but happens if the client is using a lead source that does not identify which action was performed, should be handled as “update or create if doesn't exist”
id string required Every lead has a unique identifier, used when updating the lead or adding activities to it
partner_id string required The ID provided by the Real Geeks client when connecting to this destination
source string required Tells where the lead came from. See Source values below
site_uuid string required The unique identifier of the site inside Real Geeks where this lead originated from. If you intend to reference the site inside your system prefer to use this id instead of the site_domain because sometimes clients change the site domain
site_domain string required The domain of the site that originated the lead
site_login_url string required An url agents can use to login as this lead on the website
agent_name string optional If this lead was generated from an Agent Page on the website, the agent full name will be given here
agent_email string optional If this lead was generated from an Agent Page on the website, the agent email will be given here
email string required Valid email address of the lead
first_name string required Lead first name
last_name string optional Lead last name, not always given
role string required One of “Seller”, “Buyer” or “Potential Seller”
phone string optional Phone number. US numbers could be formatted as 808-123-1234 or (808) 123-1234. International number format: +55 83 1234-1234. Note that a valid format is not guaranteed, since some clients have other lead sources besides their website
activities list of Activity optional List of activities, see Activity fields below
created string required Timestamp of when this lead was created, using ISO 8601, ex.: “2015-04-01T08:41:51+00:00”

Source values

These are know values source field could have

  • “Website Property Search”
  • “Website Property Valuation”
  • “Website Agent Landing Page”
  • “Website Property Landing Page”
  • “zillow”
  • “trulia.com”
  • “realtor.com”

But since clients can have custom lead sources using Zapier or our Incoming API, this field could have any value any other string value

Activity fields

Field name Type Presence Description
type string required See Type values below
description string required Human readable description
property Property optional In case this activity was related to a specific property. If present it is a document with Property fields
created string optional Timestamp of when this activity was created, using ISO 8601, ex.: “2015-04-01T08:41:51+00:00”
source string required Tells where the activity came from. Can be the same set of values as Lead source field

Type values

Activity type indicates what action was performed by the lead. It's one of these values:

  • “visited”: user visited the first for the first time (initial sign-up) or is back to the site after two hours of inactivity
  • “search_performed”: user performed a search on the website. Description will contain a summary of the search filters
  • “saved_search_added”: user not only performed a search but also saved it to their profile. Description will contain a summary of the search filters
  • “saved_search_removed”: user removed a saved search. Description is the same as “saved_search_added”
  • “property_viewed”: user visualized a property on the website. Description contains a summary of the property details and a link to it.
  • “favorite_property_added”: user marked a property as favorite. Description will contain a summary of the property and a link to it on the website.
  • “favorite_property_removed”: user removed a favorited property. Description is the same as “favorite_property_added”
  • “property_updates_email_sent”: our systems sent an email to the user with updates about their saved searches and favorited properties, with information like price changes and new properties available
  • “bad_email_flagged”: our systems detected that the email address this user signed up with is not valid, emails failed to be sent to it
  • “bad_email_unflagged”: our systems can now send emails to this user's email address
  • “opted_out”: user opted out of our property updates emails
  • “deleted_from_website”: user account was deleted from the website. Not that other systems, like our Lead Manager, could still have this lead saved.
  • “contact_emailed”: user sent a contact message.
  • “valuation_inquire”: user used the property valuation tool to see the estimated value of a property.
  • “shared_property_via_email”: a lead has shared a property by email with somebody else, the description will contain the property url and the name and email of the person they shared it with.
  • “market_report_viewed”: user viewed a market report on the site.
  • “saved_market_report”: user saved a market report page in their saved searches.
  • “coming_soon_viewed”: user viewed a coming soon page on the site.
  • “note”: agent has added an internal note about this lead on the Lead Manager. The note itself will be in the activity description

Property fields

Field name Type Presence Description
mls string optional MLS number
url string optional Full absolute url to visualize property
street_address string optional Street portion of the address, ex: “123 Keolu Rd Unit 12”
city string optional
state string optional
zip string optional
beds integer optional Number of bedrooms
full_baths integer optional Number of full bathrooms
half_baths integer optional Number of half bathrooms
type string optional Human readable type, ex: “Single Family Home” or “Condo”
sqft string optional Property square feet, has no format requirement
listing_price string optional If the property is being sold this is the price it's being listed for. The supported format is a number with optional decimal places, ex.: “100500” or “100500.90”
listing_status string optional If the property is being sold this is the current status, any format is allowed. ex.: “For Sale”
listing_days_on_market integer optional If the property is being sold, how long it's been in the market
estimated_value string optional Estimated value this property could be sold for, useful for Seller or Potential Seller leads. Could be from an automated or personalized valuation. The supported format is a number with optional decimal places, ex.: “100500” or “100500.90”
last_sold_date string optional Doesn't have any format requirement, could be something like “2015-12-25”
last_sold_price string optional If present will be a number with optional decimal places, ex.: “100500” or “100500.90”
tags []string optional Search tags, could be address components or any other field that destinations might use to easily implement a search feature. Real Geeks websites send things like street address, neighborhood, state, island, mls number, etc. i.e. [“kailua”, “212”, “oahu”, “981112”]
latitude float optional
longitude float optional
images []string optional List of images urls of this property
year_built int optional The year this property was built
list_date string optional Date when this property was listed. Example: “2014-10-02T00:00:00Z”

Request Headers

All requests will also include the following custom HTTP headers

X-Lead-Router-Message-Id

Contains an id for this message. This is helpful to identify retries of the same request. Here is an example value:

X-Lead-Router-Message-Id: 7ca66bef-c704-47f2-b46e-0638291bae85

X-Lead-Router-Signature

Contains the signature of this request body using the configured secret key. See details on our Security section below.

User-Agent

User-Agent is a string with the format: “RealGeeks-LeadRouter/v1.0”, where v1.0 is the API version.

Minor changes to the API that shouldn't affect clients will increase the minor version number (v1.1, v1.2, etc).

Major changes to the API that could potentially affect clients will be notified beforehand and when they take place the major version number will increase (v2.0, v3.0, etc).

Here is an example value:

User-Agent: RealGeeks-LeadRouter/1.0

Retries

We retry every time we get a response with status code different than 200 up to 8 times, here is the behavior:

  • Wait 10min before for the second, third and forth attempts
  • Wait 30min before the 5th attempt
  • 1h before the 6th
  • 2h before the 7th
  • 4h before the 8th

All attempts of the same request will contain the same value of X-Lead-Router-Message-Id header.

To avoid retries return status code 406.

Security

In order to receive requests from Real Geeks your API needs to be open to the internet. For security reasons you probably want to limit the requests you receive to those coming from Real Geeks. The easier way to do this is to setup a secret token and validate the request.

Validating requests from Real Geeks

When your secret token is set Real Geeks will create a hash with the request body. You can see our full implementation in Go below:

func sign(secret, requestBody []byte) string {
    mac := hmac.New(sha256.New, secret)
    mac.Write(requestBody)
    return fmt.Sprintf("%x", mac.Sum(nil))
}

This hash will be available as header X-Lead-Router-Signature. We have a full example of APIs in Go and Python validating the signature below. Obviously, your language and server implementations may differ. There's a couple important things to point out:

  • Only the full request POST body is used to build the hash, no headers
  • Using a plain string comparison == is not advised. Use a constant time string comparison function

Sample code in Python using Flask

# API server validating Real Geeks Signature
 
import hmac
import hashlib
from flask import Flask, request
 
app = Flask(__name__)
app.debug = True
 
SECRET = '12345'
 
@app.route("/", methods=["POST"])
def hello():
    signature = str(request.headers['X-Lead-Router-Signature'])
    mac = hmac.new(SECRET, request.data, hashlib.sha256)
    if not hmac.compare_digest(mac.hexdigest(), signature):
        return "invalid signature", 403
    return "ok"
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(port=9090)

Sample code in Go

// API server validating Real Geeks Signature
package main
 
import (
	"crypto/hmac"
	"crypto/sha256"
	"encoding/hex"
	"io/ioutil"
	"log"
	"net/http"
)
 
var secret = []byte("12345")    // your secret here
 
func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", handleWebhook)
	log.Print("Listening at 9090")
	http.ListenAndServe(":9090", nil)
}
 
func handleWebhook(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	signature, err := hex.DecodeString(r.Header.Get("X-Lead-Router-Signature"))
	if err != nil {
		log.Printf("failed to decode signature header (%v)", err)
		w.WriteHeader(500)
		return
	}
	body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Body)
	if err != nil {
		log.Printf("failed to read body (%v)", err)
		w.WriteHeader(500)
		return
	}
	r.Body.Close()
 
	mac := hmac.New(sha256.New, secret)
	mac.Write(body)
	mymac := mac.Sum(nil)
	if !hmac.Equal(mymac, signature) {
		log.Printf("Signature doesn't match")
		w.WriteHeader(403)
		return
	}
	log.Print("ok")
	w.WriteHeader(200)
}
outgoing_leads_api_developers.1461983581.txt.gz · Last modified: 2016/04/30 02:33 by igor