How a Real Estate Agency Can Get Rid of Duplicate Listings

Duplicates are a quiet problem in most agencies. Two agents enter the same property, the owner posts the listing on several portals, someone updates the price on just one record. The result: a bloated database, buyers being offered the same apartment twice, and arguments within the team over whose listing it is.

Let's look at where duplicates come from and how to set up your workflow so there are fewer of them every week, not more.

Where duplicates come from

• Several agents work the same sources. A fresh listing on OLX or DIM.RIA (Ukraine's leading property portals) is seen by everyone at once — and everyone rushes to add it first.
• The owner posts the listing more than once. A different headline, different photos, a slightly different floor area — and without a check, the system treats it as a new property.
• Manual data entry. "12 Shevchenko St." and "Shevchenko 12" are the same address to a person, but two different ones to a simple search.
• Database migration. When moving from spreadsheets or another system, old duplicates often come along with everything else.

Step 1. Agree on what counts as a duplicate

Before you start hunting for matches, set the rules for the whole team. As a rule, a property is the same if at least one of these matches:

1. the owner's phone number (the most reliable signal);
2. the address — street and building number;
3. the parameters — category, district, number of rooms, floor area and floor, within a small tolerance.

In Relto, these rules are set through duplicate detection profiles: you choose which criteria are mandatory and set tolerances for floor area and price. Apartments and land plots can have different rules — and that's perfectly fine.

Step 2. Check before a property reaches your database

The cheapest duplicate is the one that never gets created. That's why the check needs to happen at the point of entry:

• when you copy a listing with the browser extension, right on the OLX, DIM.RIA or other portal page you'll see a label: new, possible duplicate or already in database;
• when a property is added manually, the CRM shows similar listings, so the agent can see that someone has already created the record — and exactly who got there first.

A rule for the team: if the system shows "possible duplicate", open the existing record first. Updating the price or photos there is much faster than merging two records later.

Step 3. Regularly clean up what has already piled up

Even with strict rules, some duplicates will slip through. Set aside 15 minutes a week:

• in the property list, keep an eye on the duplicate counter — it shows how many matches were found for each record;
• open groups of similar listings with photos — you'll see at a glance whether it really is the same apartment;
• archive anything redundant in one click, without opening the record;
• if the match is a coincidence (for example, two identical apartments in the same building), mark it as "not a duplicate" — the system won't suggest that pair again.

Step 4. Assign someone responsible

Duplicates are everyone's problem, so someone needs to own them. Usually that's the office manager or a team lead. Their job is a weekly review of groups of similar listings and the final say in disputed cases: whose property it is and which record to keep.

What you get

• Buyers never see the same apartment twice — and trust your agency more.
• Agents spend their time on viewings, not on hunting for the "right" record.
• Honest analytics: the number of properties in your database reflects reality.
• Fewer conflicts in the team: it's clear who added a property first.

Try duplicate detection profiles and the browser extension in Relto — you can work free of charge for the first few days, and we'll help you migrate your database from spreadsheets or your previous system.