Your listing portfolio has two hundred properties across six buildings. A prospect calls and says they want a freehold, partially furnished, two-bedroom unit with parking under RM600,000 in the north corridor. You need to call them back in under five minutes with three options. That answer doesn't come from scrolling through photos or PDFs — it comes from structured data.
The Search Anchors That Actually Get Used
Type, Tenure, Property Category, Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Furnishing, and Car park are the filter fields. In real estate, the search isn't "show me everything" — it's "show me freehold, 3-bed, partially furnished, with two parking bays." Having each of these as a discrete structured field rather than text buried in a description means the query produces an exact result set. A prospect who specified no preference on furnishing gets all matching records; one who needs full furnishing gets a subset.
Direction is the field that separates listings built by people who actually sell property from listings built by people who haven't had to deal with a buyer who absolutely refuses to buy west-facing. In high-rise residential markets — particularly in Southeast Asia — the facing direction affects natural light, heat load, and privacy, and it's a hard filter for a significant percentage of buyers. If direction isn't in a structured field, you find out it matters only after you've arranged a viewing.
Unit Type handles the sub-typology within a building: corner units, standard units, duplex, penthouse. Two units can share the same bedroom count, size, and floor level and still be meaningfully different products if one has a corner wrap-around balcony and the other is sandwiched between two units.
Pricing Structure and Cost of Ownership
Sale Price, Rental Price, and Maintenance Fee together represent the complete financial profile of a unit. Sale price is obvious. Rental yield calculations require both sale price and rental price in the same record — a RM500,000 unit renting at RM2,200/month is a 5.3% gross yield, which affects the investor decision even when it has no bearing on the owner-occupier decision. Maintenance Fee changes the net yield calculation and the total cost of ownership comparison between two otherwise similar units.
Occupied closes the availability question. A rental listing where the unit is currently tenanted with eighteen months remaining on the tenancy is a different proposition than one with vacant possession. The occupancy status determines whether a sale is straightforward vacant possession or a sale subject to existing tenancy — a legally significant difference that affects both price expectations and buyer pool.
The Client Matching Layer
Client & Prospect attached to individual property records creates a direct link between the listing and the people who expressed interest. In an active portfolio, this is the field that prevents the situation where three agents are showing the same unit to the same prospect without knowing it, or where a prospect's interest in a specific unit gets lost when the managing agent changes.
Popularity as a field reflects foot traffic and inquiry volume. A unit that's been listed for eight months without offers may have a pricing problem, an access problem, or a furnishing problem — the popularity indicator, reviewed alongside the listing history, points at which of those it is. A unit with high popularity but no conversion is usually priced correctly but presented poorly; one with low popularity and no conversion is usually priced wrong.
Agent / Owner, Contact No., Contact, and Contact 2 are the access and negotiation contacts. In markets where the listing agent and the property owner are different — which is most markets — having both contact chains in the record means the agent doesn't have to search for the owner's number when an offer needs to be communicated quickly.
Area, Building name, Address, City & Zip, and Location with Photo and Date of File Entry complete the archival record. The entry date is the field that tells you how long a listing has been sitting without movement — the indicator that prompts a price review conversation before the listing goes stale.