www.vivareal.com

solutions:

• Dynamic Site Accelerator

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• Improved performance by 100% on average in Brazil
• Offloaded nearly 50% of traffic
• Increased page views by 40%
• Increased site sessions by 50%
• Reduced bounce rate by 20%
• Increased lead conversions by 15%
• Sold 40% more banner ads

Launched in May 2009, VivaReal offers an online real estate marketplace where people buy, rent, and sell residential, commercial, and vacation properties in Latin America. With operations across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, VivaReal claims to be the fastest growing online real estate Web site in Latin America. In just over a year, VivaReal has passed 1,000,000 monthly visitors across its network, almost half of whom are in Brazill.

VivaReal first considered in-house measures to address its requirements, such as running its own data center in Brazil and using DNS global load server balancing. But it quickly realized that it would need to deploy data centers in each local market for optimal performance."Such an approach would add lots of complexity to our operations, making it hard to keep up with growth and penetrate new markets," explains Floracks.
Next it evaluated Akamai and one of its competitors. Impressed with Akamai’s client list, flexible payment terms, consulting expertise, and local presence in Brazil, VivaReal chose the Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator solution. “We were pleasantly surprised to find that Akamai isn’t just for large enterprises. In fact, it maintains a group focused solely on catering to startups and small businesses," says Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal.

VivaReal was equally impressed with the implementation process. “Akamai is extremely easy to implement. We merely changed DNS entries and defined rules on our back end and we were up and running," continues Floracks. With Akamai DSA in place, page download times have increased 100% on average for site visitors in Brazil. According to Floracks, the biggest advantage of the Akamai solution is route optimization. “Even our Ajax queries on property listings are more responsive. We are now the fastest real estate website in Latin America."

VivaReal has benefited in other ways from the Akamai solution. The company has seen a nearly 50% reduction on the load on its origin servers. And because Akamai has a global network, the company can freely pursue growth. “We’re soon going to launch in new local markets in Latin America. Akamai is the foundation for our site visitor experience, allowing us to deploy a single platform to serve all countries," explains Floracks.
The company also plans to enhance its capabilities to better serve its audience. “The future is the mobile market. With Akamai’s acquisition of Velocitude, we’ll be able to easily optimize our existing web sites for mobile devices," concludes Floracks.