Case Study: Open Listings achieves rapid, zero-downtime scaling and faster market expansion with MongoDB Atlas

How Open Listings is Using MongoDB Atlas to Make Buying Your Dream Home a Reality

Open Listings is a tech-driven real estate startup whose mission is to make buying a home simple and more affordable—returning 50% of buyer agent fees. After experiencing how antiquated homebuying was, the team built an all-in-one platform but faced challenges around speed, reliability, and scale: supporting 2.5M listings, 300+ weekly tours, frequent writes and upserts, and the need for rapid, low-downtime growth in a competitive market.

They moved core services to MongoDB Atlas on AWS, using high-memory instances, a flexible schema, and a microservices approach to handle large write workloads and simplify scaling and migrations. Atlas enabled a two-week Seattle MLS integration, order-of-magnitude higher write capacity, fast state expansion, and zero-downtime upgrades—helping Open Listings serve thousands of buyers, facilitate over $500M in home purchases, save customers $4M+ in fees, and accelerate feature development so they can keep offering 50% commission refunds.

Open Listings

Alex Farrill

Co-Founder and CTO