A continuing education platform for real estate associations nationwide

From business-coaching website to nationwide continuing-ed platform

When Rialto Academy came to us in 2018, they were a business coach with a website. Today they're a continuing-education provider serving real estate associations from Kansas City to Florida, running classes, events, and member fees on a stack we've built and maintained alongside them — Ramco CRM, Thinkific, custom admin UIs, webhook automation, and the integration glue holding it together.

Most of what Rialto does for its members happens inside the software. Our work for Rialto is keeping that software ahead of where the business is going.

At a glance

• Client since: 2018
• Headquarters: Austin, Texas
• Industry served: Real estate associations and MLSs nationwide
• Stack: Custom web platform, Ramco CRM, Thinkific LMS, Brilliant Directories, Stripe, Zapier, custom admin UIs
• Active partners: KCRAR (Kansas City), Heartland MLS, GCAR, R World, with a Miami-area merger in flight pushing membership toward 93,000
• Services delivered: Web platform, LMS integrations, custom admin tooling, Ramco/Thinkific sync, payment infrastructure, ongoing engineering

The challenge: a coach's website that had to become an enterprise platform

Rialto's growth thesis was that real estate associations needed continuing education built specifically for the way associations actually run — with member-type pricing, event registration, course enrollment, certificates, and merger-grade data portability. The off-the-shelf LMS market wasn't built for that. Each new association partner brought a new SSO target, a new member-type structure, a new event calendar, a new fee schedule, and the expectation that everything would work the day they signed.

The technical problem compounded fast:

• Polling instead of events. Member updates flowed between Ramco CRM and Thinkific on a polling schedule, which meant every minute of lag was a real-world support ticket.
• Free events broke the e-commerce flow. Zero-fee classes bypassed Stripe, which meant guest registration data simply wasn't getting captured.
• Member-type fees couldn't flex. Different associations needed different fee structures for the same class — not a configuration the existing tooling supported.
• Mergers were on the calendar. A pending Miami-area merger projected membership toward 93,000, which meant any tooling that didn't scale gracefully was about to be the bottleneck.

The solution: the integration spine, not just the website

Webhook-based sync between Ramco and Thinkific

We've shifted Rialto off polling and onto webhook-driven integration with Ramco — real-time member status updates, automatic enrollment provisioning, and a Zapier layer for the workflows that don't need first-party code. When a member's status changes in Ramco, Thinkific reflects it. When a class enrolls, the audit trail is immediate.

Custom admin UIs the office actually uses

Rialto's team can manage calendar tags, banner copy, card colors, parent-tag categories, and event registrations from purpose-built admin interfaces — without filing engineering tickets. We built a self-service troubleshooting screen that lets staff repair user/enrollment mismatches with a single click, the kind of operational tooling that keeps a small team running a national platform.

Member-type and seat-fee flexibility

For associations like KCRAR running paid seat reservations, no-show fees, and add-on product purchases mid-registration, we've built the metadata model and registration logic to support variable fee structures by member type — including the rules for hiding no-show fees during trial periods, refund handling, and Stripe lifecycle for payment tokens.

SSO and merger plumbing

Each association partner gets its own SSO target, branded campus, and login flow. As the Miami merger proceeds, we're building the consolidation paths so member records, course history, and certificates roll up cleanly without manual reconciliation.

Ongoing weekly engineering

Rialto has a standing weekly check-in with our engineering team. New association partners, new fee structures, new course types, and new bugs all flow through that cadence — same engineers, same context, same codebase, every week.

The outcome

Rialto stopped being a website years ago. It's a platform — and one of the few continuing-education platforms in the country that treats real estate associations as the primary customer instead of an afterthought. Each new association partner is a configuration change, not a rebuild. Each new course type, each new fee model, each new SSO target slots into a system that's been hardened by seven years of real production traffic.

The seven-year partnership tells the story plainly: Rialto's roadmap has changed half a dozen times, the customer base has grown by orders of magnitude, and the underlying engineering team hasn't.

Visit rialtoacademy.com →