Consume data from another Joomla site (web service?)

[babberoo]

I am building a component to store property information (location, num bedrooms etc) and display on the site. I also want to create a 'micro site' that consumes property information from the master. I think that I could do this either by hardcoding the database connection information in my micro site to access the master site DB, or maybe create a webservice that returns the information. Can anyone advise me what would be the better way to approach this?