Property Search Portal

Buyers couldn’t see what was for sale, and the sales team couldn’t see who wanted to buy. The company sold new projects and resale properties through printed brochures, price lists, spreadsheets and phone calls.

Prices and availability went out of date within days of printing. Enquiries from newspaper ads, property portals and site visits were written into personal notebooks, so leads were lost when a salesperson was busy, on leave or moved on. Every project launch meant designing new brochures and starting the marketing from scratch.

We spent the first month with the sales team, site managers and recent buyers.

• Buyers start with budget, locality and possession date. Everything else came later, so search had to lead with those three.
• They want to see where it is. Distance to work, schools, hospitals and the main road decided more visits than any brochure photo.
• Sales lost leads in the gaps between an ad running and someone calling back. Speed of reply mattered more than anything else.
• The sales office kept the real availability, on a sheet that nobody outside it could see.

The portal lets buyers search by city, locality, budget, size (1, 2, 3 or 4 BHK, plots and shops), property type and possession date, with ready-to-move and under-construction homes clearly separated. Results show on a list or on a map, with nearby properties grouped so the map stays readable.

Buyers can shortlist properties, compare them side by side, and see each property’s photos, floor plan, carpet area, amenities and location on one page. The portal was built to work on the phones buyers were starting to use for everything, not only on desktop.

Every new project gets its own microsite inside the portal, ready on the first day of bookings:

• the location map with the distances that matter;
• amenities, specifications and floor plans for each unit type;
• the price list and the construction-linked payment plan;
• a brochure download that asks for a name and phone number first;
• construction updates with photos, month by month;
• site visit booking with a choice of date and time.

The team creates a new microsite from the admin panel, so a launch no longer starts with a blank page.

Every enquiry is captured as a lead with its source:

• forms on the portal and on each microsite;
• dedicated phone numbers and landing pages for each newspaper ad, so every ad can be measured;
• enquiries forwarded by property portals, read from their emails automatically;
• walk-ins and site visits, entered by the site team on the spot.

New leads are assigned to salespeople in turn and alerted by SMS and email the moment they arrive. Duplicate enquiries from the same buyer join their existing lead instead of starting a new one. Each salesperson has a follow-up list with the next call date for every lead, and managers see which sources bring buyers who actually visit and book.

Each project’s inventory is tracked unit by unit: tower, floor and unit, marked available, on hold, booked or sold. When the sales office books a unit, the website shows it straight away, so a sold unit is never offered again. Price list changes are saved as new versions, and every booking records the price list it was made on.

The portal is built on Laravel and MySQL, with jQuery and Bootstrap for a responsive front end that works on phones and desktops. Google Maps powers map search and location pages, photos and floor plans are stored on Amazon S3, and an SMS gateway sends lead alerts.

Every locality, project and property has its own clean address, title and description, all listed in a sitemap, so buyers searching for homes in a locality find the right page.

The portal launched alongside the company’s next project, whose microsite went live on the first day of bookings. Existing projects and resale listings were loaded and checked against the sales office’s records before launch.

We supported the portal for years afterwards. New projects and listings were added, and when RERA came into force in 2017, each project’s RERA registration number was added to its microsite and advertising pages.

Buyers find properties on their own, at any hour, with prices and availability that stay current. Every enquiry reaches the right salesperson within seconds and stays on record, managers see which sources bring buyers who book, and each new project launches with its own microsite on day one.