Project Overview
A UK commercial property search portal (competing with CoStar and EGi) needed to rebuild their legacy platform...
Technology Stack
Compliance & Standards
The Challenge
A UK commercial property search portal (competing with CoStar and EGi) needed to rebuild their legacy platform — a 2010 PHP monolith with no API, no mobile support, and slow search (12-second average page load). The new platform needed: sub-1-second search across 140,000 commercial property listings, HMLR and EPC API integration for property data enrichment, an agent CMS for listing management, and a subscription billing model. UK GDPR for property searcher data and PECR for marketing were the requirements. Budget: £160,000.
Our Approach
Elasticsearch for Property Search
Elasticsearch for full-text and geospatial search: 140,000 listings indexed with property type, size, rent/sale price, postcode polygon, EPC rating, availability, and keywords.
Geospatial search
radius search, polygon search (draw on map), and OS postcode sector lookup.
Search latency
- p95 <
- 400ms.
Autocomplete
typeahead for location (OS Places API) and property reference.
HMLR Commercial property data
- Price Paid Data (commercial transactions) via HMLR Linked Data API.
- EPC Register API (MHCLG): energy performance certificate for each property — displayed as part of listing.
Companies House API
occupier company information (registered address, company status, SIC code).
Automated enrichment
new listings trigger background enrichment job.
Agent portal
listing creation (structured fields + free text), photo upload (S3 with automatic WebP conversion), floor plan upload, virtual tour embed (Matterport).
Listing publication workflow
agent submits → automatic data validation → published (or held for review if data quality flags triggered).
Subscription tiers
Basic (5 listings), Professional (50 listings), Enterprise (unlimited + API access).
PECR
cookie consent management (Cookiebot) — analytics cookies only with consent.
Email marketing
opt-in consent at registration with granular preferences (new listings alerts, market reports, partner offers).
UK GDPR Article 6
legitimate interest for property search data processing, consent for marketing.
Data minimisation
search history retained for 30 days (personalisation), not permanently profiled.
The Results
Platform live at 20 weeks, £152,000 — under budget.
Search latency: 12 seconds → 0.38 seconds p95 (32x improvement).
Listing count: 140,000 properties.
Agent portal adoption: 82% of registered agents created listings within 30 days of portal launch.
Subscription revenue: £24,000 MRR at month 6 (vs £0 on legacy — legacy was free).
ICO GDPR audit: zero findings.
Core Web Vitals: LCP 1.2s (green).
“12 seconds to 0.38 seconds. Every commercial property agent in the UK knows how unusable our old search was. The Elasticsearch rebuild is the product. £24,000 MRR in six months from a product that was previously free proves agents see the value in the new experience." — CEO, UK Commercial Property Portal (name withheld)”
Project Details
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