Build log: the map-first portal that doubled Vertex Realty's enquiries
Vertex Realty came to us with 4,000+ listings and a portal that treated its map as an afterthought. Here's how we rebuilt it.
We spent the first two weeks in their offices, listening to enquiry calls and following brokers on site visits. The pattern was unmistakable: buyers asked the same five questions on every call, and brokers spent most of their day answering questions a listing page could answer. That gave us our thesis - win the search results, then remove every step between "found it" and "visited it."
Every portal we benchmarked treated the map as an afterthought bolted onto a list. We flipped it: the map IS the browse experience, with faceted filters riding on top. Prototype tests with eight buyers confirmed it - people navigate neighbourhoods, not sort orders.
With 4,000+ listings, naive client-side map markers froze mid-range phones for seconds on every pan. Clustering libraries helped but re-clustered visibly on every zoom, which felt broken.
We moved clustering server-side, keyed by zoom level and viewport bounds, and cached cluster tiles at the edge. Panning and zooming both stayed under 16ms.
The best schema decision we made: treating every listing as a content page first and a database row second. SEO paid the bills here.
Three months after launch, enquiries had doubled and organic search had become the single largest acquisition channel.