(01) - THE PROBLEM
The question beneath the brief.
I co-founded Signature Estates, a real estate agency, with three partners. Like most agencies, the business was running on WhatsApp chats, spreadsheets and memory.
Leads went cold because nobody followed up. Nobody had one clear view of which property was still available, which client wanted what, or where a deal stood. And when a deal closed, working out payments and agent commissions meant digging through messages.
Off-the-shelf CRMs are built for generic sales teams, not for how an Indian real estate brokerage actually works. So I built our own.
(02) - THE BUILD
Less noise. More signal.
A three-service platform, built in versioned milestones and used to run our own agency.
- Lead pipeline - leads from every source, stage tracking, follow-up tasks, site visit scheduling and a calendar, so no lead goes cold
- Client 360 - requirements, notes, communication logs and a single timeline that merges every interaction with a client
- Property and project inventory - listings, builders, projects, owners, availability history and nearby places on an OpenStreetMap map
- Client portal - a private link where clients see shared properties, save favorites and leave feedback, no login needed
- Deals and money - offers and negotiation history, deal stages, payments, invoices and deterministic commission splitting between agency and agent
- AI layer - a Python FastAPI service using Groq for natural-language property search ("3BHK under 1.2Cr near the airport") and auto-generated property summaries
- Role-based access - admins and managers see revenue and commissions; agents only see their own deals
- Analytics and revenue dashboards with Recharts
Under the hood: Express + Prisma + PostgreSQL API, Next.js 16 + React 19 frontend, and a FastAPI AI service reading the same database, with images on Cloudinary.
(03) - THE RESULT
Work that moves.
Signature Estates now runs on software we own, built around how our agency actually works.
- Every lead tracked from first enquiry to closed deal, with follow-ups that do not slip
- One source of truth for properties, clients and owners across the whole team
- Commission and revenue figures calculated automatically and visible only to the people who should see them
- Clients get a polished private portal instead of a flood of WhatsApp photos
Built milestone by milestone - V2.1 CRM and agent operations, V2.2 brokerage and deal management - with more on the roadmap.
