Bauwens Vastgoed is an estate agency near Antwerp that sells and lets homes and guides buyers and sellers from the first question to handing over the keys. All its files live in its CRM, and a good share of its enquiries come through its own website.

The challenge

The old site ran on a website builder and it kept hitting the same wall: speed. Pages made visitors wait, which is the last thing you want from someone who is comparing homes. That was the immediate reason to move.

On top of that, there was little the agency could do itself. A new article, an agent joining the team, a job advert or simply a different image on a page: none of it worked without help. Whatever you cannot change yourself waits until somebody else has time for it.

Our approach

We rebuilt the site as custom software, with speed as the starting point rather than an afterthought. For the listings we set one rule: the CRM is the single source of truth, and the website never writes back to it. The listings follow on their own, every hour, and if the agency does not want to wait it triggers the sync itself. The change is then online within a minute.

For everything that does come from the agency itself, we built an editing environment. Articles, team members, job adverts and the imagery on each page are edited and published there, without us.

The result

The first thing the agency noticed was the speed: the site that used to stall now opens straight away. The listings are right without anyone keeping an eye on them, and the content the agency wants to keep up to date, it now keeps up to date itself.

Where it goes from here

The partnership carries on. We host the site and keep extending the editing side, so the agency will soon be able to build new pages itself as well. In the meantime we helped Bauwens Vastgoed build a second brand, Lijfrentemeester.