# A property marketplace for homes that aren't for sale yet

> Domain meets Pinterest: homeowners list a home they aren't selling yet, buyers follow, pin and even bid on it, and the sale starts with leads instead of an auction race. Built serverless on AWS with Next.js, for two first-time founders.

- Client: Two first-time founders in Australian real estate (Real estate)
- Role: Architect and lead engineer, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Delivered. At neap.co
- Capabilities: Marketplaces, MVP development, Serverless, Web scraping
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/property-marketplace/

## Outcomes

- A full property-listing platform, built in fast, lean iterations: listings, follows, pins and bids.
- Server-side rendered Next.js on serverless AWS, so search engines could index every listing and nothing ran idle.
- Listing data sourced legally, through a data partnership with a major property portal plus a scraper of our own.

## The situation

Selling a home in Australia is a race. The owner has a few weeks of campaign and an auction to find a buyer, often while financing the next home at the same time, and the agents on both sides are the only ones who don't find it stressful. Two founders wanted to change the shape of it.

Their idea: a listing site for homes that are **not for sale**. An owner curious about what their home is worth lists it anyway. Buyers browse it like Pinterest, follow it, pin it, and can even bid on it. By the day the owner decides to sell, they already have interested buyers, and can talk to them directly. A transaction compressed into a few stressful weeks becomes a conversation that can run for years, between buyers and sellers, without an intermediary in the middle.

## What I built

The whole product, with the look of a major property portal and the feel of Pinterest:

- **A Next.js front end with server-side rendering,** so every listing was a real page that search engines could index, running on AWS Lambda behind CloudFront rather than on a server that waits for traffic.
- **A serverless back end** on Lambda, with Aurora MySQL for the listings, the users, their pins and their bids.
- **The data.** A marketplace with no listings is a ghost town. We set up a data partnership with a major Australian property portal to use some of its data legally, and built our own web scraper for the rest.

We worked lean: very short iterations, each one shown to the founders and tested against what they learned from their customers.

## How it ended

The product was built, and never launched. The founders ran out of budget before they reached the market, and went back to their corporate jobs.

## What it taught me

The technology wasn't the problem. The lesson was about who we were building for: first-time founders have tight budgets and little runway, and lean customer discovery needs both. It shaped [neap.co](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/neap-co/index.md), and every engagement since: the plan has to fit the runway.

It also dates the project. This was before AI. What took us months could now be built in days, which changes everything for a founder with a small budget: today, these two would have launched.

## Why it matters to you

If you're a founder, I've sat on your side of the table, with the same budget pressure. I'll tell you what can be built for the money you have, and what to cut to get to market before the runway does.

## Built with

- [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [AWS Lambda](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-lambda/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [Amazon CloudFront](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-cloudfront/index.md): Use when it fits in The Stack
- [Aurora PostgreSQL](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-aurora/index.md): Use when it fits in The Stack
- [Node.js (plain JavaScript)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/nodejs-javascript/index.md): My default in The Stack
- Next.js
- React
- Server-side rendering
- Web scraping

## Related

- [Lambda, Web Functions or Workers?](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/compute-choice/index.md): the decision guide behind it
- [Cutting an AWS bill from US$240k a year to under US$40k](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/aws-bill-cut/index.md): a related project
- [Real-time ingestion for a large farm-sensor network](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/realtime-iot/index.md): a related project
- [Forecasting a weather-driven risk for farmers, from a research paper to agents](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/research-to-forecasts/index.md): a related project
- [From legacy ASP.NET and stored procedures to Node.js on serverless](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/dotnet-to-serverless/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)