Alohub
Real-estate web platform · tech lead of a team of seven · 2021 to 2023
A website builder for property developers: each client got a public site, an administrator with the quoting tool inside it, an inventory viewer and a sales CRM. I was the senior frontend developer and tech lead of the team behind it.
- The problem
- One team had to build a different website for every property developer.
- What I did
- I led a team of seven and built one editing engine for every section.
- The result
- Property developers configured and ran their own websites without engineers.
Every property developer wanted a different website, and one team had to build them all
Every property developer wanted its own brand, its own sections and its own layout, and no team can hand-build and maintain a bespoke website for each one. The only way it worked was as one product that each client configured for itself: fast to set up, and correct across every kind of section a client could add, from a photo gallery to a payment plan table.
Tech lead of the whole engineering team, and the frontend was mine to build
I was the senior frontend developer and tech lead of a team of seven. I wrote the frontend and made architecture calls with the backend team. The platform had two halves: one Next.js app that server-renders every client's public site, and Alohub, the administrator where a client builds that site, quotes a unit, and watches inventory, sales and leads.
I built one editing engine for every section type.
Alohub is where a property developer configures its own public website, and every kind of section needed a way to be edited. Instead of a bespoke panel per section type, I built one generic engine: about fifteen reusable controls, a declarative map saying which control edits which field, and one resolver that walks any nested path to reach it. Adding a section type became one entry in that map, with no new screen. That engine is the core of the framework the 75% comes from.
I built the quoting tool every client configured.
The quoting tool lived inside that same administrator, and it is how a buyer gets a real price for a real apartment. Every developer sold on its own terms: what percentage the deposit was, how long a quote stayed valid, how many instalments, how the discount moved with the size of the deposit. I built the tool that had to hold all of those rules and price a unit out of live inventory. A wrong number in a published quote is a legal exposure.
The live preview runs the visitor's own renderer.
The editing panel sits beside a live preview of the client's real public site, running the same renderer that serves visitors, so what you edit is what ships. I built the bridge on the browser's own messaging between the two frames, debounced 800 milliseconds so the preview stays smooth instead of redrawing on every keystroke. If the preview drifts from the real site, a client ends up publishing something they never actually saw.
A platform that launched sites in a fraction of the time
The platform ran in production: clients configured their whole public website in Alohub, from the hero image to the payment plans, and managed inventory, leads and sales reports. The generic editor is what made it economical, and the quoting tool is what made the numbers on it trustworthy. A client who wanted a new section on their site got it from the same engine every other client was already running.
I can find the one abstraction that removes repeated work for a whole team, build it, and lead seven people to deliver on top of it.