Houzez — find your place in Bulgaria.

The brief.

Houzez came to us with a hard problem: the Bulgarian property market is fragmented, listings go stale within days, and most platforms feel like they're stuck in 2010. They wanted something that felt as good as searching for an apartment on Idealista — but tailored for Sofia, Plovdiv and the Black Sea coast.

The team was small. Two founders, a part-time photographer, and a growing roster of agent partners. Whatever we built had to be editable by humans, scriptable for bulk imports, and fast enough to feel like a native app on phones — because that's where 78% of their traffic was coming from.

Constraints

• Bulgarian-first — all strings, all SEO, but with English available for foreign buyers
• Bulk import — agents send Excel exports from their existing CRM; we had to ingest them cleanly
• Three property types — sales, rentals, business rentals — each with different filtering needs
• Edit-friendly — the founders edit the site themselves; nothing custom should require a developer

Our approach.

We built on WordPress — which raised eyebrows initially — but with a heavily extended schema and a custom block library so the day-to-day editing experience feels nothing like a typical WP site. The CMS hides every irrelevant menu, and adds three custom post types: property, agent and district, each with rich relational fields.

Search is where we spent the most engineering time. The default WP search wouldn't have survived contact with real users, so we built a custom search index that combines free-text on titles + descriptions, geographic filters, range filters on price/sqm, and faceted counts that update as you type. Lighthouse scores stay above 95 on mobile because the heavy work happens server-side.

The agent portal

Agents have their own login. They can publish, update and unpublish their own listings, manage their incoming leads, and track which properties are getting the most attention. The portal is the same WordPress codebase, just with role-based access and a totally different UI shell — written in vanilla JS to keep the bundle tiny.

What we built.

None of these are individually rocket science. The trick was making them feel coherent — every interaction lives inside one polished UI that doesn't betray its WordPress roots.

Results, six months in.

Houzez launched in early 2025. We measured the wrong things at first (page views) before settling on what actually mattered: agents publishing, leads converting, and listings refreshing without manual help.

The Houzez team now ships listings updates and content changes daily without us. We do quarterly improvements based on their analytics — the next round adds saved-search email alerts and a richer agent profile page with social proof.

The stack.

Boring on purpose. Boring scales.

• WordPress with custom post types, REST extensions, and ACF Pro
• Custom theme — vanilla JS for interactivity, no build step beyond Sass
• Algolia for the search index, with a custom WP sync plugin we wrote
• Mapbox for the map view, geocoded against the official Bulgarian district registry
• SendGrid for transactional email, hooked into the agent CRM via webhook
• SiteGround hosting, with a CDN front and a Cloudflare WAF for the agent portal