Real Estate Auction Platform

Our client’s goal was to digitize their business by building an MVP of a real estate auction platform that would allow users to buy and sell properties and participate in online auctions.

There are 3 types of users on the real estate auction platform: sellers, buyers, and administrators. User registration begins with a standard procedure: filling in primary data about themselves. For sellers, registration is mandatory since it’s vital to verify the data’s integrity.

The Sloboda Studio team developed different registration processes for buyers and sellers. We made the seller registration more complex than the buyer registration since they need to verify their property ownership. 

As a result, we’ve implemented different fields for buyers and sellers to identify personal information.

We’ve implemented a listing property feature that allows sellers to create a new real estate property listing for selling or auction purposes. In addition, this feature enables the seller to provide detailed property information.

As for photos, we implemented a crucial feature: a seller can only upload clear and high-quality images of a particular format and resolution. 

Since the customers can’t view the auction estate physically, we created a virtual tour with a 360-degree viewing angle.

Considering that buyers start their search on a home page, we provided them with two options: using the main menu and selecting what kind of property they are trying to find or using a search bar and entering either the country’s name, city or zip code.

We made separate blocks for buyers and sellers. As a result, users receive the fastest way to find the options they’re looking for on the platform.

Next, a user is transferred to the search result page. We have created a comprehensive search system that displays listings with the common information about the property, including photos, starting bid, address, and others. On the right, we designed a map for better visualization.

This search menu is convenient because you can select all the information you need, starting from the property type and its price and ending with viewing the auction’s end time.

The property page is one of the most important pages since it allows buyers to place their bids, view the end date of the auction, and the starting price. 

It’s vital to use an auction timer on the side of the screen for user-friendly visualization. Now buyers can plan their future participation in an auction or see the actual time they have for bidding once an auction sale starts.

We have implemented the auction timer feature with the following options:

• displaying the date of an upcoming auction
• showing the time left before an auction starts
• indicating the time left for bidding before an auction ends

Moreover, the page includes detailed information about the auction property, such as beds, baths, lot size, land size, year built, lot status, and the property type. Users are able to view properties with images and addresses.

For this platform, it was essential to create an admin panel to manage the auction processes internally. We have created a simple system to better guide the auction administrators. 

Our team started with a simple dashboard where admins can view the number of:

• open auctions
• closed auctions
• in-progress auctions

For convenience, the admins can request a report with all the data for their needs.

We created a simple visual series in the admin property panel to view and edit data such as properties, type, activation date, starting bid, and actions.

In addition to the list of all posted properties, we included the list of live and closed auctions. 

Admins are able to stop any auction manually, impose a penalty, view purchase terms and define other settings.

As soon as a user registers on the platform, they are added as either sellers or buyers. The admin panel stores the completed information about them.

This feature is helpful for admins since the contact information can be used for marketing newsletters, editing users’ data, and regulating users who violate the platform policy.

March 2020 June 2020