Same questions, every listing
Purplebricks is the UK's biggest online estate agent - a fixed-fee model that took them to a market cap above £300 million and expansion into Australia and the US.
Their platform handled everything from valuations through to sales progression. But when a seller listed their property, there was no structured way for them to provide the details that agents actually needed. Property type, number of rooms, parking, tenure - all of it came through phone calls and back-and-forth emails.
Every new listing generated a predictable pile of follow-up questions, and agents were spending hours chasing the same information. And the data feeding into valuations was inconsistent, because it depended on who asked what, and when.
Three months, one clear brief
We had three months. Not long enough to rethink the platform, and that wasn't the ask.
The existing codebase was a large TypeScript and React application - the kind of system where you learn quickly which parts you can touch and which you can't. We built a property onboarding flow: a structured form that walked sellers through submitting their property details before an agent ever got involved.
Sounds simple. But fitting it cleanly into an existing platform was the real work. We couldn't redesign around the legacy - we had to design within it. Their architecture, their deployment process, their data model. All constraints we had to respect.
The harder call was how much to capture upfront without overwhelming sellers. Too many fields and people abandon the form. Too few and you're back to phone calls. We landed on a flow that covered the essentials - property type, rooms, features, condition - and structured the data so it fed directly into the valuation process.
Less chasing, sharper valuations
The immediate difference was agents stopped asking the same questions on every listing. The data coming in was structured and consistent, which meant valuations were sharper from the start.
It was a focused engagement - three months, one feature - but it removed a real bottleneck. It's a good example of how legacy system modernisation doesn't always mean a full rebuild. Sellers moved faster through onboarding, and agents got hours back in their week. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is one thing well, inside a system you aren’t being tasked to completely overhaul.
Need to ship improvements inside a legacy system you can't rebuild? See how we work.
Experience, pragmatism and humility
“BitBrawn have experience, pragmatism and humility that helped them immediately gain the trust and respect of our team. As a legacy from their engagement, we’re equipped with understanding how to improve our web application development cycles, front-end development environment and approach.”
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