Real Estate Software Development

Real Estate Software Runs on Legacy Code. That Is the Problem and the Opportunity.

The global PropTech market is valued at $44.6 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $104.6 billion by 2034 at 11.2% CAGR (Fortune Business Insights). AI adoption in CRE has jumped from 5% to 92% of companies running pilots in just three years (JLL). Cloud-native operators trade at 50-120 basis points lower cap rates than their peers. The opportunity is real.

But the majority of real estate platforms in production today were built five, ten, or fifteen years ago on frameworks and architectures that are now end-of-life. PHP 5, Kohana, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, jQuery-heavy frontends, monolithic deployments with no CI/CD. They work. They also cannot scale, cannot integrate with modern APIs, and cannot support the AI and analytics features that buyers now expect.

EltexSoft is a real estate software development company. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015. We build property management platforms, appraisal management systems, real estate marketplaces, and PropTech products. We also migrate legacy real estate codebases to modern frameworks, which is how we started working with PropertyRate.

What We Built

PropertyRate: 50-State Appraisal Management Platform

PropertyRate is a residential appraisal management company headquartered in Orange, California. Founded in 2004. Licensed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. 10,000+ appraiser partners. Serves banks, credit unions, non-bank mortgage lenders, mortgage servicers, and investors.

Their proprietary Operations Management and Integrated Service Execution Platform was built from the ground up to manage the entire appraisal lifecycle: order placement, appraiser assignment, compliance tracking, status updates, report delivery, invoicing, and client communication. The platform runs thousands of appraisal orders daily.

The platform was originally built on Kohana, a PHP framework that reached end-of-life in 2017. By the time we engaged, Kohana had no security patches, no community support, and no path forward. The codebase worked but was increasingly difficult to maintain, extend, and hire for.

We migrated the entire platform from Kohana to Laravel. Database schema modernization. API restructuring. Third-party integration rewiring (payment processors, compliance tools, appraiser networks). The migration was performed without downtime on a system processing live appraisal orders daily.

PropertyRate also has iOS and Android apps (available on the App Store and Google Play) built for their appraiser portal, giving field appraisers mobile access to assignments, status updates, and report uploads.

What We Build for Real Estate

Property Management Platforms

Tenant portals, lease lifecycle management, rent collection and payment processing, maintenance request workflows, vendor coordination, inspection scheduling, and financial reporting. Multi-property dashboards for portfolio operators managing residential, commercial, or mixed-use properties.

Real Estate Marketplaces

Two-sided platforms connecting buyers, sellers, agents, appraisers, and service providers. Listing management, MLS/IDX integration via RESO Web API, map-based search with Elasticsearch, lead capture and routing, document management, e-signature integration, and scheduling. Payment processing for transaction fees and service marketplace models.

Appraisal and Valuation Systems

Order management, appraiser panel management, USPAP compliance tracking, automated assignment algorithms, turnaround time monitoring, quality review workflows, and multi-format report delivery. This is what we built for PropertyRate and it is our deepest vertical.

Analytics and AI

Automated valuation models using comparable sales data, predictive pricing for rental and purchase markets, lead scoring for agent CRMs, tenant behavior analytics, document extraction from lease agreements and inspection reports, and natural language property search.

Framework Migration

Legacy PHP (Kohana, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, WordPress-based platforms) to modern Laravel. Legacy frontend (jQuery, Angular 1.x) to React or Vue. Database migration and API restructuring. This is not a rewrite from scratch. It is a systematic migration that preserves business logic while replacing the infrastructure underneath it.

The 2026 PropTech Stack

The default stack for real estate software in 2026 is Laravel on the backend, React or Vue on the frontend, PostgreSQL for the core database, Elasticsearch for listing and property search, Redis for caching, and AWS or GCP for hosting. Python comes in as a service layer for automated valuation models, lead scoring, or any machine learning workload.

We build with all of these. Our strongest real estate stack is Laravel (the PropertyRate platform runs on it), and we have deep experience with React, Vue, and Nuxt.js for frontends. Our mobile team builds native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) as well as cross-platform with React Native.

For real estate companies operating in regulated environments (mortgage lending, appraisal management), we build with the same security rigor we apply to our healthcare work: encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access control, audit logging, and documented compliance procedures.

What It Costs

Senior real estate engineer (dedicated): $50-99/hr. A full-time dedicated developer costs $8,000-$16,000/month.

By project type:

Property management MVP: $40K-$80K, 3-5 months.

Listing portal with MLS integration: $60K-$120K, 4-6 months.

Appraisal management platform: $100K-$250K, 6-10 months.

Real estate marketplace (web + mobile, payments, search): $120K-$300K, 6-12 months.

Framework migration (Kohana/CodeIgniter to Laravel): $50K-$150K, 4-8 months depending on codebase size.

Annual maintenance: 15-20% of build cost.

Compare to US PropTech agencies at $100-$250/hr. Our $50-99/hr rate with senior-only engineers and a 3+ year average engagement delivers 40-60% lower total cost of ownership.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique real estate software development company. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

Our real estate client is PropertyRate, a 50-state appraisal management company. We also build with Laravel (our primary real estate backend), React, Vue, Django, iOS, and Android.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

We are not a 500-person offshore factory. We don’t build demo apps and disappear. We build real estate platforms that process thousands of transactions daily, and we stay to maintain them.

30-minute technical call. Bring your legacy codebase, your MLS integration challenge, or your PropTech product idea. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

Talk to us →