Client: Republik Real Estate · Industry: Real Estate — Sales, Leasing & Property Management · Country: United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi)
Overview
Republik is an Abu Dhabi real estate firm based on Al Reem Island, working across sales, leasing and property management. In the first phase of our work together, Wanas Apps built the Republik Unified Platform: a real estate operating system on Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho People and Zoho Catalyst.
The second phase faced outward. Republik's website still ran on its own separate system, apart from the CRM where listings, agents and leads now lived. We rebuilt rpublik.com so the website is driven by that CRM: what the team publishes in Zoho is what buyers and tenants see, and every enquiry comes straight back in as a lead.
The Challenge
The old website had four problems:
- Listings were maintained twice. Every home lived in the CRM and again on the website. The two drifted apart, so sold or rented homes stayed online and new ones arrived late.
- Enquiries could be lost. A form that depends on a live call to the CRM fails silently when that call fails, and nobody notices the missing lead.
- Portal publishing was manual. Pushing listings to Property Finder and Bayut, checking advertising permits and allocating reference numbers was hand work, done listing by listing.
- A rebuild could not cost existing search traffic. The old site had years of indexed property pages, guides and blog posts, and every one of those links needed to keep working.
The Solution
1. One source of truth: Zoho CRM
Republik's team manages properties, listings, agents, communities and FAQs in Zoho CRM. Published records are pushed from the CRM into the website's own fast database through a secured partner API, so the site never calls the CRM while a visitor waits. Pages stay fast and Zoho API limits stay out of the visitor's path. When a listing is unpublished in the CRM, it leaves the website without anyone touching the site.
2. Enquiries that cannot be lost
Every form on the site files its enquiry the same way: booking a viewing, an advisory call, a free valuation, a message to an agent, or a job application. The enquiry is stored first and confirmed to the visitor, then delivered to Zoho CRM as a Lead with a follow-up Task. If the CRM is unavailable, a scheduled job retries every five minutes, so an outage delays a lead but never loses one.
3. Property Finder and Bayut, run from the CRM
A Zoho Catalyst listings service replaced the Deluge scripts Republik used to rely on. From the Property record in the CRM, the team can:
- publish, update or withdraw a listing on Property Finder and Bayut together
- validate the advertising permit before anything goes out
- allocate the next free reference number automatically
- reconcile what the CRM says against what the portals show
Leads that arrive through Bayut are pulled back into the CRM on a schedule.
4. Republik Concierge, an AI assistant with a scope
The new site includes Republik Concierge, an AI assistant built on Cloudflare Workers AI. It answers questions about Republik's listings, communities and services, and declines to drift off topic. When a visitor is ready to talk to a person, a single "send my details to the team" step hands them over as a CRM lead. Like every enquiry, that handover is tracked as a conversion, and the assistant is rate-limited against abuse. (See our AI-Ready Zoho service.)
5. A rebuild that keeps its search history
We crawled the old site and mapped every URL it was known to have — sitemap pages, live and delisted property pages, all blog posts and category links — to a single redirect that lands on a working page, with no chains. A property URL that later sells redirects to its community guide instead of a dead page. The redirect map is covered by automated tests.
6. Built to be trusted
- Privacy by default: analytics run cookieless until a visitor accepts; Google Analytics never loads without consent, and both consent choices are offered as equal buttons.
- Tested on every major browser engine: an end-to-end suite of 300+ tests runs on Chrome, Safari and Firefox. It caught two Safari-only defects, and both were fixed.
- Structured for search and AI answers: schema markup, a generated sitemap and
llms.txtdescribe the business to search engines and AI assistants.
The Results
- One place to publish: a listing approved in Zoho CRM appears on the website and on both portals from the same record.
- No silently lost enquiries: every form submission is stored before it is delivered, and retried until the CRM accepts it.
- Less portal admin: permits, references and portal status are handled by the platform, not by hand.
- Search history protected: every known legacy URL resolves to a live page.
- A 24/7 first responder: Republik Concierge answers routine questions and passes serious buyers and tenants to the team.
Why it matters for real estate firms
A real estate website is only as current as its listings, and only as useful as the leads it captures. Running the website from the same Zoho CRM the agents work in removes the double entry that makes websites go stale. It also puts every enquiry where follow-up actually happens. Our Real Estate Operating System packages this approach for real estate firms across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Want your website to run on your CRM?
Whether you need a full web platform on Zoho Catalyst or want your existing Zoho CRM to power listings and lead capture, book a free consultation and we'll show you how.