Six live sites, six different jobs

The risk here is the words, not the code. Everything on it is a representation somebody holding a licence has to stand behind, and appraisal and valuation are not interchangeable when you do. So the build refuses to deploy rather than publish something wrong: twelve guards run before anything goes out, every page carries the exact commit it was built from, and a check runs every two hours against the live site and raises a ticket the moment what is serving stops matching what was approved.

Three things behind it were built rather than bought. A customer record system that takes every enquiry, tracks it through to settlement and drives the marketing and the business listings off the same records. An appraisal tool that produces a defensible figure from a seller’s own numbers. And a live chat that answers on the site, inside written guardrails, with its own gate in the build so it cannot start saying things the licence does not allow.

A broker’s pipeline is the business. Renting it back from somebody else is how you end up unable to leave, so it sits in the same repository as the site and is deployed by the same pipeline.

The hard part is that the facts move. A price read in August is not a price in October, and a site that quotes one is making a claim it cannot support. So every price is read off the live product page, the date is printed on the card, and the build refuses to publish a figure older than ten days without a person signing it off. The structured data sent to Google carries the same window, because telling a search engine a price is good for a month while the site calls it stale is two different answers to one question.

Where a link earns a commission it says so on that product, and where it does not it stays quiet. That distinction is per product rather than per shop, so a retailer with one paid link and eleven unpaid ones is never described as a commercial relationship it is not in.

This one is here because of what was not built. It runs on Shopify. We can write a checkout, and writing one here would have been the wrong call: the store has to take money reliably for the few weeks a year that matter, and a custom cart is not paid for once, it is paid for every year afterwards in maintenance, card compliance and the week in December when something breaks and there is nobody to ring.

So the work went where it changes the outcome. The personalisation, the product data behind a catalogue of thousands, the postage cut-offs that decide whether a present arrives, and the theme. Shopify keeps the parts that are somebody else’s problem and should stay that way.

The hard part is permission, not pages. A business owner puts the things nobody else knows into it: whose name the alarm account is in, when the lease option closes, who holds the logins. Then they give their manager, their leading hand and their accountant a seat. Each seat opens only the sections the owner ticked, an adviser’s seat starts able to see nothing, and employee records are refused to an outside adviser by the database itself rather than by a setting somebody could talk themselves past. Every change an owner or administrator makes is written to a record nothing in the product can edit.

It is shaped around the day a business changes hands. Twelve sections are named before the owner starts, five of them registers with the same fields on every line, and the home screen counts what is held rather than scoring it. When the owner sells, the records become one dated pack a buyer, a broker or a bank can read, after the accountant has checked it.

The hard part is the data, not the website. Applications arrive from the NSW Planning Portal, two Queensland councils and the ACT Government, each in its own format and under its own licence. Every week they are cleaned, applications at one address are merged, each job is sorted into the trade packs it belongs to, and owner names are dropped and never looked up. Each source is credited in the words its licence asks for.

Then it is built around what a tradie does on Monday. The email and spreadsheet arrive with map pins. The dashboard puts every job on a map, turns the houses you tap into a letterbox run in driving order from your yard, brings a house back when it lodges its next stage, and shows the work you won against what the list costs. The letterbox law for each state is printed on every list, and any owner can remove their address.