Building a property platform in the EU? Here's the stack we'd actually ship today · MLS, AVM, broker CRM, energy certificates, all locale-aware.
Every proptech founder asks the same question · build, buy, or wrap. The answer in 2026 is 'wrap most things, build the differentiator'. Here's the stack we'd ship today for an EU-serving platform.
Next.js 16 with server components, MapLibre GL for clustering (the OSS map stack avoids per-load Mapbox cost). Container queries on every card so the search reads cleanly on a 360px Android. Lazy-load photos, AVIF where supported, sub-second LCP on a cold cache.
Don't reach for a vector DB on day one. PostGIS handles 'within 2km of X', 'inside this district polygon', 'sorted by drive-time' for millions of properties. Index strategy: GIST on geom, btree on price, partial index on 'active'.
Algolia's pricing makes sense up to ~100k listings; above that, self-host Meilisearch on a small VPS. Either way, expose the search via a typed TS client so the frontend stays clean. Don't try to roll your own ranking · neither team has the bandwidth.
An AVM trained on Zillow data is useless in Budapest. Train per-market: scrape comparables (legally), normalise PLN / HUF / EUR, fit a gradient boosted model, eval against 6 months of held-out sales. Cap predictions at the comparable range so the model never invents a price.
EU energy certs are PDF · use a locally-hosted layout LM to extract energy class, area m², year built. Don't ship to OpenAI; the cert is a personal document. Floor plans go through SAM-style segmentation locally, output as SVG for the frontend overlay.
The buyer-facing search and the broker CRM share data but should be separate services with separate auth. Broker app is its own Next.js app behind SSO, with role-based access (broker / agency-admin / region-manager). Sharing a single user-table is a regret in year two.
Don't build everything from scratch. The bet is: pick one differentiator (AVM accuracy, search UX, or broker workflow) and outpace incumbents on that. Wrap the rest.
Founder, DField Solutions
I've shipped production products from fintech to creator-tooling · for startups and enterprises, from Budapest to San Francisco.
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