Honders & Alting acts as an estate agent in the exclusive segment: country houses, villas, off-market sales. Offices in Oisterwijk, Eindhoven, Amsterdam and a handful of other cities, and alongside that properties in Spain, France and Italy. Anyone looking for a house like that does not look in a different place per country - they want one list with everything in it.
In this segment it is not about volume. There are no hundreds of homes online, and a visitor does not glance. They take their time, study the floor plan, walk through the 3D tour and come back a week later to look at it again. What counts then is not how fast the list loads, but whether every house is presented as it should be: good images, correct details, and nothing that distracts from the home itself. And whether a house that is not publicly for sale really is not publicly listed.
We have been building and maintaining that list since 2022. The Dutch properties are entered by the estate agents themselves, with all the images, floor plans and 3D tours that belong with a home like this. The foreign properties come from a partner’s records and are read in again every night. In the overview they sit side by side. Four years long, without anyone having to see the difference.
The challenge
A home in this segment is not a row in a database. It comes with a series of thirty images, often a video and a 3D tour, and sometimes the address may not even appear because the sale is off-market. You want to be able to enter that by hand per home, exactly as the estate agent intended it. At the same time the foreign properties sit with a partner in Spain, in a system of their own, and change there daily. Keeping that same thing up to date by hand would be a full day’s work. Two ways of filling the list, then, while the visitor filtering on price must notice none of it.
Two ways of filling the list, one overview - and the visitor must notice none of it.
Our approach
We set the home up as a content type of its own, and built two routes into it.
- A dedicated content type for homes with everything this segment asks for: asking price or rent, rooms, floor area and plot size, year of construction and status, plus a photo gallery, video and a 3D tour
- Manual entry for the Dutch properties, in an admin environment the estate agents use themselves - with ‘off-market sale’ as a category of its own
- An import script that walks through the Spanish partner’s XML feed every night: creating new homes, updating existing ones, taking withdrawn ones out
- One filterable overview across both routes, with a price slider, free search and a choice between list and gallery view
- The foreign properties also reachable per country, so that anyone looking only in France does not have to scroll past the Dutch villas
- Pages of their own for the affiliated estate agents, so that a home hangs on a face
The theme is custom and sits in version control with us: every change goes through a pipeline to staging first and only then to production. Hosting and monitoring run with us as well.
The result
The site has been live since May 2023 and has kept growing since: a news module, a price slider that starts at the lowest asking price, related homes underneath a property detail page, and in 2026 pages of their own for the affiliated estate agents. The foreign properties have run along automatically since October 2023.
What it mainly delivers is calm on the estate agent’s side. Entering a country house in Oisterwijk works the way it always did, and the Spanish properties are simply there in the morning.
The Spanish properties are simply there in the morning.
One list in which a country house in Oisterwijk and a house in Spain sit side by side - the one entered by hand, the other arrived overnight.
Let’s talk
Tell us about your challenge. We’ll think along.
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