Case study: Parcelas Patagonia, a custom real estate portal

Parcelas Patagonia is a portal for land and plots for sale in southern Chile and Patagonia, with around 290 listings. I built it from scratch, fully custom, around a simple idea: a buyer, Chilean or foreign, must find the right plot in minutes, and the owner must be able to list it for free.

A search built for land, not apartments

Generic property portals filter by bedrooms and bathrooms. Someone buying land wants to know other things. So the search combines a list and a satellite map side by side, with plot boundaries when you zoom in, and filters specific to land in Chile:

• its own land title (the plot has its own tax roll number);
• non-indigenous land;
• lake or river frontage;
• water, electricity and road access.

Every listing, ready to sell

Photo gallery, map location, features, a share button, direct WhatsApp to the seller and an automatically generated PDF brochure, ready to send or print. Listing is 100% free for owners, with no commission.

For foreign buyers: English and today's currency

Many Patagonia buyers come from abroad. The portal has a full English version: listings are translated automatically every day, and prices are shown in UF, pesos, dollars or euros at today's exchange rate, updated automatically.

Listings update themselves

Every night, the portal imports listings from a network of brokers: it adds new ones, updates prices and removes sold plots. Nobody has to copy and paste anything.

Ranking on Google: the hardest part

A new portal starts with zero authority. What we did:

• 34 city pages and 6 region pages, with available listings and local context, each with its own content.
• Unique text: broker descriptions were identical on other portals, and Google wouldn't index the listings. They're rewritten with AI while strictly keeping the facts.
• A guides blog answering what buyers search for: land titles, water, easements, indigenous land, regularisation.
• A .com domain: after 12 months, the .cl domain had only its homepage indexed. After moving to .com with 301 redirects, Google indexed the first pages the very next day.

Real data nobody else publishes

Because the portal holds the prices of all its listings, it calculates the median price per city. Unique content that Google values and buyers look for. For example, in August 2026:

Fast, even with hundreds of listings

The search once took 26 seconds to load. After optimising the database and keeping it "warm", it's down to 1.5 seconds. On a portal, speed is the difference between a visit and a buyer.

Got a portal or marketplace project?

A custom portal gives you what generic platforms can't: your niche's filters, your own listing rules and your own data. Parcelas Patagonia is built in .NET with SQL Server. See my custom software development service.