Harcourts

Harcourts is a global real-estate franchise founded in 1888 in Wellington, now headquartered in Brisbane and operating across roughly 11 countries. It runs 860+ offices with over 6,000 people and more than 106,000 properties under management. Their agents live in these systems every day — creating and updating listings, moving deals through sales and property-management workflows, and reporting on performance.

I built internal tooling for that network — not the public consumer site. The work centred on listings management, agent workflows and reporting: a clean, consistent data model for property and listing data, exposed through a responsive API the internal apps could depend on, with reporting fast enough to be useful across a large, distributed set of offices.

The core engineering challenge at this scale is consistency: keeping data models clean and normalised so listings behave the same everywhere, keeping the API responsive under real usage, and keeping reporting queries fast as data volume grows.

The outcome was tooling used in the day-to-day operation of the business — supporting agents' listing and workflow tasks and giving the network dependable reporting. Internal specifics are confidential, so this stays at a general engineering level.