About a year ago, I decided to build an international real estate platform. Not for one country — for 50+. In 11 languages. With investment analytics, 3D maps, AI-powered search, and a full agent marketplace.
By myself.
I'm a mechanical engineering student by day, solo founder of JanusHermes by night (and weekends, and mornings, and honestly during some lectures too). This post isn't a polished success story — it's a brain dump of what I've learned building something way too ambitious with zero employees.
"How Hard Can It Be?"
Famous last words. Here's what I thought the project was:
A React frontend ✅
A Node.js backend ✅
Some property listings ✅
A search bar ✅
Here's what the project actually turned into:
Integrating government APIs from 7+ countries, each with their own authentication method, data format, and level of documentation quality (ranging from "decent" to "did an intern write this in 2011?")
Building a translation system that chains multiple providers because no single one handles Turkish-to-Japanese well enough
Figuring out that "address formats" are wildly different across countries and your database schema is wrong
Learning that 3D map tiles eat bandwidth for breakfast
Discovering that payment regulations differ in every single country
Realizing you need to understand visa law now, apparently
Every feature I build opens three new rabbit holes. It never stops.
Things Nobody Warns You About
Every Country Is a Special Snowflake
You'd think a property listing is a property listing. Bedrooms, bathrooms, price, location. Universal, right?
Nope.
In Turkey, listings include "aidat" (monthly building maintenance fees) as a primary metric. In the UK, you need to show EPC energy ratings or you're basically invisible. In France, the "diagnostic" documents are legally required to be displayed. In the US, HOA fees and school district ratings matter more than the property itself sometimes.
My database schema has been rewritten more times than I'd like to admit.
Government APIs Are... An Experience
I've integrated data from the UK (Land Registry, EPC, flood risk, crime, broadband), the US (Census Bureau), Germany (Destatis), France (INSEE), and others.
Some highlights:
One API returns XML wrapped in JSON wrapped in another XML envelope. Why? Nobody knows.
Another API's documentation is exclusively in the local language — including the error messages
One data source "updates monthly" but the last update was 8 months ago
I spent 3 days debugging a French demographics API only to discover the dimension key I needed was undocumented
The data is gold once you get it working, though. Official government statistics powering your investment analysis gives you credibility that no scraped dataset can match.
3D Maps Are Incredible (and Expensive)
We use CesiumJS with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. The result is stunning — you can virtually walk around any property's neighborhood in full 3D. Users love it.
But the tile requests add up fast. I had to build lazy loading, viewport-based tile fetching, and aggressive caching just to keep the bandwidth costs sane. It's one of those features where the "wow factor" is immediate but the optimization work behind it is invisible and endless.
SEO for a Multilingual Site Is a Nightmare You Can't Wake Up From
11 languages × thousands of property pages = tens of thousands of URLs that Google needs to index correctly. Hreflang tags, canonical URLs, language-specific sitemaps, prerendering a React SPA so search engines can actually read it...
I wrote a custom prerendering script that builds static HTML for every route before deploying to Cloudflare Pages. It works. It took me way longer than I expected. And every time I add a new page type, I have to update it.
Currently sitting at ~3,000 indexed pages. Small wins.
The Solo Founder Tech Stack
For anyone curious, here's what runs JanusHermes:
Frontend: React on Cloudflare Pages
Backend: Node.js / Express on AWS EC2
Database: PostgreSQL (RDS) + Redis for caching + MeiliSearch for property search
Storage: S3 for images, Rekognition for image moderation
Maps: Mapbox GL JS for 2D, CesiumJS for 3D
AI: AWS Bedrock for search intelligence and content generation
Payments: Iyzico (for Turkish market compatibility)
Is this the "right" stack? Probably not for everyone. But it's what I know, what I can afford, and what lets me ship fast alone.
What Keeps Me Going
Honestly? Seeing someone from a country I've never been to browse properties on a platform I built. The analytics dashboard showing users from 30+ countries visiting in a single week. An agent signing up from a city I had to Google.
International real estate is a massive, fragmented, underserved market. The big portals optimize for domestic buyers. Nobody's building the global layer properly. That's the gap.
Advice for Solo Builders
If you're building something ambitious alone, here's what I wish I'd internalized earlier:
Ship ugly, ship fast. My first version looked terrible. It still got users. Perfectionism is the enemy when you're a team of one.
Cache everything. Third-party APIs go down, rate limit you, or just randomly return errors. Cache aggressively and your users never notice.
Pick your battles. I can't compete with Zillow on US listings. I can compete on cross-border intelligence, investment analytics, and multilingual access. Know your edge and double down.
Automate your deployment. If deploying takes more than one command, you'll procrastinate on it. I use PM2 for the backend and Cloudflare Pages auto-deploys from Git for the frontend. Push and forget.
Talk to users, not just code. I spent months building features nobody asked for. The features that actually got traction were usually simpler than what I had planned.
What's Next
Currently working on:
Expanding the agent marketplace — onboarding agencies from new countries
AI-powered property comparison reports across countries
Mobile experience improvements
More data integrations (always more data integrations)
If you're into proptech, real estate data, or just enjoy watching a solo founder slowly lose his mind building something way too big — follow along. I'll be posting more of these.
And if you're curious, the platform is live: janushermes.com
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