MJL Development is building Terra Dunte, three seven-storey houses with 183 apartments between Riga's centre and Mežaparks. Construction starts in 2027, so the website went live about a year and a half before the first handover, in Latvian and English, with every apartment's price and plan on it from day one. We designed and built the site and the CMS behind it, and the client fills the CMS in themselves.

How people use a real estate site

Our audience research found that a first visit is mostly about looking around. The visitor wants to know what the project is and whether they like it. If they do, they come back for the location, the developer and the number of houses, and on later visits they want the numbers for particular apartments: the price per square metre, a plan they can download, a phone number.

Most real estate sites serve one of those visits well and treat the others as an afterthought. Meanwhile the developer's sales team has to keep 183 prices and statuses correct in whatever system the site runs on.

So the goal became: one site that works on the first visit and on the fifth, and that the client can update without calling us.

The order we built it

We laid the site out in that order: the home page for the first visit, the apartments section for both first-time and returning visitors, with the drill-down to a floor plan at the top of the page and the full list underneath it.

Three clicks to an apartment

Pick a building, pick a floor, and the plan shows what’s available.

The apartments section is three screens deep. The first shows the whole quarter from the air with the house marked. The second shows the façade with floors two to seven as clickable bands. The third is the floor plan, where every apartment is drawn as a clickable shape with its number and the sold or reserved ones carry a padlock. Under each screen sits the same list of sixty apartments with its filters, the price and area sliders and a checkbox that hides what is unavailable.

Everything a buyer checks before the call

It lists the rooms, the total, living and outdoor areas, the price and the price per square metre, whether there is a balcony or a terrace, and parking and storage as add-ons. The three finishing options have a gallery, and the finishing and technical specifications and the floor plan are there as PDFs.

The Home and About pages let buyers explore

The home page opens with a view across the city, then the project, a strip of what is nearby, a gallery, and a construction timeline from early 2027 to the first handover in 2028. The About page goes one level down for the visitor who comes back: the advantages, the three key figures of the project, the location, the timeline again, and the developer. A small floating thumbnail sits in the corner of every page, and a click opens the reservation offer: 1,000 € reserves an apartment before construction starts, with a choice of three finishes.

The CMS the client fills in themselves

MJL Development has several projects running and wanted to enter the content without an agency in the loop, so the CMS had to make a large set of apartment data easy to add and easy to keep current. A building has to exist before a floor can be added to it, and a floor before an apartment, and each carries the outline that highlights it in the visual browser. The apartments themselves sit in one large table that can be filtered, with the number, rooms, areas, technical details and features in the row, plus a note that appears under the price on the public page. The edit view adds the plan image, the PDFs and the finishing package.

Key takeaways

The first visit and the fifth want different things, and both fit on one page if the looking comes first and the data second.
Once the site is live, the apartment data is what the client works with every week, so the CMS deserves the same design attention as the front end.
For homes that don't exist yet, good renders at a calm pace did more than animation would have.

If you're selling homes that aren't built yet and expect to change a hundred prices before they are, we've done this before, for Heila Parks and Tērbatas Dārzs. Let's talk.