Real Estate Website Development
A bilingual property site for a Carpathian real estate agency. Someone else designed and built it — I am the developer who works on it now, and that distinction is the whole point of this page.
Short answer
DS Property is a real estate agency in the Ukrainian Carpathians selling land, houses, turnkey builds, rentals and commercial space. The website is a bilingual (English / Ukrainian) Next.js application hosted on Netlify. I did not design or build it — an earlier development team did. I hold repository and deployment access and handle ongoing development: new sections, content, structured data and search work. If you have a site in the same position, that service is website maintenance & support.
Why this page reads differently
Every other project in this portfolio is a site I designed and built from an empty folder. This one is not, and putting it here without saying so would have been the easy dishonest option — a portfolio grid implies authorship whether or not the word appears.
So the credit sits at the top of the page instead: DS Property's website was designed and built by another team before I was involved. What I do is the part that comes after launch, which for most real businesses is where the majority of the work actually lives.
What the ongoing work covers
- New sections and pages inside the existing design system
- Bilingual content — every string exists in both English and Ukrainian
- Structured data, sitemap and metadata as the site grows
- Search and analytics work on pages that already exist
Two Languages, One Codebase
The site runs English and Ukrainian off a shared routing layer, so every new section has to ship as a matched pair — same structure, same metadata, same schema, translated strings. It is the constraint that decides how any addition gets built, and it is the reason "just add a page" is never just adding a page here.
What I Did and What I Didn't
The honest version of a shared project, written out. It costs nothing to be specific, and it removes any argument later.
Not mine
Done before I had anything to do with this site.
- Original visual design and brand
- The Next.js application and its architecture
- The page structure the site launched with
- Photography and the original copy
Mine
The work I am responsible for now.
- Ongoing development on the live codebase
- New sections built to match the existing system
- Bilingual content in English and Ukrainian
- Structured data, sitemap and search work
Inheriting a website someone else wrote
Most working websites outlive the person who made them. The agency moves on, the freelancer stops answering, the in-house developer changes jobs — and the business is left with a site that still earns money and nobody who dares touch it. That is a far more common situation than a blank-page build, and it is a legitimate service rather than a consolation prize.
The temptation on inheriting a codebase is to rewrite it, because reading someone else's decisions is slower than making your own. It is almost always the wrong call. A live site with real traffic and real rankings carries value that does not survive a rewrite, and a client who paid for a build once should not have to pay for it twice because the new developer preferred a different framework. The discipline is to work inside the system that exists, match its conventions, and only replace what is genuinely broken.
The other half is attribution, and it is worth being blunt about it. A developer who claims someone else's build is one repository history away from being caught, and the client is the one who ends up embarrassed by association. Saying "I develop this site, I did not design it" costs nothing, cannot be contradicted, and demonstrates the exact quality a business is trying to buy when it hands over the keys to something that is already working.
Questions about taking over an existing site
Can you take over a website another developer built?+
Yes, and it is a normal part of what I do. What I need is repository access, the hosting account and the domain registrar login. If the code is a framework I work with — Next.js, WordPress, plain PHP or static — I can usually start shipping changes within a few days. If the previous developer left no repository at all, that is a rebuild conversation instead, and I will say so rather than patch around it.
Do you claim you designed sites you only maintain?+
No. On this page the credit is stated plainly: DS Property's site was designed and built by an earlier team, and my role is ongoing development. Portfolio pages where I did the whole build say designed and built, and pages where I rebuilt an existing brand say rebuilt. The label matches the work — anyone can check a repository history in about ten seconds, so there is nothing to gain by blurring it.
What does ongoing development on an existing site cost?+
It is quoted per piece of work rather than as a package, because inherited codebases vary enormously. A small content or layout change is usually under an hour. A new section with translations, schema and sitemap entries is a day or two. If you would rather have a fixed monthly arrangement, the website maintenance and support page covers what that includes.
What happens if the original developer comes back?+
Nothing awkward, because the work is additive and version-controlled. Every change is a commit with a message, the site stays on its original stack, and the client owns the repository, the hosting and the domain. Two developers can hand a codebase back and forth as long as neither of them rewrites the other's work for the sake of it.
More on website maintenance & support · Website migration · Pricing
Have a website nobody is looking after?
If the person who built it has moved on, I can take it over and keep it moving — or tell you honestly that it needs rebuilding. See maintenance & support.
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