Case study · Developer-broker, Bengaluru
A Drupal 7 site, rebuilt as a portal the owner runs.
Global Realtor (globalrealtor.co.in) has sold Bengaluru property for decades. Their website ran on Drupal 7 — a platform that reached end of life — so we rebuilt it as a custom property portal whose listings the owner's team posts and edits themselves.
Global Realtor (globalrealtor.co.in) is a Bengaluru developer-broker that has sold property since 1995. When Drupal 7 — the platform their website ran on — reached end of life, Creatisoul rebuilt the site as a custom-built property portal with its own editing studio. The owner's own team now adds and publishes listings, without a developer.
The challenge
The old site had earned its keep: years of property listings, hundreds of pages indexed by Google, buyers arriving from search. The content wasn't the problem — the platform was. Drupal 7 stopped receiving security updates in January 2025, and its age showed everywhere: slow pages, an admin built for developers rather than a property team, and no way for buyers to search, filter or compare listings.
Content couldn't rescue that. An unsupported CMS is a security liability you can't patch away — and those years of indexed property URLs carried search equity that a careless rebuild would have reset to zero overnight.
Before and after
| Feature | The new portal | The old site |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Custom-built, with its own editing studio | Drupal 7 — end of life Jan 2025 |
| Page load | Built to load fast on a phone | Slow — the platform's age showed |
| Listings | Owner-managed, in a visual studio | Developer-dependent admin |
| Buyer experience | Search, filter, shortlist, compare | No way to search, filter or compare |
| Lead capture | Every enquiry emailed to the owner, with the page it came from | Scattered across pages |
Verdict: same business, same listings — the platform was the ceiling.
What we built
Most real-estate websites are brochures with a contact form. Buyers don't browse brochures — they search, filter, shortlist and compare. So we built GCR a portal, designed around how property buyers actually behave:
- Search that works like buyers expect. Filter by purpose, property type, budget and locality, then compare shortlisted properties side by side.
- A visual editing studio for the owner. Add a listing, crop and reorder photos, set the price, publish — no developer in the loop, no ticket queue.
- Lead capture on every page. Each enquiry is emailed to the owner the moment it lands, with the page it came from.
- A URL-preserving migration. We mapped the old site's property URLs onto the new portal, so existing Google rankings and inbound links carried over instead of 404ing.
The site and its editing studio are custom-built. Not a template with a logo swapped in — a site the business owns outright, built to capture enquiries and live for years.
How the rebuild ran
- 1
Audit and plan
Catalogue what the old site had earned — indexed pages, rankings, years of listings — and plan the rebuild so none of it resets to zero.
PHASE-01 - 2
Build the portal
A custom build: buyer search and side-by-side compare, the owner's visual editing studio, and lead capture wired into every page.
PHASE-02 - 3
Migrate everything
Listings and locality pages move over, with every old property URL mapped to its new home. The portal launched complete, not empty.
PHASE-03 - 4
Hand over the keys
GCR's team adds, edits and publishes every property themselves. The difference between a website the business has and one it runs.
PHASE-04
What it was built for
What the build was for: speed and findability compound. Pages that load fast keep the mobile buyers who would otherwise bounce; preserved URLs protect the rankings the old site had earned; and a buyer who can filter, shortlist and compare stays longer.
A note for the sceptics, because we'd ask too: this page carries only the figures we can stand behind. Absolute enquiry volumes, traffic and revenue stay private unless the client chooses to share them. More studies are being written up — see all case studies as they're published.