Reference build · fictional agency
Ashcombe & Co
A complete property platform for Dubai and Abu Dhabi — search, area guides, agents, enquiries — on a working back office with four AI features. Built end to end as a demonstration, so a real brief can be quoted against something that exists.
- Type
- Reference build
- Role
- Full-stack, end to end
- Status
- Live, public site
Why build an agency that does not exist
Clients ask whether a property site has been built before. A screenshot answers that badly and a template answers it dishonestly, so this is the answer: a whole platform, complete enough that the question stops being hypothetical and starts being about scope and price.
Ashcombe & Co is fictional and every page says so. The eight agents are invented, the licence numbers are made up, agent addresses use the reserved .example domain and the phone numbers come from the fictional 555 01xx block, so nothing here can reach a real inbox or ring a real phone. The name was checked against live UAE brokerages before it was used.
Every price can be interrogated
No figure is invented per listing. Sale price derives from floor area against a per-community band; rent derives from sale price through a gross-yield band. Each band is recorded as either sourced from market reporting or interpolated from comparable communities, and which is which is written down per community.
That matters because implausible pricing is the fastest way to lose a UAE client's confidence, and it is where most demonstrations fall over. Here a client can pick any number on the site and get an answer about where it came from.
The local detail is the point
Rent is quoted annually with a cheques-per-year figure, the way it is actually agreed. Agents are licensed under RERA in Dubai and ADREC in Abu Dhabi, because those are genuinely different regulators. Off-plan is a first-class listing type rather than a filter bolted onto sales.
The whole site runs in English and Arabic, and the same eight visual directions are switchable from the admin — the front door lets you see all eight, which turns “what should it look like?” into a conversation with something to point at.
Same screen, different role
The same Properties list, signed into twice. An admin sees the whole book — eighty listings across sixteen communities. Yasmin, an agent, sees eleven, and every row carries her name.
The scoping happens in the queries themselves rather than in the interface, so a scoped session cannot reach past its own records by editing a URL. Nothing about the navigation changes; only what it is allowed to return.
The back office, above
The capture is silent and unedited: the enquiry inbox with its lead column, one enquiry scored by AI into a tier that always shows its reasons, and a listing description drafted from facts already entered on the form.
The two design decisions worth noticing are refusals. The score is a closed three-word tier rather than a number out of a hundred, because a number reads as measurement when it is a suggestion — and the interface says so on screen: a suggestion, not a verdict. It never changes the enquiry's status. The drafting assistant writes into a form field and never publishes; every draft goes through the same validators as hand-typed text.
Listings, agents, communities, insights and users are all editable, every change lands in an audit trail, and enquiries export to CSV. Admin credentials are deliberately not published here.