Home Portfolio Off-Market Buyer Portal

Building a Private Off-Market Buyer Portal for Hayden Roulston

Hayden Roulston sells homes in Christchurch that are never advertised on Trade Me or the public portals. Finding buyers was not his bottleneck. Keeping track of them was. Each off-market property lived in a Google Sheet that someone had to feed by hand, buyers had no way to say "I want this one", and interest trickled in through calls, texts and emails with no record tying it together. I designed and built a private, branded portal to take the sheet's place, and it was live within a week. Approved buyers sign in, look through the off-market homes, and ask for a private viewing of the specific property they like. Each request drops into a single CRM-style list that Hayden owns. The change saves around 3 hours of admin a week and gives him a private pipeline he can actually follow.

This project sits within my custom client-portal and workflow-automation work for NZ businesses.

The Hayden Roulston off-market buyer portal, a branded sign-in-only property catalogue

Project Information

Category :

Custom Software & Workflow Automation
Client :

Hayden Roulston
Service :

Off-Market Buyer Portal & Enquiry CRM
Status :

Live since 2025
Location :

Christchurch, New Zealand

Project Challenges

An off-market agent is only as good as his buyer list, and this one was held together with manual effort. Listings were kept up by hand, enquiries had no proper home, and nobody could see at a glance who wanted which property. It cost time, it let leads slip, and it all rested on one person remembering to update a spreadsheet.

A Sheet That Needed Constant Feeding – a chunk of every week went on building and updating off-market listings in a Google Sheet, one row at a time.
Every Detail Keyed In – bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, RV access and the written description were all typed out afresh for each new property.
No Way to Say "I Want This One" – a buyer could look at a listing but had no simple route to flag interest in that particular off-market home.
Interest Scattered Across Channels – calls, texts and emails all carried enquiries, none of them linked to the property in question, which made reliable follow-up hard.
Nowhere to See the Whole Picture – with no single view of who was interested, in what, and since when, follow-up came down to memory and some leads were missed.

Project Results

The finished portal was in use within one week, and it is a proper members-only product rather than a quick patch. Listings are handled in a purpose-built admin panel instead of a spreadsheet, and each enquiry goes directly into a lead list that Hayden owns.

Complete off-market buyer portal built and running inside one week
~3 hours a week of admin removed, which adds up to roughly 13 hours a month and over 150 hours a year
Automatic property setup, with bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, RV and other details filled in automatically rather than keyed in by hand
Drafted property overviews, with the "Property Insights" write-up generated for each listing, ready to review and publish
Every enquiry on record, each tied to its property in one CRM-style list, so follow-up is quick and interest does not go cold
A branded, sign-in-only portal that keeps the off-market offer properly private

Buyer enquiries tracked against each property in the portal admin panel

Project Summary

I swapped the Google Sheet for a purpose-built off-market catalogue. Adding a property no longer means retyping each field. Details such as bedrooms, bathrooms, parking and RV are filled in automatically, and a generative writing step drafts the "Property Insights" overview so Hayden edits a draft instead of facing a blank page. A job that took real effort for every listing now takes a few minutes of checking.

Buyers see a simpler flow. Approved prospects sign in, read through each listing and its property insights, and press Request Private Viewing on the one they want. That request shows up straight away in the admin panel as a tracked lead, carrying the buyer's name, email and phone against the correct property. This is where the daily payoff is. Rather than chasing enquiries across texts, calls and inboxes, Hayden works down one ordered list and replies while the buyer is still keen. Nothing is left waiting, nothing is forgotten, and each enquiry points to its property. The outcome is around 3 hours a week of admin saved, listings that largely build themselves, and a private off-market pipeline that is organised and hard to lose leads from.

Hear it from Hayden

Hayden Roulston

Hayden Roulston Real Estate, Christchurch

Is a spreadsheet still doing a job that software should be doing for you? I build custom portals and workflow automation that take the manual admin off your plate. I will run a free audit and point out exactly where yours is losing time.