Built a no-code residential property discovery platform tuned for the student housing market
A Bubble-built property listing platform for a residential real estate brand, with property search, structured filters tailored to the student housing reality and an admin portal that lets the team manage the catalogue directly.
Key Takeaways
Nirvan Realty came to Unico Connect to build a residential property discovery platform tuned for the student housing market. We delivered a no-code platform on Bubble covering customer-facing property search and contact, with filters tailored to the realities of student housing (locality, food preferences, room count, gender, distance to colleges) and an admin portal that lets the team manage the catalogue and user base directly.
The platform replaces the spreadsheet-and-WhatsApp workflow the team was running before, with a discovery experience matched to how students and parents actually search.
The Challenge
Nirvan Realty operates in a corner of Indian real estate that does not look like the rest of the residential market. Student housing has its own search logic and decision drivers. Students and parents care about distance to colleges, about food (vegetarian or non-vegetarian, because food is part of how accommodation works in this category), about room arrangements, gender norms and basic amenities. A generic residential platform surfaces none of this — which is why generic platforms have not won this market and a tailored platform was the right product call.
The team had been operating without a platform. Inquiries came through WhatsApp, listings sat in spreadsheets, contact details were shared manually, and admin work happened across documents and chat threads. As the business grew, the operational drag got harder to absorb: inquiries took longer to convert, listings went stale because updates happened in the wrong places, and parents and students waited while someone manually pulled together answers.
The brief was practical: a platform with filters matched to the student housing reality, an admin portal the team could run without engineering for routine updates, OTP-verified contact access so customer phone numbers were protected from casual scraping, delivered quickly on a stack the team could maintain. Nirvan is a property operator, not a tech-first company, so no-code was the right call from the start — a custom stack would have produced the same product at a cost and maintenance burden that did not match the business.
Our Approach
We engaged as a product partner, structured around delivering a working Bubble platform the team could put in front of customers quickly. The first phase was understanding the actual search behaviour in student housing, which is meaningfully different from generic residential search — the locality that matters most, the food preference that decides accommodations early, the room count with shared-occupancy constraints, the gender norms and the amenities that determine whether a listing is even a candidate.
Key decisions:
No-code on Bubble, by design
Bubble compressed time-to-launch, kept the cost envelope appropriate for a property operator and gave Nirvan an ongoing maintenance posture they could own — customer app and admin portal in one platform.
Filters matched to how people search
Locality drives discovery first; food preference, rooms, gender and amenities refine. Restrictions and distance-to-college live in the description as prose, because these vary by property and resist forced structure.
OTP-verified contact as a data asset
Revealing a phone number triggers phone/name/email/OTP verification — protecting the team’s outreach numbers from scraping while collecting a verified contact for every serious customer.
The solution we built
The platform pairs the customer-facing property discovery experience with the admin portal, both delivered through a single Bubble application with the supporting backend and APIs — a clean customer experience and an efficient admin one.
Student-housing search
Listings filtered by locality, food preference, room count, gender and basic amenities — the criteria that actually matter in this category, not generic residential filters.
Property detail pages
Operational details that vary by listing — restrictions, distance from colleges, specific arrangements — surfaced in prose rather than forced filter fields.
OTP-verified contact access
Revealing a contact number triggers registration and OTP verification, protecting the team’s numbers from scraping and giving them a verified contact for every customer.
Self-service admin portal
Direct property management (create, update, active/inactive, delete) and user management showing who registered and which properties they requested contact for.
Tech stack
Outcomes & impact
Tailored
Filters for the student housing market
Self-service
Catalogue management for the Nirvan team
OTP-verified
Customer contact access
