Auction real estate online with Immocatch

Adapting a proven auction platform for real estate meant handling million-franc transactions, Switzerland's strict property laws, and a distinctive post-auction process where winning only secures the right to buy. All of it demanded a new level of trust.

With the auction platform ecatch, our team already had experience developing auction logic. But not only the experience was valuable for this project, especially the fact that we could keep using ecatch's existing infrastructure. Our goal was to develop an appealing real-estate platform on the ecatch principle in as short a time as possible.

The challenge was to adapt the auction platform to the special requirements of real estate. While simple products such as shoes or coffee machines are usually auctioned on ecatch, on Immocatch it was to be houses. That required an extra level of trust, users are by no means dealing with small amounts here, but with prices that can reach into the millions.

In addition, Switzerland has strict laws for the sale of real estate. Compliance had to be built into the user flow, e.g. a user has to provide financing documents in order to be able to bid at all.

But especially the process after the auction ends is special for real estate: winning the auction doesn't automatically mean buying the house. Instead you acquire the right to purchase it at the offered price; the actual purchase then continues in a manual process.

Due to the specific requirements of the real estate market, we had to adapt Immocatch's bidding logic. We had to make sure users build trust when placing multi-million bids, the bidding process had to be absolutely high-quality. The difficulty for us was to implement this bidding logic without affecting ecatch's code.

One feature of Immocatch is automatic bidding: users can specify their maximum price and the tool places bids for them. The current price is not the maximum a user defined, but the second-highest bid. So even if a user specifies 1 million as the maximum, they may get the house for CHF 800,000 if there are no higher bids.

Immocatch is a template any other real estate company in Switzerland can use too. Originally developed with the branding for the Bernese company thomasgraf AG, the platform is nevertheless an open white-label solution. Companies that want to offer their own auction platform have it easier than ever: simply register, choose the layout (colors, fonts, logo, etc.) and add your own content. Nothing is hardcoded, anyone can create their own branded auction platform without programming knowledge.