AI-Driven Custom CRM for a Real Estate Company in Istanbul

Overview

Property Quest Turkey (PQT) helps international buyers purchase property in Istanbul and, where eligible, apply for Turkish citizenship through investment. A single client can move through many stages: first enquiry from an ad, consultations, property viewings, a purchase, staged payments, agent commissions, and a citizenship application that can run for months.

Off-the-shelf CRMs are built for simple sales pipelines. They couldn't follow this full journey or reflect how PQT's team actually works. So I designed and delivered a custom CRM built around PQT's own process.

I've worked with PQT for years, first building their original website and marketing materials, and now running their entire digital operation. That meant I understood the business deeply before designing a single screen.

The challenge

A journey no standard CRM covers. Real estate sales and citizenship applications had to live in one system, connected to the same client record.

Ad spend with no link to sales. Leads from Facebook and Instagram ads were handled manually, so there was no reliable way to tell which ads produced real buyers rather than just clicks.

Money that needs precise tracking. Staged property payments and agent commission splits had to be recorded accurately, with no rounding errors.

Many users, different access needs. Internal staff and external partners needed different permissions, and the CRM had to share one login system with PQT's other company tools.

Leadership needed visibility. Management wanted a clear, live picture of the pipeline and team performance without building reports by hand.

What I delivered

One system for the full client journey

Lead, deal, and client management in one connected record

Payment tracking for staged property purchases

Commission tracking for agents and partners

Viewing and appointment bookings

Citizenship application tracking from submission to completion

Real-time Meta ad lead pipeline

Leads from Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Lead Ads flow into the CRM automatically, within seconds of a form submission

Each lead is saved with the exact form, ad, and ad set that produced it, so campaign performance can be judged against actual deals, not just clicks

Built-in safeguards verify that incoming leads genuinely come from Meta and prevent the same lead being saved twice

Executive dashboard with AI assistant

A custom dashboard I designed for leadership, showing the pipeline and key numbers at a glance

An AI "Ask the CRM" assistant that lets managers ask questions about their data in plain language

A team leaderboard to track performance across the sales team

Unified login and permissions

Single sign-on shared with PQT's Property Management System, so staff use one account across company tools

Nine defined roles covering internal staff and external partners, each seeing only what they need

Design

The CRM interface uses the same brand design system I created for PQT (navy, gold, and cream palette with DM Sans and Inter typography), so internal tools look and feel like the rest of the company

How I built it

I delivered this CRM through AI-directed development. I acted as the system architect and product owner: I mapped PQT's workflows, designed the interface, wrote the specifications and acceptance criteria, and directed AI coding agents (Claude Code) to implement each part. Every stage was checked against my criteria before moving to the next.

A few principles guided the build:

Phased delivery. Work moved one phase at a time, starting each project with a review of what already existed before changing anything.

Data accuracy first. Money is stored in a way that avoids rounding errors, and data is audited before any figures are shown to customers.

Documentation for every release. Each part ships with handoff notes and a plan to roll back if something goes wrong.

This approach let me deliver a production system that would normally take a team of developers, while keeping the product thinking and design in my own hands.

The result

PQT went from scattered, manual processes to one integrated system. An ad click now becomes a tracked, attributed lead inside the company's own CRM within seconds, and that lead can be followed all the way through to a purchase, commission, and citizenship application. Leadership has a live view of the business, and the tool is shaped around how PQT's sales team actually works rather than forcing the team to fit generic software.