Jamaica Real Estate
A parish-first property search for Jamaica (internally 'Parish') — browse aggregated sale and rental listings by parish from an interactive map, on the same platform as CarShop but with its own distinct design.
- 8,000+
- property listings
- 14 parishes
- browse from a real map, not a box
- Shared backend
- its own distinct design
The problem
Property hunting in Jamaica is parish-shaped — you're looking in Kingston, or St. Ann, or Manchester, not 'anywhere.' Jamaica Real Estate makes the parish the way you browse, over listings gathered from across the market into one place.
What it does
The homepage is a bespoke interactive map of Jamaica's 14 parishes — tap a parish to start there, rather than typing into a blank search box. From there you filter by property type, price, bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether you're buying or renting.
Listings are aggregated from property sites rather than posted by users, so each property page links you to the original seller or agent to make contact, with a fallback inquiry form when there's no source to link to. There's an agents directory, saved favourites behind sign-in, and it installs like an app. It shares CarShop's backend, database and sign-in — but was deliberately given its own visual identity, not a recolour of the car app.
Key features
Start from the parish, on a real map
A hand-built map of all 14 parishes is the way you browse, so you begin where you're actually looking instead of guessing search terms.
The market's listings in one place
Properties gathered from across the market sit in one searchable place, so you're not hopping between agent sites to see what's available in a parish.
Filter the way people actually shop
Buy vs. rent, property type, price, bedrooms and bathrooms — the filters match how someone really narrows a property search.
Straight to the agent or source
Each listing links to the original agent or seller to make contact, so you reach the real person handling the property rather than a dead end.
Save what you like
Sign in and keep a list of properties you're considering, so a shortlist survives between visits.
Where it stands
Like its sibling CarShop, it aggregates listings from other sources rather than hosting user-posted properties, and contact happens with the original agent or seller — there's no in-app messaging inbox.
Under the hood — for the technically-minded
How it's built
It runs on the exact same stack and infrastructure as CarShop — React Router 7, Drizzle, Postgres — and in fact shares CarShop's listings table, discriminated by category, plus its authentication and database. Property-site collectors feed it the same way the car collectors feed CarShop.
The interesting decision is the deliberate design fork: rather than ship a green recolour of CarShop, the team gave this app its own structure, typography and palette under the internal name 'Parish' — a sibling app on shared infrastructure with a genuinely separate visual identity, including the parish-map centrepiece the car app has no equivalent of.
The hard problems
Two products, one backend, two identities
Sharing a database, auth and codebase with CarShop keeps the engineering lean, but the design was deliberately not shared — a decision, written down in its own design doc, to make it feel like its own product rather than a reskin, which is harder than just changing a colour variable.
A parish map as the primary interface
The choropleth map of all 14 parishes is a bespoke, hand-built component and the app's front door — browsing by geography first, which is how Jamaicans actually think about property, rather than treating location as just another filter.
From skeleton to shipped, fast
The app went from a handful of read-only routes to a full search-detail-agents-saved-inquiry product with its own design and PWA support in a matter of days — and it's the most recently-updated app in the whole workspace.
Built with
- React Router 7
- Drizzle
- Postgres
- PWA
Building something in this space?
Work with us →