Hello everyone. I wanted to get experts opinion on what we should do with our next website.

We are in a real estate business, apartment rentals. We want to create a site for ourselves, but also a complete 'turn key' website, which could be sold to other operators around the world, fully and completely customizable. Every imaginable aspect of it should be customizable including changes of logos, enabling / disabling of various features, etc. The idea is to sell it to our competitors or other operators in other cities.

My question is - should we hire someone to build this ground up in PHP or should we go with a CMS? All of my websites now were built ground up in PHP but I see that CMS is very popular now. If CMS - which one would be recommended for such a project?

I appreciate any feedback in advance and if any clarification is required pleas let me know.

If you have the cash and have the contacts to make it work then you should build it from the ground up. It will be worth more to the company then. You need to pick the right person/team to do this though. Also it will be very expensive if done right.

Another option is to have a module built on top a CMS. This would be cheaper and faster and because of the custom work it would still be worth a good amount to you.

Thanks! Yes i Understand it will likely not be cheap. Seems like going with a team and ground up option would be better. Do you have any idea of what this would cost? Approximate figure

We have been in the tendering process for similar jobs and I've seen some studios quote up to £15k. Some companies bite at that but I think it's a way over the top quote. Although it usually comes from large and very capable teams. I think you should pay no more than 2k-3k. As I have a small studio I would personally be able to come in at £1600.

It is also possible to get the job cheaper. I see some online project posting websites have ridiculously low quotes. I would never recommend going for these though. Especially not a large job. I have had a countless amount of people come to me saying they had a really low quote but the person wasn't able to finish the job after months of work.

edit: I'm using GBP which the rate is roughly at 1 GBP to 1.6 USD

hI paaaaaaaaaa

can you PM with your studios site and previous work? I can then send you all the requirements of our project so you can give me exact quote.

thx