00 / Case study
Twelve portfolios.
Four years. One build.
Over the course of four years, Cushman & Wakefield's Frankfurt office needed unique websites for a dozen of its portfolio sales. Each one was a portal that presented the properties to a shortlist of investors, behind a login, where every PDF was stamped with the name of the company that downloaded it.
-
12
Deal portals
built -
04
Years of
sales -
24+
Bidder accounts
per portal -
06
Days to build
the next portal
- Client
- Cushman & Wakefield
- Role
- Lead developer
- Stack
- Statamic
01 / Starting point
When a portfolio goes up for sale, the advisor sends a teaser, an investment memorandum and a financial package to a list of qualified investors. Those documents carry rents, lease terms and tenant names that are highly confidential. But once a PDF leaves by email, there is no telling where it goes next.
Cushman & Wakefield wanted one place per deal instead: a site that presents the portfolio properly, keeps the documents behind a login, and makes a leaked copy traceable to whoever passed it on.
02 / Constraints
- Only the shortlist gets in
- Every investor on the list gets an account, set up by the advisor. There is no sign-up form, and nothing on the site is visible without logging in.
- Every copy is traceable
- If a memorandum turns up where it should not, it has to be clear which bidder it came from, even after it has been forwarded. So the mark belongs inside the document, on every page.
- The deal team runs it
- Adding a bidder, replacing a memorandum with a new version or correcting a key figure had to be control panel work, done by the deal team on the day it was needed.
03 / What I built
-
B/01
A watermark per company
Every page of a PDF is stamped on its way out with the name of the company downloading it. A forwarded copy still says who it came from.
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B/02
Documents off the public disk
The deal documents live on a disk outside the web root and are only streamed after the login has been checked. Asking for one without an account leads to the login page, not the file.
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B/03
A switch on every file
Editors turn the watermark on or off for each upload in the control panel, so the memorandum and the teaser are stamped while a covering letter goes out clean.
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B/04
One login per bidder
The deal team created the investor accounts themselves in the control panel. On the Kassel portal they added two dozen bidders within three weeks.
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B/05
The portfolio itself
Key figures, an aerial site plan where every building opens its own details, photo galleries, 360-degree tours, a film and a map, in German and English.
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B/06
One build, many deals
Every portal started from the same build instead of from scratch, so a new sale's portal was ready faster than the client could finalize the copy.
04 / Credits
This was built while I was running an agency, Webographen GmbH, later Designbase Studio. Design by Felix Brodbeck.
Every name, figure and document in these screenshots is placeholder data.
05 / Next step
Worried about your sensitive files?
If the documents matter enough to be under NDA, they matter enough not to live in a public folder. Write down what you are sending and who is allowed to see it. The rest I can scope from there.