Ask a new real estate platform what a "property" is and you'll usually get one table. Then the first real customer arrives with an HOA that owns common areas nobody lives in, a unit whose owner is an LLC that also owns four others, a tenant who is not the owner but is the person the maintenance request comes from, and a mid-year ownership transfer that has to leave last year's dues attached to the previous owner.

None of that fits one table. It fits five, and picking them correctly on day one is most of what separates a platform that scales from one that gets rewritten in year two.

Six firms with published real estate delivery history, judged on that.

What to check before shortlisting

The source article uses a four-check proof test, and it's a good filter: a named client, a problem that matches yours, a real outcome quote, and a clickable case study URL. Anonymous case studies are not evidence.

On top of that, four engineering questions:

How would you model units, owners, and tenants?…