Office rental platform — a self-serve marketplace for commercial space

Renting commercial space in Stockholm still runs on brokers, phone calls and listings that go stale. It is a large, stable market that has barely been touched by modern product design — a slow, offline process where a faster one is clearly possible. That is what the project is aimed at.

The core idea is a self-serve marketplace: property owners list their own space and growing companies find and book viewings directly, with the process designed to run quickly and largely on its own. The rest of this case study is about designing and building that idea end to end — the deeper commercial and product thinking sits in a separate plan.

Before drawing screens I spent time in Miro: pulling apart how the established Swedish rental platforms handle listing upload and tenant onboarding, sketching the flows for the parts that would work differently here, and mapping how each kind of user would actually come on board.

This is not a set of mockups. It is a running application with a live backend, seeded with a realistic Stockholm catalogue. The frontend is a single-page React app; the backend is Convex, with the auth layer wired through WorkOS. The numbers below are counted from the codebase.

The landing page is doing sales work, so it is deliberately editorial: a high-contrast serif display face against a clean sans, alternating light and near-black sections for rhythm, and real Stockholm photography. The hero headline cycles through space types (“kontor”, “coworking”, “studio”, “butik”) and the search field is functional — it runs a real query.

The two feature sections are scroll-driven modules. In “Så fungerar det” and the Lokalprogram block, the left-hand step titles stay pinned while product mockups on the right slide and swap as you scroll through the section — the mockups are built from the actual UI, not flat images.

Lediga lokaler is the core tenant surface: a scrollable result list on the left, a sticky Google Map with pins on the right, and a filter bar that becomes a compact sticky pill as you scroll. Featured listings render as full-width horizontal cards; the rest as a two-column grid. It is public — you can browse and open listings without an account, and the sign-in wall only appears when you act.

The listing page has to carry the whole decision. It opens with a gallery (with a full lightbox and a PDF export), then the structured facts: size, capacity, description, amenities. A sticky contact card holds availability, monthly rent, the responsible broker, and the “Boka visning” and “Kontakta uthyrare” actions.

Below that: an interactive floor-plan and 3D walkthrough via an Archilogic model, a public transit block with real lines and nearby stations, an area / neighbourhood section with a map and street-view toggle, and a “Liknande objekt” row of ranked similar listings.

Publishers get a real back office, not a settings page. The broker panel and the company-admin panel share one shell — a collapsible left sidebar, the same layout and components — but differ in scope: a broker sees their own listings, leads and performance; a company admin sees the whole company, plus the broker team and company-wide analytics.

Convex holds the whole backend: a typed schema, the query/mutation functions, reactive subscriptions that keep the UI live, and file storage for floor plans. WorkOS is registered as a custom-JWT auth provider, so Convex verifies the token itself (RS256, JWKS from WorkOS) and every function resolves the caller from that verified identity — never from anything the client sends.

Auth went through a full migration. The first version used Clerk; I moved the whole thing to WorkOS AuthKit backed by Convex, because WorkOS’s hosted AuthKit plus a custom-JWT provider in Convex gave a cleaner split between identity and application data, and a path to SSO later.

Sign-up is role-first: you choose “I want to rent” or “I want to rent out” before you ever see WorkOS, so the intent survives the OAuth round-trip. After WorkOS returns, the app lands on a quiet loading state (not a jarring blank redirect), syncs the identity into a Convex user, and drops you into the onboarding flow for your role.

The platform is pre-launch. The honest status: the tenant and publisher surfaces are built and working end-to-end on a real backend; the integrated messaging and offer flow is partial; and nothing has been tested with real users yet.