So Khurram wants to build a rental apartment finder for Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai—the app needs to detect the user's location, display nearby available buildings within a certain radius on a map, and let users filter by bedroom count. He's got solid experience with Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, and the Anthropic API, so this is definitely within reach for him.
The real bottleneck here isn't the tech stack—it's sourcing live rental listings. Bayut, Property Finder, and Dubizzle all have the data he'd need, and some offer APIs or scraping options, but integrating with them or building a reliable data pipeline is where the complexity actually lives. Given his setup and the fact that he has a real estate contact at Lux Realty, the fastest path would be to either partner with a data provider or start with a smaller dataset from his existing connection while building out the geolocation and map filtering features.Yes, absolutely doable — and honestly, the front-end side of what you're describing is the easy part. Browser Geolocation API gives you the user's lat/lng on a tap, Mapbox or Google Maps renders the buildings as pins, a radius filter (say 500m / 1km / 2km) plus 1BR/2BR toggles is straightforward UI. With your stack (Next.js + Supabase + Vercel) this is a weekend build for the shell.
The real question — and the only thing that actually makes the product useful — is **where the live rental listings come from**. That's the moat, not the map. Three realistic options for the UAE:
1. **Property Finder / Bayut / Dubizzle** — they dominate UAE listings but don't hand out open APIs. You'd need a partnership, paid feed, or licensed data access. Cleanest legally, slowest commercially.
2. **DLD / Dubai REST** — the Dubai Land Department's official "Smart Real Estate" platform exposes some transaction and rental index data. Useful for pricing intelligence and validation, but not a live "available now" inventory.
3. **Your own broker network** — this is the interesting angle for you. Hasan at Lux Realty plus a handful of Sheikh Zayed Road brokerages could feed listings directly into a Supabase table (a simple broker portal where they post units in 60 seconds). You become the aggregator, brokers get inbound leads, users get a clean map experience without the spam-y feel of the big portals.
Option 3 is where I'd point Spotlight. It's a defensible play, fits your platform-builder model, and the revenue share / listing fee economics are obvious. Want me to sketch the architecture and a v1 scope — schema, broker onboarding flow, the consumer map app, and the AI layer (natural language search, "show me family-friendly 2BRs near a metro under 120k")?