The platform behind Guy Hoquet’s first North American agency

Guy Hoquet l’Immobilier is the third-largest real-estate network in France, around 520 agencies and 3,200 collaborators built over thirty years. In April 2026 the network opened its first agency in North America, on Plateau Mont-Royal in Montréal. Its two founders each brought more than a decade in the Montréal market. AetherWorks designed and built the agency’s bilingual platform over three months, from the first strategy workshop to production.

The situation

The brief, condensed: a platform the agency’s own team could run and grow without going through a developer. It had to work as well in French as in English, and carry the network’s brand while speaking to the Montréal market. It also had to do more than brochure work, starting with a way to put a prospective client in front of the right broker.

The decisions

The first weeks went to strategy. In workshops with the founders we defined the personas the agency would serve, from the stressed first-time buyer to the seasoned investor. We then studied how the established Montréal agencies speak to each of them. Those sessions fixed the structure of the site, its tone in both languages, and the place each broker holds in the visitor’s path.

The platform runs on WordPress, kept so the team would work in a content system it already knew. External plugins were held to a handful. The features the agency depends on were written by us. Three modules carry the agency: a broker space behind a login, automatic synchronization with the network in France, and AI broker matching. The agency owns tools written for it, and can add brokers, offices and regions without a rebuild.

Listings in Québec move through Centris, the province-wide system brokers work through. The listing experience was built inside its rules, so the agency’s site behaves like part of the provincial system.

The matching flow at the centre of the site asks a prospective client about their situation instead of their filters. It then routes them to the broker best suited to them. It was designed and built in French and in English at the same time.

A stressed first-time buyer and a seasoned investor should not land on the same desk. For an agency that is just opening, the cost of that mistake is high.

Nicolas Santos, AetherWorks

What shipped

A bilingual platform at quebec.guy-hoquet.com: property search for buying, renting, estimating and selling, and listings in step with Centris. Broker profiles written to be read by a client, and the matching flow at the centre. Behind the login, a broker space where each broker manages their own presence on the site. Every page was structured for search engines and for the AI assistants people ask before calling an agency. Clear headings, structured data, one page per question. On Lighthouse the site scores above 90 for performance, SEO and accessibility, a mark few WordPress sites reach.

What happened after

The platform went live with the agency’s opening in April 2026 and has been in production since. The team publishes pages, edits content, and onboards brokers without a developer. The engagement ran three months, from strategy to production, delivered end to end by the principal.