The platform behind Guy Hoquet’s first North American agency

Guy Hoquet l’Immobilier is the third-largest real-estate franchise 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, led by two founders who each brought more than a decade in the Montréal market. The stated plan: 25 brokers in the first year.

The situation

A first location runs lean. There’s no marketing department, no developer on call, and no patience for a website that needs a specialist every time a page changes or a broker joins. What the founders asked for, condensed: a platform their own team could manage and grow, that worked as well in French as in English, that carried the network’s brand without reading like a French import, and that did more than brochure work, starting with a way to put a prospective client in front of the right broker.

The decisions

The founders arrived expecting WordPress, which was reasonable. Our recommendation went the other way: a site assembled from plugins is fast to ship and slow to own, since every feature that matters arrives as someone else’s code, with its own update cycle and its own line on the monthly bill. We built the platform as custom code and kept a page builder for the one job it is genuinely good at, letting the team compose and edit pages without us. Roughly 80% of the features are built in-house.

Listings in Québec move through Centris, the province-wide system brokers work through. Most of the integration work was accepting its constraints gracefully: building the listing experience the brand wanted inside rules we don’t control, so the office’s site behaves like part of the provincial system.

The matching feature at the centre of the site asks a prospective client about their situation instead of their filters, then routes them to the broker best suited to them, identically in French and in English. Building it in one language and translating it later would have produced a matching flow that only half worked in French, which is exactly what the founders were paying to avoid.

A stressed first-time buyer and a seasoned investor should not land on the same desk. In a small office, the cost of that mistake is high.

Nicolas Santos, AetherWorks

What happened after

The platform went live at quebec.guy-hoquet.com with the agency’s opening in spring 2026 and has been in production since. The team publishes pages, edits content, and onboards brokers without developer involvement, which was the point. The architecture is built to add brokers, offices, and regions without a rebuild, because the network’s growth plan says it will need to.

The engagement ran from strategy to production, delivered end to end by the principal.