40+ Valencia rentals, two business models, one operating system
A Valencia rental operator managing 40+ units in Excel — Erasmus mid-term in winter, Airbnb in summer, inquiries from website, Facebook, Spotahome. We replaced the spreadsheets with one operating system. Four years in, we’re still partners.
- rental units on one system
- 40+
- rental models — mid-term + short-stay
- 2
- continuous partnership
- 4+ years
What we delivered
- Custom internal dashboard
- Workflow automation
- Booking & payment operations
- Website CMS
Tech stack
- Next.js
- Directus
- n8n
- Pipedream
- Google Workspace
Four years ago, a Valencia rental operator came to us managing 40+ units out of a single, growing Excel file. The business runs two models on the same set of properties: mid-term contracts with Erasmus students through the academic year, then short-stay Airbnb in the summer. Inquiries came in through the website, Facebook, and Spotahome. Contracts lived in Word. Payments were tracked by hand. Utility bills filed in inboxes. Revenue and expenses reconciled on Sunday nights. It worked — it just couldn’t grow without breaking the person running it.
What we built
A full operating system, built around a single source of truth and a quiet army of automations: a public Next.js website where direct guests inquire, with content managed by the owner through Directus; inquiries from the website, Facebook, and Spotahome funnelled into one inbox in the dashboard, with the unit, dates, and channel pre-attached; summer Airbnb bookings imported nightly and reconciled against payouts; a Next.js internal dashboard for everything else — units, tenants, bookings, contracts, payments, utility expenses, P&L; contract generation, e-signing, and payment reconciliation handled by workflows in n8n and Pipedream; utility bills auto-imported from email, parsed, and matched to the right unit across all 40+ properties.
“I used to spend every Sunday in a spreadsheet trying to remember which unit was Erasmus and which was Airbnb. Now the dashboard tells me, the contracts sign themselves, and the P&L is just there.”
How we built it
Directus is the spine: one queryable database for properties, tenants, bookings, contracts, expenses, and revenue, with a clean admin UI the owner uses every day. Around it sits a constellation of focused workflows in n8n and Pipedream — each one owns a single job (booking import from Airbnb, inquiry routing from Facebook and Spotahome, utility-bill parsing, contract drafting, payment reconciliation) and writes back to Directus. Gmail and Google Drive stayed in place — we connected them, didn’t replace them.
Four years in, still shipping
The first version went live in months, not weeks — the goal was never an MVP. It was an operating system. Four years later, we’re still partners: every quarter brings new units, new booking platforms, new tax rules, new automations. The business has grown without growing the team.
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