Casa Co Website
A WordPress to Webflow migration for an exclusive Australian vacation rental platform, with a CMS-driven property browser using Mapbox and JetBoost for geographic search.
Content
Overview
The Challenge
Our Approach
Technologies & Tools
About This Project
Casa Co is a membership-based rental platform operating in Melbourne, Victoria. Rather than an open marketplace, it runs a curated model: hosts the team knows personally, vetted guests, and three listing categories (Open, Member Referred, Private) that control which guests can view each property. Demand concentrates around major events, most notably tennis players and coaches booking homes for the Australian Open.
The platform ran on WordPress and had reached the point where the stack was costing more than it returned. Plugin maintenance, patching, and the security exposure that comes with any WordPress build of that size were consuming time the team wanted to spend elsewhere, and routine content changes still required a developer.
Virtual Playground, Casa Co's technology partner, brought Menta in to lead the rebuild. Architecture decisions were made jointly with Virtual Playground, and we delivered the Webflow build: a CMS structured around how the property catalog actually works, a dedicated property browser with search and filtering, and a map view integrating Mapbox with Jetboost. The build also established the foundation for a later phase covering bookings.
Casa Co's brief combined clear objectives for the business with specific needs for two different audiences. The client wanted the catalog rebuilt in a CMS the team could run directly, the location-first browse experience preserved, the three-tier listing model kept intact, and a foundation in place for a later phase covering bookings and transactions. Guests needed to see what's available in an area on a map before reading a list, filter by location and bedroom count, and know pricing and terms upfront with no hidden costs. Hosts needed to understand which of the three listing categories fits their property, the fee that applies, and whether the model was the right one for them.
The Challenge
CHALLENGE 1
Migrating the Full Property Catalog Out of WordPress
The WordPress platform held the complete property catalog: images, descriptions, pricing, availability terms, and the metadata distinguishing Open, Member Referred, and Private Listings. Much of that structure lived inside plugin-specific data models. A direct export would have lost it, and rebuilding listings by hand was not viable at scale. The migration had to preserve the data while reshaping it into the way Webflow's CMS actually works.
CHALLENGE 2
A Property Browser with Geographic Search
Casa Co's audience evaluates properties by location first. Someone looking at a specific area needs to see what is available there, not scroll a generic list. A standard list view would have undermined the core value proposition. The browser needed combined text and category filtering alongside a map view, both driven by the same CMS collection, and neither is something Webflow handles natively at scale.
CHALLENGE 3
Deciding Where Bookings and Transactions Should Live
The roadmap included a booking system with calendar logic, transaction handling, funds routing to hosts, and two-factor authentication. That level of control and isolation does not belong inside a visual CMS alongside marketing content. The decision shaped how the Webflow build was structured from the start, not just what came after it.
Our Approach
Solution 1
Structured Migration to Webflow CMS
The property catalog was extracted from WordPress into structured data and rebuilt as a native Webflow CMS collection, modeled around the fields the public site and the internal team both need: location, dates, pricing, photography, host information, and listing category. Defining the schema first meant each record maps to fields that drive the browse experience and the management workflow at the same time, rather than carrying plugin-shaped data into a new platform.
Solution 2
Mapbox and Jetboost on Top of the Webflow CMS
The property browser was built with Mapbox handling geographic display and Jetboost extending Webflow's native filtering. Jetboost was selected over the alternatives for its server-side indexing, GeoSearch, and direct Mapbox integration, which keeps the system workable as the catalog grows. Properties are pulled from a single CMS collection and rendered as both listings and map markers, with location and bedroom count set as the primary filters. The map presents locations as clean, restrained points rather than a cluttered overlay, in line with Casa Co's curated positioning.
Solution 3
Separating the Transactional Layer from the Content Layer
Together with Virtual Playground, we defined a hybrid architecture: Webflow for the public site and the property catalog, and a dedicated subdomain application for bookings and transactions. This keeps the transactional environment isolated from the marketing site, leaves content fully in the client's hands, and avoids building a custom CMS to support functionality a purpose-built application handles better. Webflow's managed hosting removes the patching and plugin maintenance cycle that drove the migration in the first place.
Technologies & Tools
Every project requires the right tools. Here's what powered this implementation.
Webflow
Mapbox
Jetboost
Claude
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