We were approached by a startup property management service who were on a tight budget but wanted a site that was powerful and could be easily updated with new properties and to change the details of their properties.

We therefore chose to use Joomla 1.5 with the Hot Properties property management plugin that would allow us to quickly and easily construct for them a site that would do everything it needed to.  We did extensive modifications to the default layouts of the site but we also did some customisation of the Hot Properties system as well.  In particular we added into the system a function whereby the administrator could select from a drop-down menu the rental status of a property and, if the status is rented then a rental banner would be overlaid across the property's images.  The banner is a separate, transparent image so can be easily added and removed without having to change the actual property's photograph!  (In fact we liked this technique so much we are using in on this very site!  The Joomla banner you see on the image on the right is created in the same way!