Invest Saint Lucia

Invest Saint Lucia (ISL) is the country's national investment promotion agency. It attracts foreign and domestic investment, and it administers state-owned land and industrial property across the island's development areas. Every sale and lease passes through officer review, a committee decision, and a payment schedule with fixed deadlines. The agency then has to track and evidence that transaction for years afterwards.

Records sat in spreadsheets, shared drives and individual inboxes. Nobody could see in one place which parcels were free, which applications were waiting on a decision, or which buyers were close to a payment deadline. Officers tracked deposit and balance dates by hand, so extensions and overdue accounts surfaced late. Committee decisions and assessment reports stayed in email, where nothing recorded who changed what. Applicants had no way to see what was on offer, and no way to apply online.

Three connected applications: a public portal, an internal operations dashboard, and the API they share.

• Parcel registryevery parcel with its location, size, zoning, development area and status, plus the full history of status changes and linked transactions
• Applications and committee workflowonline sale and lease applications, officer assignment, required-document checklists, internal notes, and recorded committee approvals and denials
• Sales and paymentsone-time and mortgage sales with VAT, deposit and balance schedules, installment plans, payment records with receipts, and extension requests that route to finance for approval
• Lease managementlease terms, configurable escalation periods, renewal decisions, termination, and conversion of a lease into a sale
• Automated remindersseven scheduled jobs send deposit, balance, overdue, renewal and escalation notices by email and in-app before the deadline passes
• Role-based accessfive roles with their own permission matrix. Admin, officer, committee member, finance officer, viewer. The API enforces it and the interface mirrors it
• Documents and reportingsecure document storage, generated offer letters, an analytics dashboard, and background exports to Excel, CSV, PDF and Word that arrive by email
• Public opportunitiesa published catalogue of available parcels that applicants browse and apply against
• Audit trailthe system logs every creation, edit, status change and document action against the record and the user who made it

• Next.js and React
• Bun and Hono
• PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM
• Better Auth
• Tailwind
• shadcn/ui
• Base UI
• AWS S3 and Resend
• Turborepo

Strategy

We walked ISL's existing sale and lease processes with their team and mapped the real status progressions, including the ones the paper process handled informally, like payment extensions and lease-to-sale conversions. That mapping set the data model.

Structure

Parcels, applications, sales, leases, payments, extensions and escalations each became a workflow with its own states. The parcel and the applicant link them, so any transaction traces end to end.

Design and development

Eighteen weeks, in phases. Registry and sales core first, then leases, then workflow automation, notifications and reporting. The API and the interface read the same authorization policy, so a role changed in one place changes in the other.

Launch and support

Every merge deploys to staging and every release to production, so ISL reviews work before it goes live. A user manual for each module ships inside the application, on the same screen as the work it describes.