Property & Building Management Platform

A real estate operator managing residential and commercial properties was running on legacy software held together by years of workarounds. Maintenance requests got lost in email threads, accounting required manual reconciliation, residents had no self-service options, and tenant messaging happened on whichever phone was nearest. The property portfolio was growing. The system underneath it was not.

We had built the operator's original platform, and when the portfolio outgrew it we rebuilt it rather than patching further. The second generation consolidated the whole operation into one system: service tickets with purchase orders attached, scheduled inspections and preventative maintenance that raise their own work orders, a communication center handling tenant SMS and email with templates and threaded history, document management with search across leases and contracts, lease charge codes and financial dashboards, and vendor invoice approval with an audit trail. Around eleven modules, each one replacing something that used to be a spreadsheet, a filing cabinet, or somebody's memory.

The unglamorous part decided whether any of it worked. Years of documents and financial records had to move from the old platform without losing the audit trail, and that migration was a project in its own right, planned and estimated separately from the build. A property system that cannot produce the signed lease from four years ago is not a replacement, it is a second system to maintain.

At the scale this operator runs, over 24,000 residential and commercial units, tenant communication is the constraint. Most enquiries are the same handful of questions, about a balance, a repair, or what the building allows, and every one of them used to occupy a manager. So a conversational assistant now sits on top of the platform with live access to the tenant's record, answers roughly seven in ten enquiries end to end, and escalates the rest with the conversation attached. Manager time on tenant communication fell by close to a third, and maintenance requests, raised and tracked in one place instead of chased by phone, now close around 30% faster.

The platform runs across desktop, tablet, and a resident mobile app. Tablets were treated as first-class rather than an afterthought, because an inspection either gets recorded while the inspector is standing in the unit or it gets reconstructed later from memory. Residents raise requests, check payment history, and follow community events themselves, which is why support volume stopped scaling with the number of doors.