The challenge
A property management firm handling maintenance across a portfolio of residential buildings was receiving repair requests by phone call and messaging app, at all hours, on the personal numbers of whichever staff member a tenant happened to have. A request was only as reliable as the note somebody made about it, urgent issues sat behind routine ones because nothing distinguished them, and a tenant following up had to explain the problem again from the start.
Contractor coordination happened in the same informal channel. A job was assigned by message, scheduling was negotiated separately with the tenant, and whether work had actually been completed was established by asking. Invoices arrived later referencing jobs the firm had no structured record of, making them difficult to check.
Nothing accumulated. A unit with a recurring fault looked identical to one with a first-time issue, because there was no per-unit history to consult — so the firm could not distinguish a problem that kept being patched from one that had been fixed.
Our approach
We built a tenant mobile app and a management back office over a shared maintenance record. A tenant reports an issue against their own unit — selected from their tenancy, not typed as free text — with a category, a description, and photos taken in the app, so a request arrives with the context that previously had to be extracted over a phone call. The tenant then follows the same request through its stages in the app instead of calling to ask, and the conversation about a job stays attached to the job.
Requests are triaged into priority tiers with different handling rules, so a water leak is not queued behind a request to replace a light fitting simply because it arrived later. Assignment to an internal technician or an external contractor is a recorded action against the request, and contractors work through a scoped view showing only the jobs assigned to them and the units those jobs concern — never the wider portfolio. Scheduling proposals and tenant confirmation happen inside the request, so an appointment is part of the record rather than a side conversation, and completion requires the assigned party to record what was done, with photos, before the request can close.
Because every request is attached to a specific unit, history accumulates where it is useful. Staff can see what has previously been done to a unit and by whom before dispatching anyone, which makes a recurring fault visible as a pattern rather than as a series of unrelated calls. Costs and invoices are recorded against the request they belong to, giving the firm a structured basis to check a contractor's invoice against.
Outcome
Maintenance requests now arrive as structured records with the unit, category, and photos attached, rather than as calls to staff personal numbers. Tenants track their own request without calling to follow up, contractors see only the jobs assigned to them, and each unit accumulates a maintenance history that makes a recurring fault visible.