CASE STUDY · PROPTECH SOLUTIONS
Launching a tenant management platform for a PropTech startup.
- 30%Support calls down 30% in the first quarter
- 70%70% of tenants active
01 · PROJECT OVERVIEW
The client and the brief.
An anonymised PropTech startup. Name withheld under confidentiality.
A tenant portal with online rent payments, maintenance requests and secure document storage. Tenants could see what they owed, pay, report an issue with a photo, and follow its status. Staff got an admin console to manage units, tenants, requests and documents. Automated reminders replaced manual chasing.
- 1The startup managed rent, maintenance requests and documents by hand.
- 2Rent was chased through messages and bank transfers that someone had to match to tenants.
- 3Repair requests arrived by phone and chat, and were written into a spreadsheet when someone remembered.
- 4Leases and ID documents sat in shared folders with no clear access rules.
- 5The team was small, and every new building added more phone calls than they could answer.
02 · WHAT WENT WRONG
What went wrong, and how we fixed it.
Every engagement hits problems. These were the ones that mattered here, and what we changed so they did not come back.
- PROBLEM 01In the pilot, several tenants paid rent but did not appear as paid
The cause was that payment confirmations from the provider sometimes arrived twice or out of order, and our first handler assumed one clean message. We rebuilt it to be idempotent, so a repeated event changes nothing, and added a reconciliation job that flags any mismatch for staff. We also added a plain status message for tenants while a payment was pending.
- PROBLEM 02Complaints stopped, and staff gained a clear exception list instead of guessing
- PROBLEM 03A second, smaller problem showed up in the first month
Tenants who changed phone numbers stopped receiving reminders, and some assumed rent was not due. We added a prompt to confirm contact details at each login and a staff view of tenants with undeliverable messages. Staff now fix those records before the due date instead of after it.
- PROBLEM 04Staff now fix those records before the due date instead of after it
03 · THE PROCESS
How we ran it.
We began with two weeks of discovery, sitting with the support team and listening to the calls they took. That showed which three requests made up most of their workload. We built in one-week sprints, each ending with a demo to the founders. The first sprint produced login, lease data import and the payment flow. Later sprints added maintenance tickets, documents and notifications. We ran a pilot in a small number of buildings before opening to everyone. After launch we reviewed usage and support calls weekly with the founders.
- 01Step 1
We began with two weeks of discovery, sitting with the support team and listening to the calls they took.
- 02Step 2
That showed which three requests made up most of their workload.
- 03Step 3
We built in one-week sprints, each ending with a demo to the founders.
- 04Step 4
The first sprint produced login, lease data import and the payment flow.
- 05Step 5
Later sprints added maintenance tickets, documents and notifications.
- 06Step 6
We ran a pilot in a small number of buildings before opening to everyone.
04 · RESULTS
What changed.
Measured against the way the work ran before the engagement began.
- NOW 01
Staff no longer chase rent by message.
- NOW 02
They work from an exceptions list of late or mismatched payments.
- NOW 03
Maintenance requests are triaged in one queue, with every request tracked until it is closed.
- NOW 04
Leases and documents live in one place with clear access.
- 30%
Support calls down 30% in the first quarter
- 70%
70% of tenants active
05 · WHAT WE BUILT
How it works.
- The portal is a mobile-friendly web app on a standard API backend with a relational database.
- Payments go through a licensed payment provider, so card details are never stored by the platform.
- Each payment is matched to a lease and recorded in a ledger table, with a daily reconciliation check against provider reports.
- Documents are stored in private object storage and served through short-lived links.
- Access is role-based: tenant, staff and owner see different data.
- Every document view and status change is written to an audit log.
06 · QUICK ANSWERS
The short version.
- What problem did the client have?
- The startup managed rent, maintenance requests and documents by hand. Rent was chased through messages and bank transfers that someone had to match to tenants. Repair requests arrived by phone and chat, and were written into a spreadsheet when someone remembered. Leases and ID documents sat in shared folders with no clear access rules. The team was small, and every new building added more phone calls than they could answer. They needed a product tenants would use and a back office that could keep up.
- What did Brandsmashers build?
- A tenant portal with online rent payments, maintenance requests and secure document storage. Tenants could see what they owed, pay, report an issue with a photo, and follow its status. Staff got an admin console to manage units, tenants, requests and documents. Automated reminders replaced manual chasing.
- How was the work run?
- We began with two weeks of discovery, sitting with the support team and listening to the calls they took. That showed which three requests made up most of their workload. We built in one-week sprints, each ending with a demo to the founders. The first sprint produced login, lease data import and the payment flow. Later sprints added maintenance tickets, documents and notifications. We ran a pilot in a small number of buildings before opening to everyone. After launch we reviewed usage and support calls weekly with the founders.
- What were the results?
- Support calls down 30% in the first quarter; 70% of tenants active.
YOUR TURN
Have a similar requirement?
Tell us what is stuck. We will come back with a plan and matched, pre-vetted engineers.
