The Problem: Managing 24 Properties on Spreadsheets
The client was a UK-based property management company handling 24 rental properties across five cities for a portfolio of private landlords. Every aspect of the operation ran on a patchwork of tools: rent tracking in Excel, tenant communication over WhatsApp, maintenance requests via email, leases stored as PDFs in Dropbox.
As the portfolio grew, the cracks became costly. Rent payments were missed and only noticed days later. Lease renewals crept up without warning. Maintenance requests got lost in email chains. There was no way to see the health of the full portfolio at a glance — it required opening five different spreadsheets and cross-referencing them manually.
The brief was to replace all of it with a single platform — one that both landlords and tenants could use, that automated the repetitive work (rent reminders, receipt generation, lease expiry alerts) and gave the management team a real-time view of every property they managed.
Everything a Property Manager Actually Needs
No feature bloat. Every module was scoped directly from the client's existing pain points — if they weren't losing time or money to it, we didn't build it.
Built for Both Sides of the Relationship
Property management involves two fundamentally different users with different needs and different mental models. We built two completely separate portal experiences on a shared backend.
- Portfolio overview with health indicators
- Rent collection status per property
- Maintenance ticket management + contractor assignment
- Lease management + renewal workflows
- Compliance calendar with automated alerts
- Financial reporting — income, expenses, yield
- Tenant communication hub (replaces WhatsApp)
- Document storage per property
- View current lease and tenancy details
- Pay rent online — card or direct debit
- View full payment history and download receipts
- Submit maintenance requests with photo upload
- Track maintenance ticket status in real time
- Receive all landlord communications in one place
- Renew lease digitally with DocuSign
- Move-out checklist and deposit return tracking
How It All Fits Together
The platform is built as a multi-tenant SaaS architecture — each property management company gets their own isolated data environment while sharing the same codebase and infrastructure.
The rent collection flow was one of the more complex pieces — Stripe webhooks fire on every payment event and update the platform in real time. Failed payments trigger an automated retry sequence and a landlord notification simultaneously. The entire flow from "rent due" to "receipt sent" is zero-touch for the property manager.
Technologies Used
Operational in 10 Weeks
From Spreadsheets to a Running Business.
The first automated rent collection cycle ran the week after launch. Every payment was collected, receipts sent and the landlord dashboard updated in real time — with zero manual input from the property management team. The founder described it as "the first Friday in years where I didn't spend three hours chasing rent."
Within 30 days of launch, the client had onboarded all 24 properties and all active tenants onto the platform. The maintenance ticket system alone resolved a long-standing frustration — contractors now receive structured briefs with photos instead of vague WhatsApp messages, cutting average resolution time from 8 days to 3.
The client is now marketing the platform to other property management companies as a white-label SaaS product — a use case that emerged organically from the quality of the build. BinaryBits has been retained to build the white-labelling and multi-tenancy features as a second phase.