What's in it for you
If you are moving from building apartments to operating them, or running thousands of rental units on software that was never designed for you, this is a complete tenancy lifecycle built from the map up. You will see the dozen processes it covers, the one data model behind them, the contract engine that generates agreements and annexes from data that is already correct, and the layer that raises deadlines before they pass.
The Client
A developer becoming an operator: thousands of apartments across several communities, delivered in waves from construction into long-term rental, in a market where build-to-rent at this scale had not been done before and no off-the-shelf system fit.
The Challenge
Building the apartments was the part the organization knew. Running them for decades was new, and the tenancy lifecycle touched every team.
- A dozen distinct processes from unit pricing and construction handover through lease-up, move-in, work orders, amenities, collections, renewals, move-out and supplier invoices, each owned by a different team and none of them connected
- Unit data, tenant data and contract data held in different places, with the contract itself assembled by hand from a master agreement and a stack of annexes
- Obligation dates, renewals, indexation and deposit returns tracked in spreadsheets, so the organization found out about deadlines when they had passed
- Generic property management software forced the organization to work the software's way, and the way did not fit
What We Did
At TippingPoint, we mapped the whole lifecycle first and then built the system the map called for.
- Ran a scale audit across the entire tenancy lifecycle. Every process drawn in its current state alongside its proposed state, bottlenecks flagged and ranked, quick wins separated from deep builds.
- Designed one data model for the whole business. Properties, buildings, apartments, parking and storage, people, contracts, obligations, work and money, in a single structure that every process reads from and writes to.
- Built the contract engine. A wizard that produces the master agreement and its commercial, regulatory and delivery annexes from the unit and tenant records, sends them for digital signature, and loads contracts in bulk when a building lets up all at once.
- Added a layer that acts without being asked. Approaching obligation dates, renewals due, deposits to return, invoices to match: the system raises them and routes them, rather than waiting for someone to remember.
- Left construction and accounting where they were. The handover protocol stays in the construction system; finance stays in the ERP. The operating system connects to both instead of replacing either.
The Impact
- One record per unit and per tenant, from handover to move-out
- Contracts generated in minutes from data that is already correct, instead of assembled by hand
- Deadlines surfaced ahead of time across thousands of tenancies
- An operating model that scales to the next community without scaling the back office
Outcome: a developer became a landlord at scale without inheriting a landlord's back office.