The Challenge
A Toronto retail-property operator runs three shopping centers and 39 retail units. Everything that mattered lived in paper binders, scattered email reminders, and a planner:
- Who had paid, and which lease expires when
- Which maintenance request was still open
- Which contractor was last called, and whether they were any good
Notes went missing and lease renewals crept up unseen. The issue wasn't the amount of data. It was having one place to see it. Off-the-shelf property software solved a different problem, tenant portals, online payments, hundreds of doors, none of it shaped to a hands-on operator running a few dozen units by hand.
What We Did
At TippingPoint, we built a single internal web app, shaped to exactly how the operator already worked. Our work included:
- Property-first navigation. Start at the three buildings, open one to see its units at a glance, open a unit for its tenant, lease, documents, and full history.
- One needs-attention view. The home screen ranks what is coming due, leases, appointments, insurance lapses, so the whole portfolio reads in a single glance.
- Building less, on purpose. A planned email-reminder engine was cut the moment the operator said she did not want another inbox to check. The signal moved in-app instead.
- Security treated as real. Gated access, row-level security, encryption, and an audit trail, because the data is leases and personal information.
Discovery to a live, secured deployment took about two weeks, built by one person.
The Impact
- The portfolio moved off paper and into one place
- Every lease now shows its days to expiry, sortable across all three buildings
- Contractor history, documents, and tenant records sit one click from the unit they belong to
- What used to be tracked by memory now surfaces itself the moment the app opens
Outcome: the operator stopped managing the portfolio out of binders and started managing it from a screen, on a system that runs at no ongoing cost.