This case study documents how Lycore built a suite of custom PropTech solutions for a UK residential property management company managing 1,400 properties across 12 landlord clients. The company was operating on a combination of a legacy property management system from 2014, Excel-based maintenance tracking, and a phone-heavy tenant communication model that was consuming more than a third of their staff capacity on routine enquiries and manual updates. Over 14 months of phased development and deployment, the custom PropTech platform reduced operational costs by 34%, improved tenant satisfaction scores significantly, and gave landlord clients the portfolio visibility they had been demanding for years.
The Problem: Legacy Systems and Manual Processes Limiting Scale
Before engaging Lycore, the property management company’s operational model had significant inefficiencies that were preventing growth and eroding margins as property volumes increased.
Pain Points Driving the Custom PropTech Solutions Project
Tenant maintenance requests arrived by phone and email and were manually entered into a spreadsheet, then manually assigned to contractors by the maintenance coordinator. There was no systematic tracking of job progress – the maintenance coordinator chased contractors by phone, tenants chased the office by phone, and the office had no real-time visibility into whether jobs were complete. Landlord clients received monthly PDF reports that required four hours of manual preparation per client, combining data from the property management system and the maintenance spreadsheet. Tenants had no self-service access to lease information, payment history, or maintenance request status – every question required a call or email to the office. The property management system (a third-party SaaS product) had a per-property pricing model that was making the economics of taking on new clients increasingly unattractive. The combination of staff capacity constraints, client reporting burden, and per-property licensing costs meant the company could not profitably grow beyond their current portfolio size without fundamental changes to their operational model.
Why Custom PropTech Solutions Were Chosen Over Commercial Platforms
The company evaluated four commercial property management platforms before commissioning a custom build. Each addressed some of the problems but created others. The contractor management and tenant portal features of commercial platforms were either absent or insufficient for the company’s specific workflows. More importantly, all four platforms maintained the per-property pricing model that was constraining the company’s growth economics – a custom system with fixed hosting costs would become more cost-effective than the best commercial alternative at approximately 1,800 properties, a growth milestone they expected to reach within three years. The combination of specific workflow requirements (particularly around contractor management and multi-client landlord reporting) and the commercial case for removing per-property licensing made a custom build the right decision.
Custom PropTech Solutions: Maintenance Management Module
The maintenance management module was the highest-priority component because it was the source of the greatest operational cost and the most tenant dissatisfaction.
Automated Maintenance Request Workflow
Tenants submit maintenance requests through the self-service portal with: a category selection (plumbing, electrical, heating, structural, appliances, other), a description field, and optional photo upload. The system automatically triages requests by urgency (emergency versus routine based on category and keywords in the description) and sends an SMS to the relevant contractor from the pre-approved list for that property’s borough and trade category. The contractor receives an SMS with the job details, property address, and a link to accept or decline. Accepted jobs are tracked through a simple status flow (accepted, scheduled, in progress, complete, signed off), with status updates pushed to the tenant via SMS and email in real time. The maintenance coordinator’s role shifted from chasing jobs on the phone to monitoring the dashboard for escalations – jobs that have not been accepted within 4 hours, jobs that are overdue against the scheduled completion date, or jobs where the tenant has raised a quality issue.
Contractor Management in Custom PropTech Solutions
The contractor management module maintains the approved contractor list with trade category, borough coverage, average response time (computed from job history), average completion time, and satisfaction rating (from post-job tenant feedback). The contractor assignment algorithm selects from the approved list for the relevant trade and borough, prioritising contractors with better performance metrics and distributing work to avoid over-reliance on a single contractor. Contractors submit their completed job invoices through the portal, which are reviewed by the maintenance coordinator and pushed to Xero for payment processing. The full job record – request, photos, contractor responses, completion confirmation, tenant feedback, and invoice – is stored against the property and is visible to the landlord client in their portal. This documentation trail significantly reduced the disputes about maintenance quality and response times that had previously required time-consuming manual investigation.
Tenant Portal and Self-Service Features
The tenant portal was the component with the most direct impact on inbound enquiry volume reduction and tenant satisfaction improvement.
Self-Service Features That Drove Enquiry Deflection in Custom PropTech Solutions
The tenant portal provided access to: current tenancy agreement and any amendments; rent payment history and upcoming payment schedule; maintenance request submission and real-time job status tracking; utility registration documents and meter readings; property inspection reports; and a message thread with the property management office. Within three months of launch, inbound phone call volume to the office fell by 41% – the vast majority of that reduction attributable to tenants self-serving maintenance status queries and document requests that previously required a call. The message thread in the portal replaced email for tenant-office communication on the portal-using tenant population, providing a searchable, auditable record of all communications that was significantly easier to manage than a shared email inbox.
Rent Payment Integration and Arrears Management
The rent payment module integrated with Stripe for card payments and GoCardless for direct debit mandates, with automated rent due reminders sent 3 days before the due date and arrears escalation workflows that triggered at day 1, day 7, and day 14 of arrears. The arrears workflow automated the communication steps that previously required manual action by the accounts team – reducing the mean time from rent due date to arrears notification from 4 days to same-day, and improving rent collection rates measurably in the first quarter after launch.
Landlord Client Reporting Portal
Landlord client reporting was the component that had the most direct impact on client retention and satisfaction, and the most significant time saving for the property management team.
Automated Landlord Reports in Custom PropTech Solutions
Each landlord client’s portal showed a real-time dashboard of their portfolio: current vacancy rate, rent collection status, open maintenance jobs by property, and upcoming lease renewals. Monthly financial reports – rent received, management fees, maintenance costs, and net income per property – were generated automatically from the platform data and Xero integration, with no manual preparation required. The reports were available to landlord clients in the portal on the first working day of each month, compared to the 4-hour-per-client manual preparation process that previously meant some clients waited until the 15th. The time saving from automated reporting – approximately 48 hours per month of staff time across 12 clients – was the single largest contributor to the operational cost reduction alongside the maintenance workflow automation.
Cost Reduction Results from Custom PropTech Solutions
Over the 12 months following full deployment, the company documented the following measurable improvements compared to the pre-platform baseline: management overhead (staff time on administrative tasks per property managed) reduced by 34% through maintenance automation and self-service tenant features; maintenance cost per job reduced by 28% through contractor performance management and competitive assignment rather than relying on the same contractors regardless of performance; tenant satisfaction scores (measured in annual surveys) improved from 3.2/5 to 4.1/5, attributed primarily to the maintenance response time improvement and self-service portal access; landlord client retention improved with no clients leaving in the 12 months post-launch (compared to two clients who moved to competitors in the 12 months prior, citing reporting quality as a factor). The platform paid back its development cost of GBP 110,000 in approximately 14 months through staff time savings and client retention value.
Custom PropTech Solutions: Pros and Cons
Pros
- Workflow fit – the platform modelled the company’s actual maintenance, reporting, and tenant communication workflows rather than requiring them to adapt to a commercial platform’s assumptions.
- No per-property licensing – fixed hosting costs mean the platform economics improve as the portfolio grows, supporting the company’s expansion plans without per-property cost inflation.
- Full data ownership – all property, tenancy, maintenance, and financial data is in the company’s infrastructure, supporting analytics, compliance, and future feature development without vendor restrictions.
- Competitive differentiation – landlord portal quality and tenant self-service became genuine selling points for new client acquisition and existing client retention.
Cons
- Significant upfront investment – GBP 110,000 development cost is a major capital commitment that requires a clear ROI case and a 12-18 month payback horizon to justify.
- Ongoing maintenance responsibility – the company owns the platform’s maintenance, security updates, and feature development, requiring an ongoing development partnership.
- Data migration complexity – migrating 1,400 property records, tenancy histories, and maintenance records from the legacy system and spreadsheets added four weeks to the project timeline and required significant data cleaning.
Frequently Asked Questions: Custom PropTech Solutions
When does a property management company justify a custom PropTech build?
Custom PropTech solutions are justified when commercial platforms cannot accommodate the company’s specific workflows, when the per-property or per-user pricing of commercial platforms makes them economically unattractive at the company’s scale, or when the company wants to use its technology platform as a competitive differentiator in client acquisition. The break-even calculation against commercial platforms typically favours custom at 800-1,500+ properties under management, depending on the commercial platform’s per-property pricing. Below this threshold, the development investment is unlikely to recover within a reasonable timeframe. The specific workflow requirement is often the more compelling justification than the cost comparison – a company whose maintenance contractor management process, multi-landlord reporting model, or tenant communication approach is genuinely incompatible with what commercial platforms offer has a workflow justification that is independent of the cost calculation.
How long does a custom PropTech platform take to build?
A full-featured custom PropTech property management platform – with tenant portal, maintenance management, landlord reporting, rent payment processing, and accounting integration – typically takes 12-18 months from requirements definition to full deployment across a live portfolio. This includes: 6-9 months of core development (property and tenancy data model, maintenance workflow, tenant portal, basic landlord reporting); 2-3 months of integration development (accounting system, payment processing, contractor SMS); 2-3 months of data migration (cleaning and loading historical property and tenancy data from the legacy system); and 2-3 months of phased rollout (running the new platform alongside the legacy system for a cohort of properties before full cutover). The data migration and phased rollout phases are consistently underestimated – they require more time and careful project management than the core development. Budget for them explicitly rather than treating them as minor appendices to the technical build.
What integrations are essential for a custom PropTech platform?
The integrations that are most operationally important in a custom PropTech platform are: accounting system integration (Xero or QuickBooks for UK firms) for rent collection, maintenance invoicing, management fee calculation, and landlord financial reporting – attempting to maintain a separate financial record alongside the accounting system creates reconciliation problems that consume staff time; payment processing (Stripe for card, GoCardless for direct debit) for automated rent collection and online payment; SMS delivery (Twilio) for tenant and contractor notifications where email open rates are insufficient for time-sensitive communications; and document storage (AWS S3 or Azure Blob) for tenancy agreements, inspection reports, and maintenance photos. Secondary integrations that add value but are not operationally critical include: credit referencing APIs (Experian, Homelet) for tenant referencing workflows; right-to-rent verification services; and energy performance certificate (EPC) APIs for portfolio compliance tracking. Prioritise the accounting and payment integrations above all others – they are the ones where errors or gaps have direct financial consequences.
How do you handle GDPR compliance in a custom PropTech platform?
A custom PropTech platform processes significant personal data – tenant contact information, financial records, maintenance correspondence, and potentially sensitive information disclosed during maintenance requests or tenancy applications. GDPR compliance requires: a lawful basis for each type of data processing (contractual necessity for tenancy administration, legitimate interests for maintenance management, legal obligation for right-to-rent checks); a record of processing activities (Article 30 register) documenting each data category, its purpose, retention period, and who has access; defined data retention periods enforced in the application (tenancy data retained for 6 years after tenancy end for legal and tax purposes, then deleted or anonymised); data subject rights implementation (tenant access requests, erasure requests for former tenants, data portability); and data protection impact assessment for the high-risk processing activities (credit referencing, identity verification). Build GDPR compliance into the data model and access control design from the start – retrofitting it after launch is significantly more expensive and disruptive than designing for it upfront.
Conclusion
The custom PropTech platform described in this case study delivered a 34% reduction in management overhead, a 28% reduction in maintenance costs, and a significant improvement in both tenant and landlord satisfaction within 14 months of deployment. These results came from solving specific operational problems – the maintenance coordination burden, the manual reporting process, the tenant enquiry volume – with purpose-built software rather than adapting operations to fit a generic platform. Custom PropTech solutions make sense when the workflow requirements are specific enough and the portfolio scale is large enough to justify the investment. When those conditions are met, the combination of workflow fit, data ownership, and pricing model flexibility produces returns that commercial platforms cannot match.
Running a property management business that is being held back by legacy systems, manual processes, or a commercial platform that does not fit your workflows? At Lycore, we build custom PropTech solutions for residential property managers, commercial agents, and housing associations across the UK – from tenant portals and maintenance management platforms to landlord reporting systems and integrated property management suites. Talk to our PropTech development team about your platform requirements.
