Case Studies › Cohabit

PropTech & Real Estate

One platform to run every strata building

Techdots built Cohabit from the ground up — a modern strata and body corporate management platform purpose-built for the Australian market. We delivered levy collection automation, a structured maintenance request workflow, compliance deadline tracking, and a resident-facing communication portal, replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets, email chains, and outdated desktop software that was slowing strata managers down at scale.

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Cohabit

PropTech & Real Estate

70%

Reduction in levy admin time per building

4.2x

More maintenance requests resolved within SLA

3,800+

Lots under active management at launch

5 months

timeline

This engagement is best for

Strata and property management companies managing multiple buildings

PropTech startups entering highly regulated, paperwork-heavy industries

Businesses replacing legacy desktop software with modern cloud platforms

Platforms that need tenant or resident self-service portals alongside a manager dashboard

The Transformation

Before & After

Before

✕ Levy schedules and arrears were tracked manually across dozens of spreadsheets, leading to billing errors and missed follow-ups

✕ Maintenance requests arrived via email and SMS with no central log, causing requests to fall through the cracks

✕ Compliance obligations — AGMs, insurance renewals, fire safety checks — were tracked per-building in ad hoc calendar reminders

✕ Residents had no self-service visibility into their levy balance, outstanding maintenance, or building notices

✕ Strata managers spent 3–4 hours per building per month just reconciling payment records against bank statements

After

✓ Automated levy schedules generate and dispatch notices on time, with arrears escalation handled through configurable workflow rules

✓ Maintenance requests submitted via the resident portal are triaged, assigned to contractors, and tracked through to sign-off in one view

✓ A compliance calendar surfaces upcoming deadlines across all managed buildings in a single dashboard with automated reminders

✓ Residents log in to view levy statements, submit requests, and read building notices without contacting the strata manager

✓ Bank reconciliation is automated via direct feed integration, reducing per-building admin from hours to minutes

What We Built

Deliverables & Scope

Every item below was chosen because it directly addressed a business bottleneck — not because it was technically interesting.

Multi-tenancy building management dashboard — strata managers see all buildings, lots, owners, and open items in one authenticated workspace

Automated levy billing engine — generates levy notices on configurable schedules, tracks payments, and escalates arrears through a defined workflow including reminder emails and interest calculations

Resident self-service portal — lot owners and tenants can view levy balances, submit and track maintenance requests, and receive building-wide notices

Maintenance request module — structured intake form, contractor assignment, status tracking, photo uploads, and completion sign-off with a full audit trail

Compliance calendar with automated reminders — per-building deadline tracking for AGMs, insurance renewals, fire safety, and council submissions

Bank feed reconciliation integration — direct connection to major Australian bank feeds to automatically match incoming payments against outstanding levies

ROI Logic

Why This Generated
Real Business Value

Strata management is a volume business — managers run dozens or hundreds of buildings simultaneously, and time spent on repetitive admin directly erodes margin. By automating levy billing, reconciliation, and compliance reminders, Cohabit gives managers the capacity to take on more buildings without adding headcount. The resident portal reduces inbound phone and email volume, and the structured maintenance workflow shortens resolution times, which directly improves resident satisfaction and retention of management contracts.

Key Outcomes

70%

Reduction in levy admin time per building

4.2x

More maintenance requests resolved within SLA

3,800+

Lots under active management at launch

Why It Worked

The Decisions That
Made the Difference

Good execution matters. But the right early decisions matter more.

We mapped the full strata manager workflow before writing a line of code — spending two weeks interviewing active managers to understand where time was actually lost, not where stakeholders assumed it was

The levy engine was built around Australian body corporate legislation requirements from day one, meaning the compliance model was baked into the data structure rather than bolted on later

We shipped the resident portal in parallel with the manager dashboard, so Cohabit launched with a complete two-sided product rather than a back-office tool with no resident-facing value

Automated bank reconciliation was prioritised early because it was the single highest-friction daily task — solving it built immediate trust with the first cohort of strata managers onboarded

Tech Stack

Sidekiq AWS (ECS + RDS + S3)

Integrations

Stripe — levy payment collection and direct debit authorisation Basiq — open banking bank feed aggregation for automated reconciliation SendGrid — transactional email for levy notices, arrears reminders, and resident notifications Twilio SMS — arrears escalation and maintenance status updates via SMS DocuSign — electronic signing of AGM minutes and strata management agreements

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