Industry
Property and real estate
Property technology deals in multi-year relationships between parties with genuinely different interests, mediated by documents, payments and statutory obligations. The system that keeps a continuous, attributable record is the one that resolves the dispute.
Workflows
The work that actually happens here
Named the way practitioners in this sector name them, because that is the vocabulary a delivery team has to learn before it can be useful.
- Listing and viewing management
- Publishing availability, scheduling viewings and capturing interest, across an agent’s own presence and portal feeds.
- Application and referencing
- Structured applications with identity verification, affordability evidence, employment and previous-landlord references.
- Agreement and signature
- Generating the agreement from the tenancy record, electronic signature, and storage with a signature audit trail.
- Rent, deposits and arrears
- Collection, deposit-scheme registration tracking, arrears schedules and reconciliation against the tenancy ledger.
- Maintenance and works
- Tenant-raised requests with evidence, triage, contractor assignment, access arrangements, completion and cost.
- Compliance tracking
- Safety certificates, licences and inspections tracked with escalating reminders ahead of expiry.
Constraints
What changes the architecture
These are the reasons a design that works elsewhere would be wrong here.
Multi-party access with genuinely divergent interests
Landlord, agent, tenant and contractor need different views of the same tenancy. A contractor needs the access details and not the arrears history.
Statutory deadlines carry penalties
Deposit registration and certificate renewal have legal deadlines with financial consequences for missing them. Reminders are a product requirement.
Records must be evidence-grade
Disputes are decided on the record. Timestamps, attribution and immutability matter more than convenience of editing.
Document-heavy workload
Load is dominated by document upload, generation and retrieval rather than concurrent browsing, which changes the architecture.
Identity evidence has a defined life
Right-to-rent and identity documents are held for a lawful basis with a defined retention period, after which they must actually be deleted.
Integrations
Systems we would expect to meet
- Identity and right-to-rent verification providers
- Deposit protection schemes
- E-signature providers such as DocuSign or Adobe Sign
- Payment providers and open banking for rent collection
- Property portal feeds
- Accounting systems for landlord statements
Trust considerations
What users and regulators need here
- Tenants should be able to see exactly what has been requested of them and why, and what has been decided.
- Contractor access must be tightly scoped and time-limited to the job.
- Financial and identity data need permissions beyond ordinary tenancy membership.
- Communications should be retained per tenancy so a dispute has a record.
- Document retention must be implemented, not merely stated in a policy.
Architecture
A shape we would actually propose
A starting sketch, not a template. Discovery is what turns this into a specific design with recorded trade-offs.
- Domain
- The tenancy is the aggregate; properties, people, agreements, payments and works attach to it.
- Access
- Row-level security keyed on tenancy membership and role, with financial and identity data behind extra permissions.
- Documents
- Private storage, short-lived signed access, server-side validation, download auditing and per-class retention.
- Ledger
- Append-only tenancy ledger for rent, deposits and works costs, reconciled against provider settlements.
- Reminders
- Scheduled, durable compliance reminders with escalation and recorded acknowledgement.
Outcomes
What good looks like
- A continuous, attributable record per tenancy that settles disputes
- Compliance deadlines met through system reminders rather than individual memory
- Faster application-to-agreement cycles through structured referencing
- Maintenance resolution times visible and improvable
Related
Where to go next
Next step
A property and real estate project starts with the constraints
The Project Architect asks sector-specific questions about data, regulation and integration before it asks about features.