Tenant portal for a commercial office landlord: maintenance requests and budget

The verdict in three sentences

A commercial landlord with 22 office buildings and 180 tenants handling 3,000 maintenance requests a year by email loses traceability, misses contractual response times and cannot measure its contractors. A custom tenant portal centralises tickets with SLAs by urgency level, lease documents and contractor tracking, where off-the-shelf platforms in London or New York cost 7,000 to 25,000 GBP or 10,000 to 35,000 USD in licences a year. Kolonell builds it within its custom application grid of 3,810 to 22,870+ EUR (2,500,000 to 15,000,000+ FCFA), in 3 to 5 months.

Why email breaks down at 3,000 tickets a year

At 3,000 requests a year, the property team receives 12 to 15 tickets per working day, often duplicated (the tenant writes to the property manager, then the building manager, then the asset manager). Attachments go missing, chasers pile up, and nobody can say whether a leak reported on a Friday evening was attended within the 4 hours set in the facilities contract. At annual tenant meetings, the landlord has no reliable figures. The portal fixes this with a single route: the tenant reports, the system qualifies urgency, the contractor is notified and every step is time-stamped.

These timings are 2026 orders of magnitude seen in facilities management contracts in London and New York; the portal makes them configurable per building and per contractor.

The functional scope of a tenant portal that gets used

The core has four modules. First, request reporting with a phone photo, location (building, floor, unit) and guided urgency selection. Second, real-time tracking for the tenant, with email notifications and a full history. Third, a document area: lease, variations, schedule of condition, compliance certificates, and energy data needed for EPC ratings in the UK or Local Law 97 reporting in New York. Fourth, the landlord dashboard: tickets per building, SLA compliance per contractor, cost of rechargeable works for the service charge.

Then come the options that move the budget: a connection to your existing property management system to pull units and tenants, single sign-on for large occupiers, a mobile app for engineers, e-signature of lease variations. Occupant personal data falls under UK GDPR or US state privacy laws: defined hosting region, access logs, retention periods. Hosting and its security options are priced in the quote.

Build or buy: the three-year comparison

For 22 buildings and 180 tenants, the medium application covers the brief: tickets, SLAs, documents, dashboard and property system connection. The complex tier is justified if you add meeting room booking, access badge management and an offline engineer app.

Mini case study

James, head of asset management at a landlord with 22 office buildings in London, measures 35 minutes of admin per ticket today (reading, forwarding, chasing, closing). With the portal he targets 15 minutes: 3,000 tickets x 20 minutes = 1,000 hours saved a year. At a loaded cost of 40 GBP an hour for a property manager, that is 40,000 GBP a year. The medium application at its top price of 10,670 EUR plus Premium maintenance at 183 EUR a month (2,196 EUR a year) costs 12,866 EUR in year one. The project pays back in about 4 months of use, and the landlord finally has SLA figures to show tenants at lease renewal.

FAQ

How long does it take to go live?

Allow 3 to 5 months: 3 to 4 weeks of scoping, 8 to 12 weeks of development, then 2 to 4 weeks of acceptance testing on 2 pilot buildings before rolling out to all 22.

Can the portal connect to our property management system?

Yes in most cases, through an API or a scheduled import of units and tenants. Feasibility and cost of that connection are set out in the quote after reviewing your system.

Do contractors need a paid licence?

No, you own the portal: you can add 5 or 50 contractors with no per-user fee, unlike platforms billed at 20 to 60 USD per user per month.

How is data protection handled?

Occupant data is hosted in a defined region, access is logged and tickets are purged after a set period, for example 6 years after the lease ends to match UK limitation rules.

What happens when we add buildings?

Adding a building means creating its units and SLA rules in the admin area, in under an hour. Cost does not depend on the number of buildings.

Let's scope your project. Tell us about your portfolio, facilities contracts and current tools, and we will define the modules, integrations and a 3 to 5 month go-live plan. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.