Everything arrives at once, and the leak is in the same pile as the parking question
Tenants, landlords, contractors and applicants, all messaging the same two people, at every hour, with no way to tell from the outside which message is an emergency.
The failure is not that things go unanswered. It is that they go unanswered in the wrong order. A boiler failure sits behind forty messages about bin collections because both arrived as unread notifications, and by the time somebody works down to it the tenant has rung the out-of-hours line, the landlord and the council.
Triage is the actual product here. Every enquiry — call, WhatsApp, chat — is understood, given a reference, sorted by urgency and sent where it belongs: the emergency to the on-call contractor tonight, the reference request into the queue, the parking question answered outright and never seen by a person.
What the assistant does with an inbox this shape
The emergency does not queue behind the trivia
Urgency is judged from what was actually said, not from a form the tenant had to categorise correctly. No heat and no water on a Friday night is not a normal repair.
Every issue gets a reference
Numbered, tracked and chaseable. It is what turns "I reported that weeks ago" from an argument into a lookup.
It knows which flat, and asks if it does not
Address, unit, tenancy and history attached before anyone reads it, so nobody spends the first two minutes of every call establishing where the problem is.
Answered at midnight, escalated correctly
The whole point of an out-of-hours line is judgement about what warrants waking someone. That judgement is applied to every call, consistently.
Dispatched with the detail attached
The right trade gets the address, the access arrangements and what the tenant actually described, rather than a voicemail saying "call the office".
Booked against the real diary
Applicants ring at every hour and go cold fast. Slots are taken on the call and confirmed, without a negotiation over email.
Rent dates, bins, parking, notice periods
A large share of the volume is questions with fixed answers already sitting in the tenancy agreement. Those never need to reach a person again.
A different line and a different answer
Owners asking about arrears, inspections and statements are a separate assistant with separate knowledge — including the ones ringing from another country.
Judgement about urgency is only as good as what you tell it counts as urgent. That is a half-hour conversation at setup and it is the half hour that decides whether this works.
A weekend in a managing agent’s inbox
No heating, Friday, half past nine
Triage · on-call escalationRecognised as urgent, ticketed, and pushed to the on-call contractor with the address and access details. The tenant is told what is happening rather than left guessing.
“I’ve logged that as an emergency — reference 4471 — and the on-call engineer has it now.”
Forty messages about the bins
Knowledge base · answered outrightCollection days, which bin, where they go. Answered instantly and permanently, and never appearing in anybody’s inbox again.
A reference request from a letting agent
Ticket · routed to lettingsRouted to the right desk with the tenancy already identified, instead of forwarded twice and actioned on Tuesday.
An owner abroad asking about arrears
Live query · your systemAnswered from the actual ledger at whatever hour they are awake, rather than a promise that someone will look into it in the morning.
“The June payment cleared on the 3rd; there’s nothing outstanding on that tenancy.”
Will it wake the on-call engineer for something trivial?
The escalation rules are yours: what counts as an emergency, who gets it, at what hour, and what happens if they do not answer. It applies them the same way every time, which is more than can be said for a tired person at midnight.
Can it see our property management system?
If it can be connected, yes — read-only, so it can answer about tenancies, balances and repair history during the conversation rather than promising to check.
What about tenants who only use WhatsApp?
That is most of them in a lot of blocks. WhatsApp, phone and chat land in the same queue with the same triage, and voice notes are understood rather than left unplayed.
One platform fee. Seats only when you want people. No minimum, no term.