Hamptons Estate Property Management

A property management company in the Hamptons area of Long Island was running their entire operation on spreadsheets, phone calls, and paper forms. Property listings lived in a shared document. Service requests came in via phone and were tracked on a whiteboard. Billing was manual — invoices created one at a time, payments tracked in a separate spreadsheet, late notices sent by hand.

The business was growing, but the manual processes could not scale. New properties meant more phone calls, more spreadsheet rows, more opportunities for things to fall through the cracks. The team spent more time on administrative coordination than on the property management work that actually generated revenue.

This was a full client engagement — from initial requirements gathering and contract negotiation through production deployment and handoff. We structured the engagement with a tiered Digital Services Agreement that included system ownership vesting milestones, ensuring the client would own the platform outright after the engagement completed.

The platform was built as two connected applications: a client-facing portal where property owners can view their listings, submit service requests, and manage billing; and an admin dashboard where the management team handles client management, service scheduling, and financial reporting. Both share a single Supabase backend with row-level security ensuring data isolation between clients.

We integrated Google Maps for property visualization, Stripe Connect for payment processing with automated invoicing, and SendGrid plus Twilio for multi-channel notifications — email for formal communications, SMS for time-sensitive service updates.

• Tiered service agreement with ownership vesting — the client gains full system ownership after engagement milestones, eliminating vendor lock-in concerns and aligning incentives.
• Supabase RLS for multi-tenant isolation — row-level security policies ensure property owners can only access their own data without requiring separate database instances per client.
• Stripe Connect over direct Stripe — Connect enables the property management company to process payments on behalf of property owners with automated fee splitting.
• Docker on Hetzner VPS — lower ongoing infrastructure cost than managed cloud platforms, with full control over the deployment environment. Blue-green deployment for zero-downtime updates.
• Multi-channel notifications — email for invoices and formal updates, SMS for urgent service notifications. Channel selection is automatic based on notification type.

The platform replaced the entire manual workflow — from property listing management through service coordination to billing and collections. The admin team reported significant time savings on administrative tasks, with automated notifications eliminating the need for manual follow-up calls and reminder emails.

The client portal gave property owners self-service access to their information for the first time, reducing inbound phone calls for routine inquiries. Automated invoicing and payment processing improved cash flow by reducing the delay between service delivery and payment collection.

The system was deployed to production on Docker with automated backups and monitoring, and the client received full documentation, a codebase walkthrough, and 30 days of post-launch support.