Fictional client
Section 20 caps what you can recover at £250 a flat if the consultation is not run properly. Forty-four flats at £250 is £11,000 against £184,000 spent, leaving £173,000 the client company has to find from somewhere else. This consultation was correct at every stage but one — the Statement of Estimates went out six days late. Block management is a business where the software either holds the statutory clock, or the firm absorbs the difference.
Marlbourne Property Management does not exist. We cannot show live client systems, so this study is built around a fictional managing agent — invented firm, invented buildings, invented people, invented figures. What is not invented is the work: the statutory processes, the sequence of notices, the obligations, the data structures and the failure modes are all real, and the screens are genuine working pages rather than pictures of pages. Every mockup on this page opens and responds to clicks.
On scope: the law referred to throughout is that of England and Wales — principally the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 and the Building Safety Act 2022. Scotland and Northern Ireland have materially different regimes, and a system built for either would need a different statutory core.
Marlbourne manages residential blocks across the Thames Valley and the South East. It is a good firm with a serious problem: the business has roughly doubled in five years and the systems have not moved. The accounts package handles the money. Everything that decides whether the money is recoverable lives in Word documents, Outlook and a shared drive.
None of these is a technology problem in the abstract. Each one is a specific way a managing agent loses money, loses time, or acquires a liability it cannot see.
The system is built around two ideas. First, the building is the record — every certificate, lease term, works order, document and consultation hangs off it, so nothing has to be assembled later. Second, anything with a statutory or contractual date drives a task before it becomes a problem, and keeps the evidence of what was served, to whom, and when.
Seven screens follow. Each one opens as a real page — click through them.
The morning view for a director or an operations manager. Not a wall of vanity metrics — a ranked list of what carries consequence this week, with the statutory items above the financial ones and the reason each item is on the list.
The screen this whole study is built around. Five stages, each with its statutory date, its service evidence, and its observation log. The estimates sit against the stage that requires them, the leaseholder's nominated contractor is tracked separately because it must be included regardless of price, and no stage can close without recording who authorised it.
It watches both triggers, not just the famous one: qualifying works above £250 a leaseholder, and qualifying long-term agreements above £100 a leaseholder a year. The system applies the right test to the right agreement rather than relying on somebody remembering there are two.
Everything about one block in one place: units and apportionments read from the lease, key dates, the reserve fund against the ten-year plan, the building safety information as structured data rather than a folder of scans, and documents filed against the obligation they evidence.
One register across all 184 blocks, sorted by consequence rather than by date entered. A certificate uploaded against an obligation sets its own next due date from the interval in the regulation. Higher-risk buildings carry their safety case readiness, their open gaps, and who is accountable.
The budget builder pulls prior-year actuals and live contract uplifts, then shows the per-unit consequence of every line before the demand goes out. Demand runs refuse to issue without the prescribed information. Credit control is a defined ladder where nothing escalates past final notice without a person deciding and the system recording who.
Committed cost hits the budget the day the order is raised, not the day the invoice arrives. An order that would take a budget head past its limit cannot be approved by a property manager and routes to the client directors with the variance already worked out. A contractor whose cover has lapsed is blocked the same day, and the exposure it creates is shown in full.
A second audience, so a second interface — no staff navigation, no jargon, and the same statutory clock rewritten in plain English so a leaseholder can see exactly where a consultation has got to and how long they have to comment. Documents appear the moment they are filed. Issues go straight to the named property manager with a reference and a date.
Statutory notices can be served through it, but only where that leaseholder has agreed in writing to electronic service. The system holds the consent per unit, records when it was given, and falls back to post for anyone who has not given it — because a notice served by a route the leaseholder never accepted is a notice that was not validly served.
Four phases of two weeks each — eight weeks end to end. The order matters as much as the speed: the statutory core goes live first, so the firm stops losing recoverability in week four rather than week fourteen. Each phase ends with something the team actually uses, not a demo.
Weeks 1–2.
Weeks 3–4.
Weeks 5–6.
Weeks 7–8.
Eight weeks is possible because most of it already exists. The engine underneath — the client and property records, document handling, approval limits, escalation rules, the portal — is running in production across six sectors already. What actually gets built for a managing agent is the statutory core: the consultation stages, the obligation intervals, the apportionment rules read from the lease. That is the part this study is about, and it is the part we would spend the eight weeks getting right.
This took a fictional firm and made its process visible. The same exercise works better with a real one. Tell us how your business actually runs and we will build a working mockup of it — your language, your stages, your brand — before anybody commits to a build.
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