The developer and the management company

Ilia Sotonin, founder of Unitify and co-author of the book Developer and Property Management Company, ran a residential management company for about 20,000 residents and built doma.ai, the platform used by 10,000 management companies across more than 5 million apartments. The book's core thesis is that the quality of a building's management is decided before the first resident moves in, at the design and construction stage. Developers who plan operations early sell their next project more easily; those who leave it until handover pass the problems to residents and to whoever manages the building.

The buyer's real experience starts after the sale

A developer sells an apartment once. The buyer then lives in it for years. In 2019 I wrote: "The main experience of an apartment buyer arises when the developer is no longer around. The management company is there." And in the same series of posts: "What is the customer experience of an apartment buyer? It is the experience of living in it."

That is why I call the management company's work "a continuation of the developer's sales process." In 2023 I gave a talk on the same idea: development continues even after the building is commissioned and the keys are handed over.

This used to be invisible in developer economics. It is not any more. Resident reviews now live where buyers search for them. Large projects sell in phases, and buyers walk through the finished phases before they commit to the next one. A dirty lobby or a slow response in phase one shows up in phase two's sales. In the book we describe seeing exactly this: poor hallway cleaning lowering conversion in a developer's sales office.

Design decisions are management decisions

Many problems residents blame on the management company were built into the building. A facade material that shows every speck of dust will make any operator look careless, however often it is cleaned. Bright colors fade and are expensive to restore. If the developer does not glaze balconies before handover, residents glaze them one by one, and the facade loses its coherence for good. If nobody plans where air-conditioning units go, neighbors end up in disputes and the facade fills with improvised brackets.

The courtyard is the same. If nobody thought about where dogs are walked, where teenagers play and where older residents sit, people repurpose spaces informally, and the management company absorbs the conflict. The book gives a practical order: lay out the shortest walking routes first, then place quiet and noisy zones relative to those routes and to the windows.

Every design choice comes with a maintenance cost that someone will pay for decades: lifts, ventilation, landscaping, lighting, access systems. Those costs set the floor of the service charge long before residents move in. A building can help its management company build good relationships with residents, or it can get in the way. The developer decides which.

Plan operations before handover

The first months after handover decide a building's reputation. That is when the wave of defect claims arrives. If it is not organized, individual complaints turn into a united, hostile group of residents. If the developer and the management company work in one shared system, each claim has an owner and a deadline. Without one, the developer and the operator redirect the resident to each other, and the resident, who just wants the problem fixed, is stuck in between.

So the operating model needs the same depth of thought as the architecture. Before handover, a developer should settle:

• who will run the building, with what team, and from what founding intention — to sustain the life the project promised, not just to minimize complaints;
• a service charge calculated line by line for the building's real systems, and explained to residents;
• the request, billing and communication system residents will use from the first day;
• the resident onboarding: what new owners need to know, and where they ask.

Smart technology belongs in the same plan, with one condition. As I wrote in 2021: "It is important that the root reason for adopting smart technologies is not the developer's wish to sell the apartment at a higher price." It has to make living there easier.

Questions people ask

Why should a property developer care about the management company? Because the buyer's real experience of the product starts after the sale, and the management company delivers it. Reviews, referrals and buyers inspecting earlier phases all link management quality to the developer's next sales. Having run a management company for about 20,000 residents, I saw directly how service quality in finished buildings affects the next project.

When should a developer start planning building operations? At the design stage, not at handover. Facades, balconies, air-conditioning placement, courtyard layout and engineering systems all set the future maintenance cost and the number of resident conflicts. The operating model, service charge and resident systems should be ready before the first keys are handed over.

What design decisions make a building hard to manage? Materials that look dirty or fade quickly, balconies left unglazed for residents to finish themselves, no planned positions for air-conditioning units, and courtyards with no thought given to who uses them. Each of these creates recurring complaints that the management company cannot fix later without major work.

How should the developer and the management company share responsibility after handover? Put both in one system for defect claims and resident requests, with a clear owner and deadline for each claim. When each party keeps its own records, they redirect the resident to each other. One shared process prevents that.

Ilia Sotonin is open to conversations on this topic: hello@iliasotonin.com