One Less Reason to Sit On Your Hands
Voluntary board work is demanding - not least in cooperatives and owners' associations—lots of unpaid work, lots of potential conflicts of interest, and lots of appendices and minutes. For the same reason, recruiting volunteers to the board is not always easy.
The task of keeping track of everything around the property is burdensome - and with conflicts, you probably never quite get rid of either. But something can be done about the paperwork.
Ejendom.com is put into this world to make paperwork easier and give everyone the courage to take on the board task, one less reason to goof off, the next time candidates for the board are to be found.
While the individual owner makes all decisions regarding the maintenance of a detached house, it is more complicated for owner-occupied and cooperative apartments. You still decide for yourself what to do within the four walls of the home, but everything else is decided jointly. It's all about the external framework: roof, insulation, windows, balconies, installations, facades, climate protection, ceiling, basement, common areas, etc.
The tasks range from substantial renovation projects that extend over several years, which require new supplementary financing and construction technical construction knowledge and advice - to small, banal operational tasks that are not wildly expensive, but can be costly to forget, should a cloudburst pass.
It places great demands on the volunteers who have chosen to spend some of their free time on the property board. Plans and tasks extend over many years, and there will almost always be many shifts in the boards along the way, which makes maintaining an overview and history quite challenging.
Surprisingly, much of this work takes place on paper and by e-mail. This makes transferring responsibility from one board to the next, extra challenging. Therefore, a lot of knowledge and documentation is lost, and much time is spent on (re)obtaining drawings, project plans, and offers - and re-establishing the overview.
This was just one of the challenges that the people behind ejendom.com wanted to address. To develop a digital solution that gives all stakeholders around the property a single overview of the property's condition, the future operation, maintenance, and renovation tasks, and the historical documentation of everything that has been made.
Ejendom.com is a platform-as-a-service, where different target groups can rent all or part of the solution and use it to manage and document the maintenance of one or more properties.
At ejendom.com, the owners of the property own the property's data and can control who has access to which data. They can easily and quickly add and delete board members. They can decide that all residents have read access, and they can give counselors and other business partners permanent or temporary access to the property's data.
The primary solution contains:
- A dashboard that provides a quick overview of this year's tasks and the budget for the next ten years
- A dynamic condition report that is updated annually with accompanying image and video documentation
- A maintenance plan with an associated budget for the next 10 years of operation, renovation, and improvement tasks.
- Documentation of past and future tasks in one place: Technical drawings, requirements specifications, estimates, schedules, tenders, contracts, minutes, etc.
- Flexible user management so that roles and responsibilities can change without friction or loss of knowledge
The target group is broad, so new functionality is continuously developed to meet the needs of other target groups, such as rental property owners, consulting engineers, contractors and craftsmen, property management companies, and insurance companies.
The solution is built as a decoupled solution. The frontend, which serves all types of users - from board members and portfolio owners to data providers and advisors, is coded in React Next.js supplemented with Tailwind to keep the CSS as efficient as possible. Chartjs-2 is used for data visualization.
The backend with rights management, business logic, and calculation engine has been developed in Laravel, and ejendom.com has a control panel in Laravel Nova. The communication between the front and backend takes place as a RESTful service and is secured with a Laravel Passport token. The solution scores 98-100 / 100 in a Google Lighthouse test - and it is a few conscious design choices that keep us from the 100 out of 100.
The solution has been developed in close collaboration with a consulting engineering company and went live on November 1, 2021. Already within the first period, 200 properties with a total of 8,000 apartments embraced ejendom.com. Together they created more than 6,000 operations and maintenance tasks on the platform for a total value of DKK 1.3 billion.
That's 1.3 billion being spent on extending the life of buildings and making them more energy efficient.
In this way, ejendom.com contributes to a more sustainable construction. According to the UN Environment Organization, buildings (scope 1, 2, and 3 for construction, maintenance, and operation) account for almost 40% of global CO2 emissions, so there is enough to take off. Both in terms of energy efficiency when the building is in operation and maintaining the buildings so that the life of the building is extended.
"We are very pleased with the collaboration with Dwarf. They have familiarized themselves with our industry and our customers' needs - and play with knowledge of user experiences, design, and technology. Together, we have built a well-structured application, which our customers have received very well. It's cool to notice that our team at Dwarf is just as passionate about delivering a good product as we do ourselves."
