# The estate office

> Visitor management and property administration, run as one platform across a property operator's customer sites.

**Sector:** Property management operator
**Year:** 2022
**Role:** Team of four
**Stack:** Flutter, C#, .NET, SQL Server
**Runs on:** Self-hosted
**What it does:** Guardhouse to billing — one resident record

## The problem

Managed properties run visitors and residents on paper or on whatever the guardhouse happens to have, so registering a resident is manual re-entry and billing them is a separate manual exercise every cycle. For an operator running that service across properties, that manual work is a cost attached to every site they take on, which caps how many they can serve.

## What we built

A visitor and resident management platform covering registration, visitor handling and resident billing in one place, with a mobile app on the resident side and a back office on the operator's. The operator runs it themselves and serves their customers on it, so a new property is an onboarding rather than a deployment.

## Outcome

- Resident and customer registration is materially faster than the manual process it replaced.
- Billing runs automatically each cycle instead of being prepared by hand.
- The same resident record serves the guardhouse and the invoice, rather than being kept twice.

## The long version

Most visitor management systems stop at the gate: they record who came in and
when. The reason this one runs to billing is that the two halves are the same
record. A resident is a person the guardhouse needs to recognise and a person
the operator needs to invoice, and keeping those in two places is what made
both jobs manual.

The constraint that shaped the build was that the client is not the end user.
They run the platform and serve property owners on it, so every decision that
would have been fine for a single site was wrong here: a hard-coded rule, a
workflow that assumes one way of running a property. It had to be
configurable enough that taking on a new property is an onboarding rather than
a change request, because otherwise the client's own margin disappears into us
every time they win one.


[Overcode](https://overcode.io/) — AI workflows and custom systems. This study as HTML: https://overcode.io/work/visitor-resident-management/