Hi all,
I've been a lot owner in my building for 14 years, and a professional building manager for the last 8. In that time our scheme has cycled through pretty much every strata platform on the market, plus a lot of Excel and a lot of email. The same problem kept coming up. None of those platforms were built for committees or owners. They were built for strata managers, and the rest of us were stuck waiting on PDFs.
So a few of us got together (all owners, all from a fintech background) and built UnitBuddy. It is not another strata platform. It is a toolkit that sits alongside whatever strata manager and software your building already uses, and gives the committee and owners their own working environment.
After years of working on products where every transaction is auditable and visible to the customer, coming home to strata software felt like stepping into the 1990s. Same standards we held ourselves to in fintech, applied to the place we actually live in.
The pitch we landed on is "give your building a memory."
What we mean by that. Every building accumulates years of context that nobody bothers to write down. Why a particular bylaw was passed. Which contractor did the lift refurb in 2017 and what the warranty was. The defect list from settlement. Who the committee asked for three quotes and what the other two said. The reason the special levy was struck. The conversation about the leaky planter box that's been going on since 2019.
When the committee turns over, or the strata manager changes, or a committee member or hard worker around the building moves on, all that context just walks out the door. The next committee inherits a folder of PDFs and starts the same arguments from scratch. UnitBuddy is the place that information actually lives, so the building remembers even when the people change.
A few features we really proud of:
- Notices with read receipts and voting. The secretary actually knows who has seen what and how they voted.
- Live budget vs actuals and levy health, with benchmarking against comparable buildings. Allow people in the building to model budgets.
- Searchable history of every committee vote and AGM resolution. Saved us a lot of arguments.
- A 10-year capital works plan generator that exports the proper NSW clause 17I format. Gant charts, tables, cost projections.
- AI assistant. Ask questions about your building's data in plain English, with citations back to the source document.
- Standard document templates you can fill out and record against a unit, contractor or piece of common property.
- A "My Lot" report any owner can pull on themselves. Lists everything that has ever touched their unit. Useful when you go to sell.
- Auto-translation of bylaws and notices into other languages, which has been a bigger deal than we expected in buildings where English isn't everyone's first language.
- Finance-style research tools for slicing the line items, the way you would on a Bloomberg terminal rather than a council PDF.
- And much more.
In our scheme we saved between $2k and $10k a year on outsourced capital works reports, per-notice fees and document request charges. Pricing is $199/yr for townhouses, up to $1,999/yr for high-rises.
Site is unitbuddy.com.au if anyone wants to take a look. Still rough in places. Genuinely keen to hear from other owners and committee members. What's broken in your building's setup, what you would want a toolkit like this to do, and where we have got it wrong.
Thanks.
(Edited to add some technical stuff).
Its a NextJS app router app using convex as a backend. PWA functionality, PDF libraries, shadcn, tailwind, zustand etc pretty standard tech stack.