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Zora

Property management

Custom property management software

Property management is a business of calendars and third-party accounts: every month produces the same operations, and every year produces one that calls them all back into question.

What your trade computes that others do not

The money passing through is not yours. Rent collected belongs to landlords, deposits are neither income nor an advance, and your revenue is limited to the fees withheld. That separation between client-account money and the firm's own is not accounting subtlety: it is the structure of the trade, and it is what no general invoicing tool can represent.

Rent calls are then a recurring mechanism with many special cases: rent and service-charge provisions, annual indexation, mid-month move-in or move-out prorated, shared tenancies, guarantors, housing benefit paid directly to the landlord. Every exception handled by hand is a line that will eventually drift, and the annual reconciliation of recoverable charges will expose it twelve months later.

Finally, the landlord expects accounts, not a bank statement. They want to know what was collected, what was withheld, what was paid on their property, which works were commissioned and what remains to be recovered. Producing that statement by hand, property by property, takes most firms several days per period — and it is the task that disappears most completely when the operations upstream are held correctly.

What most firms work around by hand

These are the tasks that return on fixed dates and that nobody manages to remove.

  • Rent receipts are generated then corrected one by one for special cases.
  • Annual rent indexation is applied by hand, lease by lease.
  • Charge reconciliation is prepared in a spreadsheet, every year, from scratch.
  • Arrears are tracked on a list kept alongside the accounts.
  • Owner statements take several days per period.
  • A landlord who wants to know how their property is doing has to phone.

What we have not done here yet

No engagement in the portfolio covers this sector. We would rather write that than let it be assumed. Here is the closest one by its management rules:

Short-term rentalReal profitability for a short-term rental portfolioA financial dashboard replacing an Excel workbook: automatic consolidation of booking revenue and accounting charges, then real margin computed by unit, by month and by channel.Read the full case study

What this asks to be built

The building blocks involved, described in detail on their own pages.

Frequently asked questions

Can rent calls be fully automated?
Yes for the monthly run, including move-in and move-out prorating and indexation on each lease's anniversary. What stays manual is what should: a decision on arrears, an agreement on a payment plan, a judgement call on works. The rule is to automate only what the lease states in black and white.
Can the tool prepare the annual charge reconciliation?
It is the calculation that most often justifies the project, because it takes several days and is redone identically every year. Building expenses are allocated by the defined keys, compared with the provisions called, and the statement is produced tenant by tenant with the detail that makes it defensible if challenged.
Can landlords view their properties online?
Yes, and it makes the biggest difference to call volume. An owner area shows collected, remitted, works in progress, documents and the state of arrears, read-only. The rule to settle up front is which figures are visible before approval, because a provisional number read by a landlord generates more calls than it saves.
Has Zora built property management software before?
Not for long-term letting under mandate, and we say so rather than let ambiguity settle. The portfolio contains a short-term rental and coworking operator, for whom per-property profitability was built from scattered revenue and costs. What carries over is that logic of a property as a profit centre; client accounts, rent calls and reconciliation are specific to your trade and belong to design.

Let’s talk about your project

Describe what you are trying to build. We answer with an honest first read on feasibility and scope — even when the answer is that you do not need us.

Tell us about your trade