How Unitify Was Born
It started with raw sewage on a basement floor.
I grew up in a 1930s constructivist apartment complex — an architectural landmark that was supposed to be a model of ideal communal living. By the time I was a teenager, the building was rotting. The sewage system was dumping waste straight onto the earth floor in the basement. The heating was failing. Nobody was doing anything about it.
In 2006, my parents decided to form a homeowners association (the local equivalent of an HOA) and started fixing things themselves — new heating systems, renovated common areas, water filtration. It worked. Neighbors from other buildings noticed, and asked for help. Slowly, a tiny management company took shape.
By 2009, we were already managing several buildings. It was small-scale and hands-on — I personally answered calls and knew every plumber by first name. But it worked. Because we cared. We answered the phone. We showed residents exactly where their money went. We opened a separate bank account for every building and gave residents real-time access to every transaction. Complete financial transparency, unprecedented for the industry.
Within a few years, we had 20,000 residents, 57 employees, and a management philosophy inspired by a trip to Hamburg — where I met a "hausmaster" who maintained an entire building by himself, drove a BMW, and loved his work. We renamed all our maintenance staff to "hausmasters." Not for branding — to change the culture. We wanted people who treated a building like their own home. We only hired people with zero industry experience, because everyone who'd worked in property management before had already absorbed the toxic culture we were trying to break.
We built the company on holacracy — no hierarchy, no managers. Self-organizing teams, each responsible for ~100,000 sqm. Every team was its own legal entity. It was radical, and it worked.
By 2012, we'd grown to about 20 buildings. And I realized that 90% of what we did was communication. If we wanted to scale, we had to digitize. So I built one of the first mobile apps for apartment residents in the world — bills, maintenance requests, building news, all in your phone. The app got praised by one of the country's most prominent designers, who called us "the management company of your dreams."
That app turned into a product. The product turned into a SaaS platform. At its peak: 4,000 management companies, 5 million+ apartments. Two successful exits.
The problems I'd solved weren't unique to one market — billing opacity, maintenance chaos, resident distrust, governance failures. Every country, every building, same pain. So I took the experience, the open-source components from our previous stack, and the lessons from 15 years of running buildings and building software — and started Unitify. Not a port, not a refactor — a ground-up rebuild with AI at the core.
Today we have clients in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the EU, and first requests coming in from Kenya and beyond. This is the story of what we're building and why.
Detailed Feature Walkthrough
Let me walk through each major module. I've spent 15 years thinking about these problems, and every feature reflects real pain I've experienced or watched thousands of management companies struggle with.
Billing & Payments
Here's a truth I learned managing 20,000 residents: people don't hate paying bills. They hate not understanding them.
When a resident opens their bill and sees a line item they don't understand — "building maintenance: $47.50" — they don't pay it. They call the office. The office says "it's in the contract." The resident gets angry. Collection rates drop. The management company can't pay contractors. The building deteriorates. Everyone loses.
Unitify's billing module makes every charge transparent. Residents see exactly what they're paying for, when each charge was calculated, and how their money is being spent. Every payment is visible in real-time — not in a monthly statement that arrives two weeks late.
On the back end, we integrate with local payment systems: banks, payment terminals, mobile money — whatever works in the local market. Payments are auto-reconciled. When money comes in, the system matches it to the correct account, the correct billing period, the correct charge.
The AI-Financier handles what used to require a full-time accountant: automated charge calculation based on tariffs, square footage, and meter readings. Payment matching across multiple payment channels. Discrepancy detection — flagging when something doesn't add up before it becomes a problem. Hours of manual accountant work compressed into minutes.
The philosophy is simple: when a resident sees that every sum is spent properly, they pay on time. I've seen this play out across thousands of buildings. Transparency is the single biggest driver of collection rates.
Maintenance & Requests
A resident has a leaking faucet. In a typical building, here's what happens: they call the management company. One person comes, says "this isn't my area," and leaves. Another person is supposed to come but nobody knows when. The resident has zero visibility — no status, no timeline, no confirmation that anyone is actually working on it. It's not that management companies ignore emergencies — it's that the process is opaque and chaotic.
And here's a problem nobody talks about: in many buildings, residents speak different languages. A Spanish-speaking resident tries to describe a plumbing issue to an English-speaking dispatcher. Miscommunication. Delays. Frustration on both sides.
In Unitify, the flow is: Resident opens the app, types "leaking faucet in kitchen" — in any language. AI-Concierge classifies the request — category, urgency, required skill set. The system auto-translates the request so the management team sees it in their language.
System assigns the nearest available technician with the right skills
Resident sees the request status update in real-time and can chat directly with the management company — each side in their own language, with automatic translation built in. When the issue is resolved, the resident gets a notification and can rate the service
The technician has their own app. They see their tasks for the day and their status. We're currently building a prioritization module — early tests show it increases effective working hours from 22 to 35 per week. We treat maintenance staff like professionals, not interchangeable labor.
The AI triage layer is where it gets interesting. Based on industry data (HappyCo reports that 40%+ of maintenance requests can be de-escalated or resolved without dispatch), our AI-Concierge handles first-line triage. "My radiator isn't working" might get a response: "Your building's heating system was shut down for seasonal maintenance. Service resumes March 15th. Here's the announcement from your management company." Request resolved. No dispatch needed.
One cultural decision we made early: we renamed plumbers and maintenance workers to "housemasters." It sounds small, but it changed everything. The title carries respect. Turnover dropped. Quality of applicants went up. When you call someone a housemaster, they act like one.
Resident Communications
If you've ever been in a 200-person WhatsApp group for your apartment building, you know the problem. Someone posts about a water shutoff. Then 47 people reply "ok." Then someone asks about parking. Then someone posts a meme. Then you miss the actual emergency notice about a gas leak inspection.
Unitify replaces this chaos with structured communication. Management companies send announcements — water shutoff notices, maintenance schedules, community updates, emergency alerts — and residents receive them through push notifications, in-app messages, or email. No noise. No memes. No "ok" replies burying critical information.
Residents can respond to announcements, ask questions, and participate in discussions — but it's organized by topic, not dumped into a single unreadable stream.
E-Voting
The #1 governance problem in HOAs worldwide is quorum. You need a majority of homeowners to vote on anything — budget approval, major repairs, rule changes. Try getting 200 people to stand in a yard at 7 PM on a Tuesday. It doesn't happen. So nothing gets decided. Buildings stagnate.
Unitify's e-voting module enables online homeowner meetings. Residents vote from their phones. Results are transparent. There's a full audit trail — who voted, when, how the numbers add up.
This isn't just convenience. It fundamentally changes building governance. When voting is easy, people participate. When people participate, buildings get managed properly. When buildings get managed properly, property values go up. It's a virtuous cycle.
Building Onboarding (AI-Powered)
This one is my favorite because it showcases what AI actually does well — not replacing humans, but eliminating tedious data entry.
When a new building comes onto the platform, someone has to set up the unit map: every entrance, every floor, every apartment, square footage, owner info. For a large complex, this is hours of mind-numbing manual work.
With Unitify, you can describe the building in plain text or upload an Excel spreadsheet, and the AI generates the full unit map. Entrances, floors, unit numbers, layout — all created automatically.
Real case from a few weeks ago: a developer in Nairobi sent me spreadsheets — building layouts, floor plans, unit counts across multiple blocks. I fed those Excel files into AI to generate a structured prompt, then used that prompt to create the full building in Unitify. 15 entrances. 138 floors total. 510 units — created in seconds. What used to take an hour of manual data entry — done in under a minute. The building is live, residents can download the app, and the management company can start delivering great service today.
Smart Building / IoT
I need to address the "smart building" buzzword. When most people hear it, they think smart curtains, voice-activated lights, refrigerators that order milk. That's smart apartments. We do smart buildings.
Unitify integrates with meters (water, electricity, gas, heat), environmental sensors, and access control systems. The platform provides real-time visibility into what's happening with the building's infrastructure.
The real value is predictive maintenance. When a water pump's power consumption gradually increases over weeks, that's a signal. The system flags it: "Pump #3 in Building 4 is showing degradation patterns consistent with bearing wear. Recommended inspection within 14 days." You fix it on schedule instead of at 3 AM when it fails and 200 units lose water.
Not every building has smart meters yet. That's fine — Unitify works with manual readings too. But as IoT infrastructure rolls out, the platform is ready.
Resident API — The Plaid for Real Estate
This is the section for developers, and it's the part I'm most excited about from a technical perspective.
We built a Resident API — a standardized way for third-party applications and AI agents to access a resident's building data with their explicit consent. Think of it as Plaid, but for real estate.
MiniApps: Building as a Platform
This is the architecture decision I'm most proud of. Instead of trying to build every feature ourselves, we built Unitify as a platform for MiniApps — think WeChat mini-programs or Telegram mini apps, but for your building.
Third-party developers can build modules that plug directly into Unitify — both in the resident app and in the management company's web dashboard.
This means any management company can customize the system for their specific needs without waiting for us to build every feature.
Here are some MiniApps that already exist or are in development:
- Booking — tennis court, sauna, meeting room, BBQ area. No spreadsheets, no phone calls about "is Saturday at 3 PM free?" Residents see availability and book in two taps
- Guest passes — when a guest arrives, security already has their name and access permission. No awkward phone calls to confirm
- E-voting — online homeowner meetings as a MiniApp
- Smart building group — a whole family of MiniApps for IoT: turn on the shared EV charger, open the intercom, send your guest's license plate so the gate opens automatically when they arrive, view security cameras, unlock your smart lock remotely
- Investor dashboard — a growing segment of the market are buildings where buyers don't plan to live full-time. Bali, Dubai, Thailand, other vacation destinations — apartments purchased as investments, rented out through Airbnb or local operators. These owners don't care about submitting a leak request. They care about yield: how much rental income this month, what's the occupancy rate, how does this unit compare to similar ones. A MiniApp gives investor-owners a real-time view of their asset performance — earnings, expenses, net yield — without calling anyone
The key insight: residents don't want to install 10 different apps for their building. Everything about your home — from paying bills to opening the front door to booking the gym — should be in one place.
And we want to take this further. Our dream is to make MiniApps so easy to build that you could vibe-code them in real-time — describe what you need, and the system generates a working MiniApp. We're not there yet, but that's the direction.
The access layer goes beyond our own app. We want every voice assistant — Alexa, Google, Siri, OpenClaw, whatever you use — to be able to interact with your building through the same API.
Resident API
Under the hood, this all runs on the Resident API — a standardized, secure way for any application or AI agent to access a resident's building data with their explicit consent.
The model is simple: a resident authenticates with a one-time code, grants scoped access to their specific unit's data (billing, payments, meters, maintenance status), and any authorized app can read it. Strict token isolation — one token = one unit, no access to neighbors, no building-wide data. Revocable at any time.
This is the Plaid moment for real estate. When building data has a standardized API, thousands of new services become possible — personal finance apps that include housing costs, insurance products priced on real maintenance data, energy optimization tools that read actual consumption patterns, and AI agents that proactively tell you "your water bill is 3x higher than usual — possible leak."
The ecosystem hasn't been built yet because the API layer didn't exist. Now it does.
For Developers
If you've read this far, you're probably either a developer or a very patient property manager. Either way, here's the call to action.
We're looking for developers who want to build on top of building data — MiniApps, AI agents, fintech integrations, energy optimization tools, smart home bridges, anything.
What we're specifically looking for:
🤖 AI agent developers — if you're building a personal assistant and want to give it access to building data, we have the API for that
🏠 Smart home integrators — bridge building systems (access control, intercoms, sensors) with the Unitify platform
⚡ Energy tech — consumption analytics, optimization recommendations, carbon tracking
🛡️ Insurance / fintech — real maintenance data for better pricing models
If any of this interests you — or if you just want to argue about API design decisions — reach me out on LinkedIn, or email iliasotonin@unitify.com.
The building industry has been stuck in spreadsheets and phone calls for decades. We're building the API layer to change that. Come build with us.
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