How to Build a Property Maintenance Request App
A property maintenance app suits landlords with roughly 5 to 50 units. Tenants submit requests with photos and urgency; managers track status through to completion. The critical technical risk is the permission boundary — one tenant must never see another tenant's requests, and AI builders get this wrong.
For landlords and small letting agents managing somewhere between five and fifty units. Below five, email is fine. Above fifty, buy proper software.
In between, the problem is real: maintenance requests arrive by text, WhatsApp, email and phone call, and there's no single list of what's outstanding.
What it needs
- Tenant-submitted requests with photos. The photo eliminates most of the back-and-forth about what's actually wrong.
- Urgency levels. No heating in January is not the same as a sticking cupboard door.
- Status tracking — received, contractor assigned, scheduled, complete. Tenants chase because they don't know what's happening; visible status stops most chasing.
- Property and unit association, so requests group sensibly.
- A contractor assignment field and a notification when work is scheduled.
- A history per property — genuinely useful at sale, at renewal, and in disputes.
Starting prompt
Build a property maintenance app for iOS and Android with two user types: tenants and managers. Tenants submit a maintenance request with a description, photos, and an urgency level, associated with their unit. Managers see all requests across all properties, filterable by property and urgency, and update status through received, assigned, scheduled and complete. Managers can add a contractor name and scheduled date, which notifies the tenant. Each property has a full maintenance history.
The honest hard part
Two user types with different permissions is meaningfully harder than a single-user app. A tenant must never see another unit's requests. AI builders get permission boundaries wrong, and this one has real privacy consequences.
Test it explicitly: log in as one tenant and confirm you cannot see anything belonging to another.
Also worth knowing: in many jurisdictions landlords have legal obligations around response times for certain repairs. The timestamps in this app become a record — that's useful when you've complied and awkward when you haven't.
Cost
- Subscription: $25–50/month
- Equivalent developer quote: $20,000–50,000
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