1,200+
units managed on the platform
-65%
time spent on lease administration
3x
faster maintenance-request resolution
8 months
from kickoff to full rollout
The Client
A commercial real estate firm managing a mixed portfolio of office, retail and light-industrial properties — more than 1,200 rentable units across multiple markets. The firm had grown steadily through acquisitions, but its back office had not: property managers, accountants and maintenance coordinators each worked from their own tools and spreadsheets.
The Challenge
The operational core was a legacy desktop application installed on a handful of office machines, surrounded by an ecosystem of Excel workbooks. Lease data lived in three places that never quite agreed. Critical dates — renewals, escalations, option deadlines — were tracked by hand, and a missed escalation clause had recently cost real money. Tenants reported maintenance issues by phone or email, and requests routinely disappeared between the front desk and the contractor.
The firm had no in-house engineering and no desire to build a department. They wanted a partner to take full delivery responsibility at a known price — a scoped, fixed-bid build with a firm rollout plan, not an open-ended time-and-materials arrangement.
What We Did
Dillo ran this as a fixed-bid outsourcing engagement: a two-week discovery to nail scope, then a milestone plan with acceptance criteria attached to each phase. A Dillo delivery lead ran weekly demos with the client's operations director, so the firm always saw working software, never status decks.
- Built a central property and lease registry in C#/.NET and SQL Server — one source of truth for units, tenants, lease terms, escalations and critical dates, migrated and reconciled from the legacy system and spreadsheets.
- Delivered lease-workflow automation: renewal pipelines, automatic escalation calculations, deadline alerts, and document generation from approved templates.
- Launched a tenant portal in React where tenants view their lease and statements, submit maintenance requests with photos, and track progress.
- Implemented maintenance tracking end to end — triage, assignment to in-house staff or contractors, SLA timers, and completion sign-off with tenant notification.
- Deployed to Azure with role-based access and automated backups, retiring the desktop servers entirely.
Rollout was phased by property group: two pilot buildings first, then the remainder of the portfolio in waves, with data verified against the old records at every step. Full rollout completed in eight months, on the agreed fixed budget.
The Results
- 1,200+ units are now managed on the platform, with the legacy desktop system and shadow spreadsheets fully retired.
- Property managers spend 65% less time on lease administration — escalations calculate themselves, and critical dates surface automatically instead of living in someone's calendar.
- Maintenance requests are resolved 3x faster, and tenants can see status in the portal instead of calling to chase updates.
- Leadership finally has portfolio-wide occupancy, renewal and maintenance reporting in one place — previously a quarter-end spreadsheet exercise.
- The firm has since engaged Dillo for a second phase covering owner reporting and accounting-system integration.
Figures reflect outcomes reported for this engagement; they are project results, not audited benchmarks.
Tech Stack
Services Used
Software Outsourcing — a fixed-bid, milestone-based delivery with Dillo owning the outcome end to end, on transparent pricing.