Harbourline Property
Tenant correspondence sorted before the office opens
A reading step that sorts every tenant message by type and tenancy before the team starts work.
Harbourline Property · Property management · 12 staff, about 400 residential units across three towns
62 h
Admin hours saved each month
1,400
Messages routed per month
5 weeks
From first call to live
Challenge
Harbourline runs one shared inbox for about four hundred units across three towns. Repair requests, contractor invoices, council notices and rent queries all arrive there, around sixty on a typical working day, and by the morning they sat in no particular order.
Two members of the office team spent the start of every day reading each message, working out which unit it concerned and passing it on. Urgent repairs could wait behind routine questions, and invoices filed against the wrong tenancy had to be untangled at month end.
Approach
Map the inbox. We read through three months of messages with the office manager and agreed eight categories, from urgent repair to rent query, along with the rules for recognising a unit reference.
Build the reading step. Each new message is classified, the unit reference and tenant name are extracted and checked against the tenancy list, and the message is filed against the right tenancy in the property system.
Hold anything unclear. Messages with no reference, two possible tenancies or a low-confidence reading go to a short review queue for the office manager. We ran the pilot in one town for two weeks before switching on the other two.
Result
Five weeks after the first call, the reading step was live in all three towns. The office now opens to a sorted inbox with urgent repairs at the top and invoices already filed, and the hours that used to go into reading and forwarding now go into tenant calls and planned maintenance.
Urgent repair requests flagged within minutes, including those that arrive overnight
Invoices filed against the right tenancy well before month end
About one message in twenty held for review, usually cleared in ten minutes each morning
Two of us used to spend the first part of every morning just reading. Now the inbox is sorted when we sit down, and the few messages it is unsure about are already waiting for me.
Joanna Pryce
Office Manager, Harbourline Property
Have a process in mind?
Send a short description of the work and we will tell you whether it is a good fit.