Propla

What a landlord is actually managing

Propla handles rent tracking, compliance, maintenance, documents, staff access and portfolio performance for UK landlords, from a single buy to let up to a portfolio held across several companies.

The work these people do is mostly chasing. Has the rent landed. When does the gas safety certificate expire. Which certificate belongs to which unit. Where has the tenancy agreement gone. None of it is difficult and all of it is scattered, usually across a spreadsheet, a bank app and a WhatsApp thread with a contractor.

Designing for the overdue

The organising idea is that a landlord opens the product to find out what needs attention, not to browse.

So compliance is not a list of everything, it is a list of what has expired and what expires next, with the property named on the row. Rent is not a ledger, it is what is expected against what arrived, with arrears flagged. The dashboard leads with portfolio value, occupancy, debt and yield because those are the four numbers that answer whether the portfolio is working, and everything else is one level down.

Density is unavoidable in this category. What is avoidable is undifferentiated density, where twenty numbers arrive at the same weight and the reader has to rank them. Here the urgent count is red, the upcoming count is not, and that single decision does most of the work.

Range without a second design system

A landlord platform has to speak to buy to let, HMO, short let and commercial at once, and those are quite different businesses sharing one interface. Rather than fork the product, the design keeps one structure and lets the labels and thresholds change underneath.

We designed the brand, the marketing site and the product interface. The client’s team built it, and it is live at propla.co.uk.