In short and in plain language
This post is for property managers. Often everything comes in through one phone and one mailbox. The office then has to ask a lot of questions.
It is better to have a separate path for each need. A form for damage asks for the building, the flat and a photo. It also asks how urgent it is.
The page shows the emergency number for each building. Forms and house rules are ready to download.
A protected area can show owners their papers. The post also says what such an area cannot replace.
A page of its own helps owners who look for a new manager. We build such websites for property managers.
In many property management firms, everything ends up in the same place. The water stain in the top-floor flat, the question about the service charge statement, the notice of a change of ownership and the enquiry from an owners' board looking for new management for its association all arrive through the same phone number and the same mailbox. The office then sorts by hand, asks which property is meant, requests photos and looks up the emergency number for the building concerned. Each of these follow-up questions costs time, and hardly any of them would be necessary if the report arrived complete and correctly assigned from the start. This article describes a property management website built for exactly that: separate routes for each concern instead of a single contact form, a damage report with property, photo and urgency, emergency numbers per property, forms and house rules to download, a protected area for invitations, minutes and the register of resolutions, and a dedicated page for associations that want to change their manager. It also sets out the deadlines under the German Condominium Act (WEG) and the virtual owners' meeting under Section 23(1a) WEG in plain terms, because a portal can prepare a meeting well but cannot replace a statutory form requirement. The article classifies the legal position for work on a website and does not replace legal advice in an individual case.
Key points at a glance
- A damage report arrives complete when the form asks for property, unit, photo and urgency instead of offering only a free-text field.
- Tenants must notify the landlord of a defect in the rented property without undue delay (Section 536c(1) BGB). A reporting route without hurdles helps both sides.
- The owners' meeting is convened at least once a year (Section 24(1) WEG), in text form and with a notice period that should be at least three weeks (Section 24(4) WEG).
- A virtual meeting requires a resolution passed by three quarters of the votes cast and applies for no more than three years (Section 23(1a) WEG).
- An owner portal provides the invitation, minutes and register of resolutions. The invitation itself must still be delivered in text form.
- A manager can be appointed for five years at most (Section 26(2) WEG). A page for associations considering a change therefore belongs on a property management website that wants to win new mandates.
Why one phone number for everything slows the office down
Anyone who calls a property management firm usually wants something quite specific. A tenant reports a dripping radiator, an owner asks about the date of the next meeting, a notary's office requests documents for a change of ownership, a tradesperson wants to know who will hand over the key to the boiler room, and an owners' board wants to find out whether the firm is still taking on associations. In the office, all these concerns arrive in the same way: as a call squeezed between two other calls, or as an email with the subject line “Question”. The real work only begins with the follow-up. Which property is meant, which flat, how long has the damage been there, is water involved, is there a photo? Several contacts often lie between the report and any action, and each of them ties up the same people who should be preparing statements, organising meetings and coordinating tradespeople.
A website changes none of this as long as it is merely a business card with a phone number and a general contact form. It changes a great deal once it separates the concerns before they reach the office. The principle is familiar from the information architecture of a website: if you ask visitors what they want to get done, rather than listing what the firm offers, you receive reports that are already sorted. For a property management firm, this means that the home page does not lead with service descriptions but with routes. Report damage, find the emergency service, download documents, go to the owner portal, request management for an association. Each of these routes ends in its own inbox with its own required fields, and each inbox can be assigned to a person or team in the office. One mailbox for everything becomes several small ones, each with someone responsible for it.
Day-to-day management, not property marketing
The damage report as a route of its own
Among the messages a management firm receives, the damage report is the one where time matters most. For tenancies, the underlying obligation is clearly regulated: if a defect in the rented property becomes apparent during the tenancy, the tenant must notify the landlord without undue delay (Section 536c(1) BGB). A rental management firm therefore has its own interest in making a report as simple as possible and at the same time as complete as necessary. In a condominium association the situation is similar. The manager is entitled and obliged to take the measures of proper management that are necessary to meet a deadline or to avert a disadvantage (Section 27(1) WEG). That power is only useful if the damage becomes known early and precisely. A water stain that sits in a shared mailbox for days usually ends up costing the association more than one that reaches the responsible clerk the same morning.
The form for a damage report therefore does not ask for “Your message” but guides the user through fixed details. First the property, selected from the managed portfolio rather than typed as free text, so that the same address does not arrive in several spellings. Then the unit or area: flat, stairwell, basement, roof, outdoor areas. Then the type of damage and an assessment of urgency, phrased in everyday language such as “Water is leaking”, “Something is not working” or “It is a cosmetic defect”. Add to that photos, contact details and the question of whether access to the flat is possible and at what times. Each of these details saves a follow-up question, and together they decide which inbox the report lands in and who sees it first. A confirmation of receipt with a reference number completes the route, so that the person reporting does not have to start from the beginning if they follow up.
Property from a list
The property is selected, not typed. This way every report lands on the right building, and the evaluation later shows which building reports the most damage.
Photo at first contact
A picture of the damage can replace the first site visit. The form accepts photos straight from a phone and resizes them before they fill up the inbox.
Urgency in everyday language
Nobody needs to know which trade is responsible. The options describe the situation as tenants experience it, and the office translates it into a priority.
- Property selected from the managed portfolio
- Unit or area: flat, stairwell, basement, roof, outdoor areas
- Type of damage and urgency in plain words
- Photos straight from a phone, resized on the server
- Contact details and times when access to the flat is possible
- Confirmation of receipt with a reference number for later follow-ups
Emergency service per property instead of one catch-all number
A form only helps with what can wait until the next working day. A burst pipe on a Saturday evening, a heating failure in January or a front door that no longer closes need a phone number that someone answers. Many management firms work with contractors that differ by property or by trade. The plumbing emergency service for the building in the city centre is a different one from the service for the estate on the edge of town, and the lift has its own fault service. A single emergency number on the website that ends up on the office answering machine after all is of no help when it matters. A better approach is an emergency page that asks for the property and then shows exactly the numbers that apply to that building, organised by trade and with a note on what to do before calling, such as turning off the main water valve or switching off the fuse.
This page is a maintenance task, not a one-off setup. Emergency contracts change, phone numbers change, properties are added or move to another management firm. The number therefore does not belong in the page text but as a field on the property in the system, from which the notices in the stairwell can also be produced. Then the notice and the website match, and anyone handing over a property removes it from the portfolio in a single place. If you run several offices, you know the same question from your own branches; how to structure it cleanly is shown in the article on multiple locations on a website. The same principle applies to properties on a smaller scale: each building has its own details, and every page reads them from the same source.
No emergency by form alone
Documents, house rules and statement queries
Some calls concern documents that already exist: the house rules, the form for registering a pet, the application for a structural alteration, the direct debit mandate for the service charge, the notice of a change of owner or tenant. A download area per property answers these questions without anyone in the office going to the photocopier. It does not need to be protected as long as the documents contain no personal data; house rules are not a secret. What matters is that every document carries a version date and that old versions disappear as soon as a new one applies. Forms to be filled in are better served as online forms than as PDFs to print, because an online form can check required fields and lands in the right inbox. The same requirements apply as for any other form: operable by keyboard, with visible labels and understandable error messages, as described in the article on accessible forms and controls.
Statement queries follow their own rhythm. In rental management, advance payments for operating costs must be settled annually, and the statement must be sent to the tenant no later than the end of the twelfth month after the end of the accounting period. The tenant must raise objections no later than the end of the twelfth month after receiving the statement (Section 556(3) BGB). If you send out a year's statements in one batch, the questions about them arrive in a batch too. A separate route “Question about the statement”, with fields for property, unit, accounting year and line item, catches this wave and sorts it so that the accounts team can answer similar questions together. Often a short explanatory page on the line items that prompted the most questions is enough afterwards, and it can be referenced with the next statement.
| Concern | Route on the website | Required details | Inbox in the office |
|---|---|---|---|
| Damage, not an emergency | Damage report form | Property, unit, photo, urgency | Technical team |
| Emergency | Emergency page per property | Property | Contractor, not the office |
| Question about the statement | Statement query form | Property, unit, accounting year | Accounts |
| Change of owner or tenant | Form with document upload | Unit, effective date, new contact details | Master data |
| House rules, forms | Download area per property | None | Not applicable |
| Invitation, minutes, resolutions | Owner portal with login | Access per owner | Management |
| Association seeking management | Page for changing manager | Units, year of construction, end of appointment | Directors |
The owner portal: what it can deliver
For flat owners, the website is more than a reporting route. They have rights to documents held by the management: every owner can demand inspection of the management documents from the association (Section 18(4) WEG), and an owner must be allowed to inspect the register of resolutions on request (Section 24(7) WEG). Minutes of the resolutions passed at the meeting must be drawn up without undue delay (Section 24(6) WEG). A protected area holding invitations, minutes, budgets, annual statements and the register of resolutions for each association turns these individual requests into a self-service route. The owner who needs the resolutions of past years before selling her flat downloads them instead of making an appointment at the office, and the office no longer has to copy folders.
The boundary matters here, and it belongs in the description of the portal itself. The law speaks of inspection on request, not of an obligation to provide documents online. The portal is an offer that fulfils the entitlement more conveniently, but it is not the only form in which it can be fulfilled; anyone who does not want to use an account can still inspect documents at the office. Equally important is the invitation to the meeting, because it is issued in text form (Section 24(4) WEG). The fact that an invitation can be retrieved in the portal does not mean that it has been delivered to every owner. The invitation therefore continues to go out by the route the association has provided for it, for example by email or letter, and the portal provides a copy including attachments. So that email invitations do not end up in the spam folder, sending must be set up properly; what matters is described in the article on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
The portal supplements the form requirement, it does not replace it
- Invitations with agenda and attachments, filed per meeting
- Minutes with date and signature status
- Register of resolutions as a consecutively numbered, searchable list
- Budget, annual statement and asset report per financial year
- Declaration of division, community rules and house rules in the current version
- Access only for owners of the association concerned, with a personal account each
WEG deadlines and the virtual meeting
The owners' meeting is convened by the manager at least once a year (Section 24(1) WEG). It is convened in text form, and the notice period should be at least three weeks unless there is a case of particular urgency (Section 24(4) WEG). If more than a quarter of the owners demand a meeting in text form, stating the purpose and reasons, the manager must convene it (Section 24(2) WEG). Two tasks follow from this for the website. The first is a calendar per association from which every owner can see when the next meeting takes place and by when motions for the agenda should be submitted so that they can be included in the invitation. The second is a clean route for motions and demands themselves: a form that asks for the property, the applicant and the subject, and sends the person submitting it a confirmation of receipt by email that they can keep.
The meeting can now also take place entirely without physical attendance. The owners can resolve with at least three quarters of the votes cast that the meeting will or may take place without physical presence at a venue for a period of no more than three years from the resolution (Section 23(1a) WEG). The virtual meeting must be comparable to an in-person meeting in terms of participation and the exercise of rights. Alongside it, the hybrid format remains, in which owners can also take part without being present at the venue and exercise their rights by electronic communication (Section 23(1) WEG). A website does not hold a meeting. It can, however, carry the preparation: the dial-in details in the owner portal rather than in an open mailing list, a technical check before the date, a guide for owners taking part digitally for the first time, and the agenda documents in the same place.
Time limits belong in the calendar
The page for associations that want to change manager
New mandates often arise where an association is dissatisfied with its current management or where its appointment is coming to an end. The appointment can be made for five years at most, and for the first appointment after the establishment of condominium ownership for three years at most; a reappointment requires a new resolution, which can be passed no earlier than one year before the appointment period ends (Section 26(2) WEG). The manager can be dismissed at any time, and a contract with the manager ends no later than six months after dismissal (Section 26(3) WEG). For boards preparing a change, this results in a predictable period. Anyone looking for new management during this time can form a first impression on the firm's website before calling. If it shows only a phone number and a list of services, it answers none of the questions the board has to put to its association.
A page for associations considering a change answers exactly these questions. Which property sizes does the firm take on, in which area, with which services included in the basic fee and which charged separately? How does the handover of documents from the previous management work, and who takes care of switching the accounts? How are owners reached, is there an owner portal, and how is a damage report handled? This includes an enquiry form with the details needed for a quote: number of units, year of construction, type of heating and the end of the current appointment. If you also make this page findable locally, you reach boards searching for management in their city; how the business profile helps with this is described in the article on local SEO with the business profile.
Scope and area
Which property sizes, which cities, which type of management: condominium, rental or individual units. Clear information filters out enquiries that do not fit before anyone picks up the phone.
Services and fees
What is included in the basic fee and what is charged separately. Without this distinction, boards compare quotes that cannot be compared.
Licence and supervision
Licence under Section 34c GewO, competent supervisory authority, continuing training. What has to be in the legal notice anyway is explained in plain words on the change page.
These credentials include an obligation that is easily overlooked on a property management website. Anyone who wants to manage the common property of flat owners or residential tenancies on behalf of third parties on a commercial basis needs, as a residential property manager, a licence from the competent authority (Section 34c(1) sentence 1 no. 4 GewO). If a service is offered as part of an activity that requires official authorisation, the legal notice must state the competent supervisory authority (Section 5(1) no. 3 DDG). On top of this comes a continuing training obligation of 20 hours within a period of three calendar years (Section 34c(2a) GewO). Which other details the legal notice has to include is covered in the article on legal notice requirements. On the change page, the same information becomes a signal of trust: it shows the board that the firm discloses the requirements of its profession rather than hiding them in the small print.
Technology, data protection and operation
A property management website processes more personal data than an ordinary company site: names and phone numbers of tenants, photos from flats, details of units and ownership, and in the owner portal even statements. This results in requirements that go beyond the usual. The forms transmit data in encrypted form, the server strips photos of metadata such as the location where they were taken before they reach the inbox, and uploads are not stored in a publicly accessible directory. The privacy policy states the purposes of the individual forms separately, because the damage report and an association's enquiry process different data for different reasons. An overview of the points every website should meet is provided by the GDPR checklist for websites.
The owner portal is a login area and deserves the care you would give a customer account: individual accounts per person instead of a shared password per association, a lockout after repeated failed attempts, a log of who retrieved which document and when, and a procedure for a change of ownership in which the old account expires on the effective date. Add to that regular updates, as described in the article on website security basics. Where the data is stored is not a side issue for management firms; web hosting with a data processing agreement and a named server location makes the question answerable for the privacy policy and for the board. And because a portal is never finished, as associations are added, documents are replaced and accounts change, ongoing website care belongs in the plan from the start and not only after the first fault.
What counts in a dispute
How a rebuild begins
For an existing management firm, the work does not start with design but with an inventory: which concerns arrive today through which channels, and which of them generate the most follow-up questions? The routes of the website follow almost automatically from this list. Usually the damage report and the emergency service come first, followed by statement queries and documents, then the owner portal. The page for associations that want to change manager is the part that brings in new mandates, and it deserves the same care as the routes for the existing portfolio. If you want to offer appointments for property inspections or office hours online, you will find the mechanics in the article on online appointment booking. What such a website can look like for the real estate sector as a whole is shown on the page about websites for real estate; for a first conversation about your properties and today's reporting routes, a short message via the contact form is enough.
Sources and legal basis
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