Facility and property management is the daily work of running a building after it is built: collecting the rent, paying the bills, servicing the lifts, repairing the air conditioning and booking the meeting rooms. Most of this work now runs on software.
Three parties meet in every building. The owner, also called the landlord, may be a person, a company or an investment trust that owns many buildings. The tenant rents space under a lease, the contract that sets the rent and the period. The manager runs the building for the owner. Large owners often hire a separate property management company for this.
Consider a tech park in Bengaluru with six office blocks and 40 tenant companies. Running it splits into two jobs, and each job has its own software. The money side is property management. Every month, the manager's property management software raises 40 rent invoices, records each payment and keeps the accounts that the owner's investors read. The physical side is facilities management. When a tenant reports a leaking pipe, the job is logged as a work order in a computerised maintenance management system (CMMS), assigned to a plumber and tracked until it is fixed. The same system plans the regular servicing of the chillers, lifts and generators.
Each tenant also runs its own floors. A tenant company with hybrid work, in which employees come to the office on some days only, uses desk booking and workplace management software. Its employees book desks and meeting rooms, and the company sees how much of the space it rents is really used.
Some property businesses rent out much smaller spaces. Self-storage software runs a business that rents out small lockable rooms where people keep their belongings.
Almost all this software is sold as software as a service (SaaS): the customer pays a monthly fee and uses it in a browser. The largest companies in this market are American and sell mainly to landlords in the United States, but many of them build much of their software in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Some of it also sets prices. A rent recommended by one algorithm for many competing landlords has raised legal questions, described in algorithmic rent pricing. The machines that the maintenance team looks after are covered in building systems and HVAC.