Serviced accommodation and property management operators / The problem
Miss one hand-off and the whole thing quietly stops
A landlord signs. Then someone has to notice. Then someone duplicates a template, sends an email, hops to the contract tool, hops back, makes a folder, chases a missing certificate, books a cleaner, an inventory, a photographer, and updates three databases that do not talk to each other. Five or six people touch it. Forget one step and nothing moves, and nobody finds out for days.
Serviced accommodation and property management operators / What we found
Only the physical steps actually needed a person
Walking it end to end produced the first complete written version of the process that had ever existed. Until then it lived in three places: a template, a screen recording, and one person's head. Counted honestly, step by step, only the photographer and the work that happens at the property needed a human at all. Everything else was people hand-carrying the same information between five tools.
Serviced accommodation and property management operators / What we built
It runs the process and asks before it sends
The whole onboarding now exists as something that runs rather than something people remember. Mechanical steps execute. Judgement steps arrive drafted, in the right person's name, waiting for one tap. A missing gas or electrical certificate gets spotted and the chase email writes itself with only the missing item on it. And you can ask where a property is up to without anyone stopping to compile an answer.
Serviced accommodation and property management operators / What changed
It has never touched the real business, deliberately
Twenty of the twenty-one steps ran unattended, end to end, on a structural replica built in separate accounts with invented data, every outbound message hard-forced into one sandbox inbox so it could not reach a real landlord. That was the rule from day one: rebuild the process somewhere safe rather than experiment on a live business. What exists is a proven process waiting on a decision, not a changed operation.
20 of 21Onboarding steps that ran unattended end to end on a structural replica, with every outbound message forced into a sandbox inbox.
Serviced accommodation and property management operators / Whose it was
A short-let manager, nine staff, still a replica
Built for a UK company that runs short-let and contractor accommodation on behalf of landlords: nine people plus outsourced partners for listings, pricing, inventory, photography and books. Nine departments and 59 workflows now run inside it, each carrying a tag saying whether it came from real documented procedure, real fragments, or standard practice still to be confirmed. It is live to look at, and not yet connected to anything real.
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All fourteen stories · MAX.AI · 2026