From inbox management to relationship management
How LJ Hooker Strata ACT built a more transparent strata experience, gave managers their time back, and dramatically improved their team wellbeing.
At a glance
- Significantly reduced reliance on email across the business
- Transparent, centralised committee communication replacing fragmented email chains
- Measurable service delivery with real accountability
- Improved staff wellbeing, satisfaction, and business culture
- Better continuity when team members are away
- Committees that are more engaged, confident, and less frustrated
What challenges did LJ Hooker Strata ACT face before using resvu?
Most strata management businesses will recognise this story.
Work arrives from everywhere. Phone calls, emails, committee meeting minutes, requests forwarded by colleagues, messages from lot owners that someone picked up and someone else lost. There is no shortage of incoming. The challenge is knowing what is actually on foot, who owns it, and what has been done about it.
For Tim Maly, CEO and Managing Director of LJ Hooker Strata ACT, the answer to that challenge was painfully familiar.
“The biggest challenge was heavy reliance on email.”
Email is how strata management has always worked. And for a small portfolio, it holds together reasonably well. But as a business grows, email starts to fracture. Requests get buried. Conversations branch into separate threads. Work sits inside individual inboxes where no one else can see it. Things fall through the cracks, not because anyone stopped caring, but because the system made it almost inevitable.
The business needed a different approach. Not just a way to manage tasks, but a way to make work visible.
“We as a company had a mechanism where we knew what tasks were on foot and who we can assign those to to make sure those things get done.”
That visibility became the foundation for everything that followed.
How did LJ Hooker Strata ACT reduce reliance on email?
Tim is clear that email still has a role to play. It remains the right channel for relationship conversations, nuanced communication and anything that benefits from a personal touch. The problem is not email itself. The problem is using email for everything, including the work it was never designed to handle.
Transactional work, maintenance requests, approvals, follow-ups, status updates, these are not relationship conversations. When they live in email inboxes, they create noise, slow everything down and put unnecessary pressure on strata managers who are already managing heavy portfolios.
Moving that work into structured workflows inside resvu changed the picture significantly.
“The reduction in emails is massive.”
The effect on daily working life has been tangible and immediate. Strata managers who previously ended each day with overflowing inboxes and a long tail of unanswered messages now experience something very different.
“Today, as of right now, I constantly hear my strata manager saying, I’ve got 7 emails in my inbox at the end of the day.”
That shift matters far beyond operational efficiency. When a strata manager ends the day with 7 emails instead of 70, they are not just more productive. They are less stressed. They feel more in control. The work feels manageable. And that changes how they show up for their clients.
The quality of the service improves because the person delivering it is no longer running on empty.
That visibility became the foundation for everything that followed.
Client Story
“Conversations with clients, even residents and tenants of buildings”
It’s a brighter time.
Tim Maly
Managing Director, LJ Hooker Strata ACT
How does better visibility improve service delivery?
Visibility is the difference between knowing what is happening and hoping that it is.
When maintenance requests, committee actions and client communications live inside a centralised platform rather than scattered across inboxes, managers can see what is on foot, what has been actioned and what still needs attention. And so can their colleagues, and their leaders.
That accountability creates something strata management businesses often struggle to deliver at scale: consistent, measurable service.
“It does give us the ability to make sure that we can offer service guarantees.”
Service guarantees are a significant commitment in a sector where the volume of incoming requests makes it difficult to track and respond consistently. But when workflows are structured and progress is visible, that commitment becomes achievable.
“We’ll get back to everyone by the end of the next business day.”
For clients, a clear response commitment means they are not left wondering whether their request was received, who is handling it or when they will hear back. That transparency builds trust in a way that ad hoc email communication simply cannot replicate.
General Manager Pascal Deschanel describes this as one of the clearest moments he has seen where the right tool changed a relationship almost overnight.
The committee had been unhappy. Communication had broken down in the way it often does when instructions arrive by email and different people read the same message differently. The strata manager believes they have acted on what was asked. The committee feels they were ignored, or misunderstood, or sidelined. Neither interpretation is wrong. The process just has no way of keeping everyone on the same page.
Pascal suggested trialling CommitteeHub with this particular committee, moving their discussions, decisions and voting out of email and into a platform where every member could see exactly what had been raised, what had been decided and where things stood.
The committee agreed to try it. The next morning, the response arrived.
“The next morning, I got a glowing email saying we loved it. Please, can we use this moving forward for every single thing that we need to consider? We don’t want emails.”
One day. That is how long it took for a committee that had been disengaged to become one of the strongest advocates for a new way of working.
The technology did not fix the relationship on its own. What it did was remove the conditions that had been creating friction. When everyone could see the same information at the same time, in the same place, the misunderstandings stopped. The frustration had somewhere to go. And the committee could finally feel like participants rather than bystanders.
See how a committee became one of LJ Hooker Strata ACT’s strongest advocates after moving committee discussions out of email and into CommitteeHub.
How has Committee Hub improved committee communication?
Committee communication in strata has a structural problem. Decisions get made in meetings that not every member attends. Voting happens over email chains where different members are cc’d in at different points. The record of what was agreed, by whom and when, lives across a dozen separate threads that no one can easily reconstruct six months later.
CommitteeHub changes that architecture.
“It’s clear and transparent to all the members of the committee where things are up to.”
When every discussion, motion and vote sits in one place, every committee member has access to the same picture. There is no information advantage. There is no ambiguity about what was agreed. There is no need to follow up by email to find out where a decision landed.
“Everyone’s on the same page at the same time.”
That transparency does something deeper than just reducing administrative friction. It changes how committees feel about their strata manager. When clients can see that work is progressing, decisions are being tracked and nothing is being lost, confidence in the service grows.
For strata managers, CommitteeHub also solves one of the most persistent continuity problems in the industry. When a manager goes on leave, or moves on, the institutional knowledge of a committee does not have to walk out the door with them. The history is in the platform. The next person can pick it up without needing to reconstruct the past from forwarded emails.
How has resvu helped LJ Hooker Strata ACT deliver measurable service?
One of the biggest benefits for LJ Hooker Strata ACT has been the ability to measure, track and demonstrate service delivery.
In strata management, it’s easy to make promises. The challenge is proving you’re consistently delivering on them.
With every request tracked through a structured workflow, the team has clear visibility into what’s happening, who’s responsible and where something is up to at any given moment.
“It’s about having measurability and tracking on each job. It’s that communication flow that goes through to what’s happening in each job.”
For Tim Maly, that visibility creates confidence for both managers and clients.
Rather than relying on inboxes, memory or manual follow-up, the team can see exactly what actions have been taken, what information is still outstanding and what the next step needs to be.
That level of transparency allows LJ Hooker Strata ACT to confidently set expectations and stand behind them.
“It does give us the ability to make sure that we can offer service guarantees and provisions.”
The business publicly commits to responding to enquiries by the end of the next business day. More importantly, they have the systems in place to measure whether they’re achieving that goal.
“We say, well, we’ll get back to everyone at the end of the next business day. We can offer realistic timeframes as well that we can then measure and track as well to make sure we’re doing things efficiently as well.”
When clients know what to expect and can see progress as it happens, trust grows. Managers spend less time defending their work, and more time helping committees make informed decisions.
That’s the difference between promising good service and being able to prove it.
What did LJ Hooker Strata ACT achieve?
The outcomes at LJ Hooker Strata ACT are the kind that show up in both business results and in how people feel about coming to work.
Email volumes have dropped substantially across the business. Strata managers who previously ended each day overwhelmed now describe inbox counts that would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago. Committee communication is more transparent, decisions are better documented and confusion over what was agreed has become much less common. Service delivery has become more measurable and the business can stand behind commitments it previously could not have made with confidence.
Manager wellbeing has improved in ways that go beyond anecdote. Staff feel more in control. The culture reflects that. And the business holds external recognition to match.
Handovers are simpler and less risky. Continuity is maintained. Client relationships are stronger because the communication is more consistent and more proactive.
And the tone of the business, the quality of the conversations, the experience of working there, has shifted in a direction that Tim describes simply.
“It’s a brighter time.”
The bigger picture
Strata managers should not spend their days buried in inboxes. That is not what clients are paying for and it is not what the best people in this profession got into strata to do.
The best strata businesses are building systems that free their people to focus on what actually matters: relationships, communication and community. They are creating environments where work is visible, accountability is built in and managers can go home at the end of the day without carrying the anxiety of a hundred unanswered emails.
LJ Hooker Strata ACT’s story is one version of what that looks like in practice. It is not a story about software. It is a story about what happens when a business decides that its people deserve better processes and its clients deserve better service, and then builds the infrastructure to deliver both.
The future of strata management is relationship management, not inbox management.
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