maintenance used to live in email inboxes. now it lives in one place.
How Stratacare centralised maintenance across 20,000 lots, reduced admin load, and gave their team back the time to focus on what matters.
across Gold Coast, Brisbane & Sunshine Coast
920 requests
logged and tracked in 2 months
~10,000 emails
saved across the lifecycle of those requests
100% centralised
from first phone call to final upload in StrataMax
920
resident requests logged and tracked in one system
~10,000
emails saved across the lifecycle of those maintenance requests
100%
maintenance centralised from first phone call to final upload in StrataMax
What challenge was Stratacare trying to solve?
Stratacare manages more than 20,000 lots across the Gold Coast, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. At that scale, the volume of maintenance requests coming in on any given day is significant. And for a long time, every single one of those requests was managed by email.
Requests arrived by phone or email. Managers forwarded messages to contractors. Committees were looped in. Quotes were requested and sent back. Work orders were issued. Status updates were chased. Every step in that process lived somewhere in someone’s inbox, which meant that visibility depended entirely on whether the right person had forwarded the right email to the right place at the right time.
As the portfolio grew, that model started to crack. Not because the team was not working hard, but because the system had no way of keeping everyone informed without someone manually making it happen.
“Typically maintenance was very email driven. A lot of things would get missed because it wasn’t all centralised.”
If a request was not followed up at exactly the right moment, it stalled. If someone was away or could not access the relevant inbox, progress stopped. The risk of things falling through the cracks was not theoretical. It was a daily operational reality.
Why email-driven maintenance breaks down at scale
Email works reasonably well when a portfolio is small. When one manager knows every building and every job personally, information gaps can be filled by memory. But as a portfolio grows, that model becomes increasingly fragile.
Each maintenance request can generate five, ten, sometimes fifteen separate email interactions before it is resolved. Initial triage. Committee discussion. Quote requests. Contractor replies. Work order confirmations. Progress updates. Completion sign-offs. Each of those is a separate email that needs to be sent, received, read, and filed in exactly the right place for the next person to act on it.
At twenty thousand lots, that adds up to an enormous volume of invisible work happening across dozens of individual inboxes simultaneously. No single person can see the full picture. No single report can pull it together. And when something goes wrong, the question of what happened, when, and who was responsible for it, has to be reconstructed manually from email threads that may or may not still exist.
That is not a people problem. It is a systems problem. And it requires a systems solution.
Sarah Pearson on why centralised visibility changed everything for Stratacare’s maintenance team.
How did Stratacare centralise maintenance from start to finish?
Stratacare made a clear, non-negotiable decision. Maintenance runs through resvu from start to finish. No exceptions.
If a resident calls, the team logs it in resvu. If a request comes by email, it goes into resvu. Quotes, work orders, contractor communications and progress updates all stay inside the platform. The only point at which a job leaves resvu is when it is finalised and the file moves into StrataMax for accounting. That is not a guideline. It is how the business operates, every time, for every job.
“So our process within Stratacare is it’s run from start to finish through resvu. It doesn’t go off resvu until we need to finalise the file and then we upload it to StrataMax. If we get a phone call, we log it via resvu, everything’s done from there, from the start.”
The result of that discipline is simple: anyone on the team can log in and see where any job is up to, right now, without asking anyone else. The maintenance team can see it. The strata managers can see it. Leadership can see it. And so can the lot owner who lodged the request.
Client Story
“Typically maintenance was very email driven and lots of things would get missed.”
Now with resvu, you can just log in and see everything.
Sarah Pearson
Gold Coast Branch Manager, Stratacare
920 requests. ~10,000 emails avoided.
In the first two months of running maintenance through resvu, Stratacare logged 920 resident requests. Every single one captured, tracked and visible in one place.
To understand what that number means for email volume, consider the lifecycle of a single maintenance request. The initial triage. The committee discussion. The quote requests sent to contractors. The responses that come back. The work order issued. The follow-up to confirm the job is complete. Conservatively, that is ten to fifteen email interactions per request.
Across 920 requests, that is roughly 10,000 emails that did not need to be written, read, forwarded or filed. Each of those emails represents a small piece of time that the manager, the committee member, or the contractor got back.
“What it’s actually done is it’s reduced the workload in terms of emails and phone calls because it is all centralised. It has cut down the amount of time spent doing the admin work in the background.”
The committee meeting experience has changed too. Where previously Sarah’s team would scroll through saved email threads or print off chains of correspondence to present at a meeting, they now generate a report directly from resvu. Everything is already there, structured, current and ready to share.
“If we want to show a committee at a committee meeting, we can just generate a report and take it to the meeting, whereas before you’re printing off emails or we’d have emails saved on our laptop and be happy to go through all this information. We don’t have to do that now. It’s so much easier. We can just collate it from a report from resvu.”
How does visibility improve the client experience?
Centralising maintenance does more than reduce admin. It fundamentally changes what the client experience feels like.
When a lot owner lodges a maintenance request, they want to know it has been received, that someone is working on it, and that they will be kept informed as it progresses. In the old email-driven model, none of those things happened automatically. Owners would call to ask for updates. They would send follow-up emails. They would grow frustrated when the response was slow or the information was incomplete.
With resvu, that dynamic changes completely. The lot owner can see that a quote request has been lodged. They can see that a work order has been issued. They receive notifications at each step. They do not need to call because the information is already available to them.
“The lot owner who’s lodged the maintenance request can see everything. We don’t have them calling asking for updates because they can see that Fiona’s lodged a quote request or I’ve done a work order. They can see all of that. They don’t have to ring and say, where are we up to here? The clients can also see the process if we want to show them what we’re doing and they get notified of every step, they can see everything, so it makes them a lot happier.”
Fewer follow-up calls. Fewer frustrated emails. Fewer misunderstandings. When people can see that things are moving, the anxiety around whether they have been forgotten disappears. Visibility is not just an operational benefit. It is the experience itself.
Sarah Pearson on why real-time visibility for lot owners reduces calls, builds trust, and makes clients happier.
What did the shift mean for the team?
Stratacare is known for investing in its people. They run team events, celebrate success and bring in fortnightly massages for the office. That investment in culture is genuine. But technology plays a role in wellbeing too, and Sarah is clear about the connection.
When maintenance is structured and visible, managers are no longer constantly reacting. They are not searching through inboxes to find out where a job is up to. They are not wondering whether something has been followed up. They can see it. That shift from reactive to informed changes how the work feels on a daily basis.
Change management was part of the story too. Not every team member adopted the new way of working immediately, and Sarah is honest about that. It took coaching. It took patience. But once the team could see how the new system actually made their days easier, the resistance faded quickly.
“As you can appreciate, it’s taken a bit for some of the team to adopt. It’s just been coaching them to getting used to the new way of doing things, but they all love it now. They wouldn’t change it back. It actually reduces the workload, so it reduces their stress level.”
That last line is worth sitting with. The team would not go back. Not because they were told to use a new system, but because the new system genuinely made their work better. Less stress. More control. More clarity.
Less stress. More control. A team that would not go back.
Strata management is a high-pressure role at the best of times. Managing a portfolio of thousands of lots across multiple locations means that the volume of incoming requests is relentless, and the expectation to respond quickly, communicate proactively and never let anything slip through is constant.
Systems that add friction to that work, that require managers to hunt for information, reconstruct history or manually coordinate communications, are systems that quietly erode capacity and confidence over time. Systems that reduce that friction do the opposite.
For Stratacare’s team, the shift to resvu was not just an operational change. It was a change in how the job felt. Clear processes. Visible progress. Less time chasing. More time completing.
Sarah Pearson on team adoption, stress reduction and why the team would not go back to the old way of working.
What does the future look like for Stratacare?
Maintenance was the starting point. But Sarah’s view of where resvu can take the business goes further.
Lot owners today compare their strata management experience against every other service they interact with digitally. They expect updates. They expect transparency. They expect to be able to see what is happening without having to ask. That expectation is not going to diminish over time. If anything, it will increase.
For strata businesses that have the right systems in place, that expectation is not a burden. It is an advantage. As more workflows move into resvu, including insurance and compliance processes, the volume of email across the business will continue to fall. And with each piece of admin that moves into a structured workflow, the time that managers spend reacting to inboxes converts into time they can spend on relationships, problem solving and the work that actually requires their expertise.
“We’ve never had a true customer service solution in strata,” Sarah has said. “Just accounting systems, emails, and people doing their best.” resvu represents something different. A platform built around the service experience, not just the accounting outcome.
What Stratacare has achieved
Stratacare’s maintenance operation looks fundamentally different today from what it looked like before resvu. Every request is captured from the first contact. Every step is tracked. Every person involved can see where things are up to without asking anyone else. And the historical record of every job lives in the platform, available whenever it is needed.
920 requests logged and tracked in two months. Around 10,000 emails avoided across that period. Committee meetings that now involve generating a report rather than scrolling through saved email threads. A team that is less stressed, more in control, and would not return to the old way of working.
The direction from here is clear. More workflows. More transparency. Less email. And more time for the kind of work that actually builds the relationships, trust and service quality that strata management businesses compete on.
Sarah Pearson on the reduction in emails and phone calls since Stratacare centralised maintenance in resvu.
The bigger picture
Maintenance does not fail because strata managers do not care. It fails when information is fragmented, when visibility is limited, and when the system requires constant manual effort to keep things from falling through the cracks.
Stratacare’s story demonstrates what happens when those conditions are removed. When requests, communications and workflows live in one place, managers gain visibility, committees gain confidence, lot owners gain transparency, and the business gains the capacity to grow without the chaos that growth typically brings.
For any strata management business evaluating whether a centralised platform is worth it, Sarah’s answer is unambiguous.
“What I would say to someone looking at implementing resvu is to absolutely implement it. It will make a massive difference to their business.”
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