Real Estate & Property Management

Your stock is a tree, not a list

A property company does not buy ten units the way a trader buys ten laptops. It buys a plot inside a block inside a square inside a project, builds a tower on it, carves the tower into floors and the floors into flats, and then sells or leases each flat individually on a plan that runs for years.

Nama models exactly that. A project, a square, a block, a land plot, a building, a floor and a unit are all estates — one shared property record at eight levels — and units can also be bundled into a group and sold as one package. Because every level is an estate, every level carries its own accounting subsidiary, its owner, its price, its areas and its documents. You can raise a cost against a building, sell a block as a single deal, or lease one flat.

Availability behaves the way the business does: sell a block and every plot, building, floor and unit beneath it becomes unavailable, while the square above it is flagged partly sold. A unit model — “Type A, three rooms, 150 m²” — stamps two hundred identical flats in one action instead of two hundred data-entry sessions.

Money is a schedule, not a balance

The second idea that shapes everything: a sales contract or a lease carries a grid of instalment lines, each with its due date, its type — down payment, ordinary instalment, insurance, commission, maintenance, fees — and its value.

That grid is a projection. Nobody types into the paid columns. Collection documents write the payments, and paid and remaining are recomputed from what actually arrived. A buyer’s position is therefore never an opinion, and “what is overdue across the whole compound” is one question rather than a reconciliation.

Selling, and leasing, are two parallel worlds

Selling runs offer → hold → reservation → sales contract → handover. The documents before the reservation are deliberately inert: an offer and an initial contract record intent, not money. The reservation is what locks the unit; the sales contract is what marks it sold, records the buyer, builds the schedule and posts. Handover stamps the contract and the estate — and where the accounting was deliberately held until delivery, handover is what releases it. Waivers and cancellations have their own documents, because a buyer walking away is a transaction rather than a deletion.

Leasing is its own chain: an offer that can hold the unit for rent, a contract whose payment schedule is generated for it, accrual ledgers that recognise the revenue period by period rather than when cash arrives, renewal, and termination. Bulk collection generates one collect document per line, which is what a landlord with four hundred tenants needs on the first of the month. Exemptions, rebates and late fines are documents in their own right.

What flat 12 cost

Nobody ever spends money on flat 12. They spend it on the tower’s lifts, its landscaping, its site office. Cost documents book project cost against an estate and distribute it downwards over the units — by area, by price or by a numeric field — so each unit accumulates its own assigned cost, and the cost of sale on handover is that unit’s real share.

Where the company also builds what it sells, project cost from the contracting side bridges into these units, which is the accounting problem that defines a developer who is also a contractor.

Maintenance is two streams, not one

A one-off maintenance deposit agreed at the point of sale is collected and parked in the project’s maintenance fund. Separately, the building’s annual maintenance budget is accrued across its units by area and spent through maintenance expenses. They are independent on purpose, and confusing them is the usual reason a service-charge account never reconciles.

Pooled money, if that is your model

For a developer investing other people’s money, a parallel chain tracks each estate’s purchase value, the improvements capitalised onto it and its revaluations, and distributes the fund’s profit between investors. A fund here holds money balances rather than issuing shares or units, so each investor’s entitlement is computed from what they actually put in. Agricultural investment contracts, with their own categories and profit claims, are a separate product again.

Going live with a portfolio that already exists

Nobody starts on an empty database. Three opening documents load an existing portfolio — units already sold, leases already running and historical cost — into an opening period, so the first month in the system is a continuation rather than a re-entry.

Properties, sales, leasing, collections, cost distribution, maintenance and investment are documented in the real estate section.