Opala has 12 units in the Melbourne CBD, and this week I logged into a web app that tracks every one of them. Nobody asked for it. One of our VAs, Hani, decided it should exist and built it. It is the clearest case of virtual assistant initiative I have seen in my own businesses.
Where I sit, first. I am a co-founder of Opala and we have been running short-term rentals in the Melbourne CBD and using Airbnb arbitrage strategy. I also co-founded a business that supplies offshore staff, so this is work I sell. The app is password-protected and its footer says Confidential, so I will describe what it does, not where it lives.
Tl; dr;
- Hani, a VA on our team, built Opala a tenancy management system nobody requested. The idea and the scope were hers.
- We guided her on how. That guidance was necessary and I will not pretend otherwise.
- Five modules, covering 12 units, all occupied, four of them short-term.
- The Bills module is the giveaway. It applies a utility threshold per unit and calculates the tenant’s excess, which is a charging policy written into software.
- I have measured nothing, so there is no saving to quote. One case does not generalise.
- It creates real problems too: key-person dependency, a privacy obligation, no maintenance budget, an unanswered ownership question.
What she actually built
It is called the Opala Tenancy Tracker. Five modules: Dashboard, Tenants, Bills, OTA Tracker and Key Inventory. The Dashboard reports occupancy with filters for all, occupied, vacant and short-term, plus a rent table carrying the unit, the amount, the due date and the status.
The Tenants module records, per tenancy, the unit, the tenant, the type, the term, the move-in and move-out, the rent in AUD, contact emails and the status. That is a property management record, not a spreadsheet with a login on the front. I am describing the fields only. The rows belong to real people who never agreed to appear on my blog.
It also greets her by name on login, with a line of encouragement. She built it as a tool she wanted to use, not a deliverable to hand upward.
The Bills module is the giveaway
Here is what changed my thinking. The Bills module tracks electricity, water, gas and internet, per unit, per period, and sums them into a full set total. Then it applies a threshold for that unit and calculates the tenant excess and the excess payment.
That is a utility allowance policy encoded in software. The business absorbs usage up to a cap and bills the tenant for the overage. Nobody writes that unless they understand how the business charges people. You can copy a form off a screenshot. You cannot derive a charging rule off one.
The rest is competent. Bills is what told me she was solving our problem, not practising her tooling.
What virtual assistant initiative actually looks like
Two days ago I published a post on what a VA can help a property flipper with. That one is about which tasks to hand over. This one runs the other way: what happens when the person you handed tasks to turns up holding the idea.
The ceiling on a VA is set by what you let them own, not by what they are capable of. We never wrote “design a tenancy management system” into anybody’s scope of work. We answered her questions about how. The modules, the fields and the logic came from her side of the table.
If you want the staffing side of this, VA For Everyone places this kind of person. Engage someone offshore directly instead and the exposure moves to you, because what makes an offshore worker an employee is how the relationship runs day to day, not where they sit. To be accurate about my interest, I co-founded that business. I do not own it.
What this does not prove
One person did this. If your takeaway is that you hire a VA and software appears, I have written this badly. We taught her how, and leaving that out would be flattering and false.
I have no numbers for you either. Nothing here has been measured, so any figure I quoted would be decoration.
An unrequested internal tool brings four adult problems. Key-person dependency, because one person knows how it works. Privacy, because it holds real tenant data, and that is an obligation whether or not anyone wrote it down. Maintenance, which nobody budgeted for. Ownership, because when a staff member builds something on their own initiative, who owns it is worth settling in writing early. I have settled none of the four. I am naming them.
Summary
The Bills module is the whole post for me. A threshold with a calculated tenant excess is a business rule, and Hani understood the business well enough to write one. Virtual assistant initiative is not something you can recruit for reliably, but you can leave room for it. Most of us scope that room away before the person starts. I am changing how narrowly I write the brief.
A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter I, 1776
