[biased_coin]

Managing an apartment complex (pro-bono) alongside a tech job. In Bangalore, it is normal to have a committee of apartment owners who oversee the operations, set up rules for residents, take up mini-projects for efficiency / beautification /long term maintenance and also manage the finances. This committee operates for a year and then passes on the reins to the next committee.

Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:

- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements

- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)

- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)

From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting

- distribution of water, electricity, gas

- Sewage treatment plant

Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.

4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)

[scandox]

That's really interesting to me. How are the finances raised? I assume there is a service fee. Do you have to handle collection also? What legal body is the employer of the staff and how many are there?

In Ireland/UK there is a normally a management company either owned or originally established by the developer and they collect the service fee. They usually do not encourage a lot of tenant participation.

[biased_coin]

An apartment association is a legally recognized body, which collects service fee and pays service taxes too!

Large apartment associations employ few staff on own payroll, but mostly Security, Housekeeping, Plumbers, Electricians, STP operators,etc are on the payrolls of manpower agencies.

Members of the association are owners of individual flats. Tenants do not participate much ( and not encouraged either). This ensures a skin in the game and service fee goes towards activities contributing to long term value of the property (including liveability).

[anilgulecha]

Sounds interesting. I'm from b'lore too, so if you'd like to discuss this a bit I'd very much like it.