Running a residential management company

Ilia Sotonin, founder of Unitify, started by looking after the apartment building he lived in and grew that work into a residential management company serving about 20,000 residents. He then built doma.ai, the software used by 10,000 management companies across more than 5 million apartments, and exited in December 2025. He knows the job from the night shift up: a management company exists to keep a building working for the people who live in it, and most of that work is unglamorous.

What the job actually is

A residential management company is the firm residents or their board hire to look after the building: repairs, cleaning, the lift, the lobby, emergencies and the bills. The resident is the client, not the developer and not the staff. In 2011, when I was rewriting our contract with a new building, I summed it up as: "They managed you. We serve you."

I have kept coming back to that. In 2021 I wrote: "Management companies are a contractor hired by the residents. But the companies themselves forget this and treat the building as their own property that brings in money." Once a company forgets who hired it, everything else goes wrong.

The unglamorous part

In the early years I was the dispatcher myself. As I later wrote: "I had to be the dispatcher myself and keep the duty phone under my pillow at night, so that if there was an emergency I could pick up and take the request." There was no emergency plumber on staff, so "you call the first one, and he's been drinking. The second one is out of town. The third one agrees." Then I drove over with the keys to the basement. The residents and their phone numbers lived in a spreadsheet.

I also took a shift sweeping the yard. My note from that day: "Turns out part of the job is helping people."

That is the real work: a leak at night, a dark stairwell, a lobby people are embarrassed to bring guests into. We built a renovation standard for lobbies so that fixing one stopped being a one-off project. We wanted a housemaster, not a distant manager: "Someone who sees that a light bulb is out and replaces it himself." We even designed the uniform so staff would not be embarrassed to walk into a café after a shift. People who feel respected look after a building differently.

Hiring people who want to help

Service cannot be scripted; it has to be hired. You can train a greeting, but not the wish to help. At my company the rule was not to hire people from legacy housing operators. The book I co-authored recommends hospitality, retail and banking instead, because those jobs teach people to deal with customers. In 2016 I wrote that a management company's main capital is its relationships with residents: "Everything else any company can copy if it really wants to, but relationships are built over years."

Staffing ceilings

From running buildings, I use a few working benchmarks. One community manager can look after about 1,000–1,500 units. One building-operations lead can cover about 500–1,000 units. Below roughly 2,000 units, an operator cannot afford its own full team: no bench, no in-house quality control, no brand.

The reason is structural. A company with ten buildings and a company with a hundred must perform the same set of functions: dispatch, billing, arrears, legal, quality control, hiring. The larger one simply has more people per function. The small one has the same list and one or two people to cover it.

Why small operators struggle

That is why small operators so often fail residents. They are rarely bad people. The market and their processes do not let them make money while doing the work properly. A function nobody owns does not get done.

I saw the fix early. In 2023 I wrote: "Digitization is the tool that can give a small management company or HOA the financial efficiency of a large one." Technology does not remove the plumber. It removes the paperwork around him, so a small team can cover every function.

Growth needs the same discipline. In 2015 we turned down several attractive buildings because, as I wrote, "there was a danger of chasing quantity and losing quality." What we needed instead was "a system that keeps working without failures as new buildings are added."

A simple health check from our book: do residents like the company, does the team like working there, and is there enough money to sustain it? If any answer is no, something structural is broken.

Questions people ask

What does a residential management company actually do? It keeps the building working for the people who live there: repairs and emergencies, cleaning, common areas, the lift, collecting charges and reporting on the money. In the company I ran for about 20,000 residents, the hardest and most important part was being reachable when something broke, including at night. Everything else builds on that.

How many units can one community manager handle? In my experience, about 1,000–1,500 units per community manager, and about 500–1,000 units per building-operations lead. Beyond that, quality drops unless software takes over the routine. Below roughly 2,000 units, an operator struggles to afford a complete team of its own.

Why do small HOA management companies struggle to be profitable? They must cover the same functions as a large company, from billing and arrears to dispatch and quality control, with far fewer people. The problem is structure, not character. Good software is what lets a small company or a self-managed HOA run with the efficiency of a large one.

What should I look for when hiring a building manager? Look for someone who actually wants to help people, often from hospitality or retail, rather than someone who only knows legacy housing operations. Skills can be trained; the wish to help cannot. At my company we hired for character and taught the job.

Ilia Sotonin is open to conversations on this topic: [email protected]