Wild Wood Apartments owns 20 different apartment complexes in Washington, Oregon, California, and Idaho. Each apartment complex contains anywhere from 10 to 60 separate apartments, of varying sizes. All apartments are leased with a six month or yearlong lease.
It is the company’s practice to hire one of the tenants to manage each apartment complex. As managers they need to admit new tenants to the building, collect rents from existing tenants, and close out leases. The manager also needs to maintain the apartments conducting any repairs, replacements, or renovations. These can be billed back to the parent company. For acting as manager, the tenant gets free rent and a stipend. The stipend varies depending on the size of the apartment building.
Each manager is expected to send a report to the Wild Wood Apartments company headquarters in San Francisco every quarter. This report summarizes the occupancy rate, the total revenues in rent, the total expenses in maintenance and repairs, etc. Currently managers fill out a paper form and mail it back to headquarters. Many apartment managers have complained that preparing this report is a very difficult and time consuming process. Also, the managers at corporate headquarters have expressed concerns about the accuracy and verifiability of the reports.
To allay these concerns and to improve the ease and efficiency with which the apartment managers conduct their daily business, the company is proposing to development a centralized database that can be used by the managers to track the daily business of their apartment building and to prepare their reports.