An apartment owner can be forgiven for their outrage when the air conditioner malfunctions on a sweltering February afternoon and their only solutions are to either send an email to the property manager – and wait hours for a response – or make a phone call and be sent directly to voicemail.

The frustration of the property manager can equally be excused when, rather than having the liberty to solve the problem quickly, they must spend hours fielding phone calls and responding to numerous emails – all reporting the same problem.

Tom Welsby, an InDaily 40 Under 40 alumni, saw these frustrations and found a solution to them.

“The biggest pain point in our industry is the reactive nature of servicing clients” he said, adding that it illustrates how far the strata management industry is behind the airline and telecommunications sector who have greater transparency and response times.

“This is despite the fact that 10 to 15 per cent of Australians live in apartment buildings,” Welsby said.

Welsby’s solution was to create Resvu, a platform to create a positive strata management experience through improving flows of communication and streamlining homeowner requests.

It is a white labelled platform allowing it to be custom branded and modified to suit requirements, such as having separate forms for owners to make maintenance requests ranging from cracked lobby tiles to architectural damage.

In the case of the failing air conditioner, Welsby said his system means “you only need to get one person to tell you, and then you tell everyone else through the communication system”.

“It’s not just operational tools, it becomes the ecosystem for everything engagement related,” he said.

Resvu can also be used to send newsletters, manage events and book facilities such as gyms and meetings rooms and its current customer base manages approximately 700,000 apartments and units spanning Australia and the United States.

The journey to creating Resvu started while Welsby was a commerce student at the University of Adelaide in 2015 and he decided to buy a franchise in a large strata management brand.

By 2016, he was managing a strata management portfolio which had grown to around 2000 units.

“I was really enjoying the people management of it, the emails (and) the phone but during that period of time, I had no further improvements to my management processes and efficiencies; so ultimately I was just working more hours in the week to get it done,” he said.

The growth pains became apparent when ineffective management processes emerged in one of Welsby’s buildings during the infamous storm which plunged South Australia into darkness in 2016.

“The lift was down, so the building manager, or the cleaner effectively, had to go home, print out a piece of paper to say that the lift was down and then drive back into the city, in which he was stuck in traffic because of gridlock from no traffic lights, just to put that piece of paper up in the lift foyer,” Welsby said.

Inefficiencies were further revealed when a broken pool pump resulted in Welsby receiving 170 phone calls and emails.

It was evident that a digital solution was required, which he and a few teammates developed by participating in the University of Adelaide eChallenge in 2017.

“My mind runs at a million miles an hour, which is a detriment,” Welsby said.

“When you’ve got a business idea, that can also kill you in the sense that you’re trying to do too much at once and one of the greatest things that I took out of the eChallenge was that, because they’re focusing on the process behind validating the idea, you have a stricter set of lanes to stick to.”

He described that, although there may be multiple elements that need solving, you need to focus on the biggest one. For him, that was “communication”.

The eChallenge is an entrepreneurship program providing tools and mentoring to help participants develop an idea into a profitable business model and take a product to market. It is open to all people, regardless of educational background.

Welsby appreciates the role the eChallenge – at which his team won the Tertiary Stream – had in Resvu’s success.

“If I didn’t do the eChallenge, then I would have had multiple points where I didn’t know where to go to next. So I could confidently say that if I didn’t do it, then I don’t think I would have done the idea,” he said.

This year’s 40 Under 40 will be announced on June 27 at a gala event at the Adelaide Oval.