I'm Robert Elliott, founder and CEO of Block Manager Technology. Throughout my adult life living in flats and helping on resident committees, I've dealt with poor workmanship, financial mismanagement, and complex legal systems when trying to get things under control, including through enfranchisement. All these experiences inspired Block Manager because, for Britain's more than 4.8 million leaseholders, there has to be a different way!
I knew I wanted to build a product for the people who actually pay the bills – the leaseholders – by harnessing the rapidly evolving benefits of AI and automation.
Block Manager systematises and where possible automates everything related to residential building management. This allows property managers to focus on providing the leaseholders with a better service and lower service charges.
The excitement of a start-up
In March 2025 I applied to the Geovation Accelerator Programme and was thrilled to be accepted. Early on, one of the mentors gave me some tough love: "You need to build a business, not a product, and you have no customers. Prove they'll pay or this could all be for nothing. Don't give up your day job, Robert!"
I hit the phones immediately and got my first paid client who agreed to let me audit their building and its systems. That was the beginning of a major learning curve. After pulling apart every facet of their building’s management processes and systems, I put all the data back together through an accessible ten-systems framework, from health and safety to compliance to financial management and more.
Then I designed features for everyone living in or involved in managing leasehold flats, including:
- the Digital Vault, where residents can access their Land Registry title deeds and leases alongside insurance policies, service charge statements, and more – available to all leaseholders and directors;
- a timeline tracking every upcoming important task for property managers, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks;
- AI-powered issue reporting via the app, enabling residents to log and track maintenance issues quickly and accurately;
- a directory of vetted, reliable tradespeople;
- live finance dashboards so that leaseholders can scrutinise service charge spending in real time; and
- communications tools for keeping all residents informed and engaged.
The hurdles
Running a start-up is both daunting and full of surprises. Property management sits at the confluence of different legal systems – property law, company law, health and safety acts, consumer law as well as data protection. Finding a law firm that covers everything? Really hard but essential. Finding staff who want to work for a startup? Really hard too. But slowly, we're getting there, we’ve found our law firm and are building a team who believe in resident empowerment.
The next frontier
We've just closed our first fundraising round of £500,000 at a £5 million valuation and have signed up our first 117 units. We've got real customers and real backing. So here we go!
The dream will be watching volunteer directors at Resident Management Companies, Right to Manage companies and freeholders go from drowning in paperwork to confidently running their buildings with human support when they need it. That's why we've built Block Manager.
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