'Apnacomplex' - Apartment living made easy - Part1

In the last few year, apartment complex with more than 100 apartments in same complex is quite common and been accepted way of living particularly in Metro's. However, post handover woes are quite common and so is the maintenance being overlooked. Maintenance management, communication management, issue tracking is challenge for the owner's association. With penetration of Internet, in the last few years, they have been some web based application, which are making the post handover easy through portals.

With each residents having their own priorities and work routine, they hardly find time to meet each other to discuss common issue and work towards resolution of issues, this is where web based application facility management application can be beneficial .

One among such web based application towards facility management is Appnacomplex (www.apnacomplex.com). I had an opportunity to interview Mr Raja Sekhar, the promoter of this innovative venture, presenting below are the excerpts from the interview.

i. Can you please provide a brief about the venture (http://www.apnacomplex.com/)?

ApnaComplex is a web-based Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) solution for residential and commercial complexes. The solution helps in efficient management of Gated Communities and Commercial Complexes by Resident Welfare Associations, Commercial Complex Owners and Facility Management Firms.

Residential and commercial complexes today lack integrated tool which integrates accounting and finances, maintaining facilities including assets, communication between members, tracking and managing residents/tenants and staff. They use a set of disparate manual and computer aided processes for meeting these needs.

For residential complexes, the existing models are not able to scale up resulting in poor management of complexes, escalation of costs, discontent due to lack of transparency, inability to roll out enhanced processes like staff verification and act as blockers in adoption of new technologies.

Commercial complexes have additional requirements around frequently changing tenants which require on-boarding and separation processes. They have unique requirements around monitoring and maintaining SLA, tracking issues, and billing for services provided.

Our offering provides an integrated solution to meet the needs of commercial and residential complexes. It is provided as a hosted solution with zero setup and maintenance cost for the client. It also allows for easy upgrade of functionality and anywhere access to all these functionalities. This comes as pay as you use model without the huge upfront cost associated with traditional approaches.

Our target customers are - Resident Welfare Associations, Commercial complex Owners.
We believe ApnaComplex is ideally positioned to take advantage of the increase in penetration of Internet and mobile, continued addition of new complexes, and shift towards professionally managed complexes to become a credible player in this segment.

ii. Since how long is www.apnacomplex.com is online now?.
Apnacomplex has been online since May, 2010. As this is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering running on the cloud, we have been able to push out new features on a regular cadence since the launch to bring more value and features to our customers.

iii. How are you funding your venture and have you taken the venture capital route?

It is a self-funded venture by the co-founders.

Well.. will continue part 2 shortly, till then if you are an apartment owner, its time to think about the benefits such application would provide or if you plan to buy apartment, think about what is in store after handover by the builder to the association.