Why Vecinar
Water gives no warning
It was half past six in the morning when the first message arrived.
- Has anyone been down to the garage?
- There's water everywhere 😱
- The water's up to my car's wheels
- Should we call the fire brigade?
- I've already called them
- Me too
By seven the community's WhatsApp group had more than two hundred unread messages. Blurry photos of cars. A video of someone splashing between the parking spaces in soaking trainers. Two-minute voice notes. Horrified emojis.
The water kept coming in.
We had bought a flat in a new build. A brand-new building, smelling of fresh paint, with the excitement of starting from scratch. Nobody imagines that the first big memory of their community will be a flooded garage.
And the worst part was not the water.
A property manager who did not manage
From day one the developer assigned us a property manager. We did not choose them. They came with the building, like the taps or the letterbox.
We asked for the minutes and they never came. We asked for the maintenance contracts, the plans, the building warranties, the insurance policies… nothing. Or it arrived late, incomplete, as a crooked scanned PDF. Every request was a fight.
In the end we did what so many communities do: we voted to change property manager. And the old one refused to hand over the documents. Everything that was ours was on their computer, in their email, in their folders.
Our community's memory did not belong to us.
In the middle of that handover, with one property manager leaving reluctantly and another arriving blind, the garage flooded.
Chaos looks like a WhatsApp group
Who had the number of the pump company? Nobody. Where was the insurance policy? With the previous property manager. Which residents had damaged cars? You had to read four hundred messages to find out.
The photos for the loss adjuster? Scattered across twenty phones, compressed, with no clear date, mixed in with stickers and someone asking whether the bin lorry was coming tomorrow. The new property manager ended up asking us, one by one, to email him the photos again. Some were lost.
WhatsApp is for talking, not for managing.
The data belongs to the community
Vecinar grew out of that experience, with a very simple idea:
The property manager can change. The community's information has to stay.
Vecinar is a space that belongs to the community of owners, not to whichever property manager is in charge. That is where the documents, the minutes, the contracts and the incident history live. When you change property manager, you do not have to beg for anything back: you give the new one access, take it away from the old one, and the community keeps its whole history intact.
And if water gets into the garage again, the incident will have its place. All the photos will go to the same spot, with their dates. The WhatsApp group can go on doing what it does best: letting everyone know the bin lorry is coming.
Because a community is not its property manager. It is the people who live in it.