Managing a resort complex with owners abroad

In a resort town a large share of the apartments are bought as assets, not homes, and their owners live somewhere else. We described the general problem in The Building Where Nobody's Home. This post is about its extreme version: a holiday-home complex of several hundred apartments in Georgia, where most owners are abroad most of the year, and what a management company or an amkhanagoba can do about meetings, votes, notices, payments and reports.

Why e-mail and chat groups break

At ten apartments, a group chat works. At several hundred it does not, and not because the people are careless:

• No single list. Nobody holds one current list of who owns which apartment, in which language they read and on which channel they answer. Every notice starts with a search.
• Messages drown. A water shutoff announced in a group of three hundred people is read by those who were looking at the phone at that minute.
• No record. When an owner says "nobody told me", there is nothing to open that shows who received what.
• Charges arrive late. An owner in another time zone learns about a charge after the due date, and the management company starts a reminder cycle that was avoidable.

The fix is not a better group. It is one place where each owner's apartment, language and balance live, and from which notices and requests go out and come back.

A meeting and a vote with absent owners

The legal side comes first, and we take it only from the Georgian text of the law, which we have compared with the consolidated version on matsne.gov.ge.

Where no charter has been adopted, a members' meeting of an amkhanagoba is quorate if two thirds of the members attend. If that is not reached, the chairperson calls a second meeting with the same agenda, and it is quorate whatever the number of participants (Law of Georgia No. 5277-rs, art. 28, paragraphs 2 and 3). Decisions are taken by more than half of the votes of those present, and they bind all members, including those who did not vote. The details, with the source, are in the Georgian glossary: the meeting, quorum and minutes (in Georgian).

What Unitify does here is limited, and we say so. The management company or the chairperson creates a vote or a survey in the panel, owners vote from the app and participation is visible as votes come in. The tool records votes; it does not make a meeting legally valid. The written notice, the quorum, the count and the minutes signed by the chair of the meeting are separate and follow the law or the charter. The statute is silent on remote or electronic voting, so ask a Georgian lawyer before relying on a vote cast online. Unitify has no video conferencing of its own and no qualified electronic signature. Details on the voting product page.

Notices in each owner's language

The language wall sits between the management company and the owner more often than the distance does. In Unitify every conversation happens in each person's own language: the manager writes in Georgian, the owner reads it in German or Russian, and AI translation works in the middle on messages, announcements and requests. The app itself is available in Georgian, English and Russian.

A notice for the whole complex goes out as an announcement in the app, and it reaches the owner on the phone, wherever the owner is.

Paying from abroad

Card payment already works in Georgia through Flitt, in production at Ande Tower: the owner opens the invoice in the app, pays on the payment provider’s secure card page, and the payment shows in the app automatically. The Bank of Georgia adapter is built too and accepts Visa, Mastercard or Amex from any issuing bank; ask us about its rollout timing. Which cards Flitt accepts is confirmed when the account is set up. See the pages on Flitt and Bank of Georgia.

Collection is the number that decides whether the complex runs. At Ande Tower in Batumi, on-time collection went from 40% to 80% in six months.

For arrears, the law gives an amkhanagoba a tool the management company should know about. With the meeting's agreement, the chairperson can register a member's debt above GEL 500 in the public register as an obligation tied to the apartment (Law No. 5277-rs, art. 14, paragraph 5). Separately, a new owner answers for unpaid membership obligations whether or not the debt was registered (art. 14, paragraph 6). The details are in the glossary page on debt and the GEL 500 limit (in Georgian). Registering is a decision of the amkhanagoba with its lawyer; Unitify does not decide it for you.

What an owner can read each month

Each owner sees the charges of their apartment and where each line comes from, the payment status and the invoice, in the language of the app. The chairperson or the manager sees every apartment's balance and payment status in one place. A report of rental income for owners of apart-hotel units, a yield view, is not in the product today.

What is not there

• No yield or rental-income statement for owners.
• No legal validity for a meeting, an electronic vote or a signature: those follow the law and the charter.
• No promise about which cards Flitt accepts before the account is set up.
• The free plan lets you start with one building; a complex of several hundred apartments needs the registry loaded, which we do with you.

If you run or build a holiday-home complex with owners abroad, book a demo and tell us how many apartments, which languages your owners read and where they pay from. The Georgian market page is on Unitify in Georgia.