The Harding Centre.
A 66-unit mixed-use residential + commercial building in Ohio, and the pioneer client for FrontDesk — Blobby Labs' property management template. Before: spreadsheets, group texts, sticky notes. After: a full operations dashboard, automated tenant messaging, and a virtual pet named Blobby.
The situation
Greta is one person managing 66 units. Tenants text her at all hours with maintenance requests, lease questions, noise complaints, rent questions, and the occasional "the elevator is making a weird sound."
Before Blobby Labs built FrontDesk, the data lived everywhere.
- Twelve spreadsheets.
- Three inboxes.
- A stack of sticky notes.
- A paper calendar tacked to the wall.
- 40 group text chains.
- 300 screenshots forwarded from her phone to the handyman.
- Invoices in a drawer.
- A Rolodex in the top desk drawer.
- And the parts of it Greta had to carry in her head at all times, because nobody else could.
Lease renewals slipped. Maintenance requests sat for days. Inspection deadlines for elevator and fire-alarm testing were kept on a paper calendar. Every time Greta went on vacation, something fell through the cracks.
What we built
FrontDesk — a complete operations dashboard, running on a Mac Mini at the property office. Eighteen pages, one database, no monthly subscription.
Tenant messaging
Tenants text the building. Tickets, replies, and emergency pages happen automatically. Every conversation threaded by unit, so nothing gets lost.
Maintenance tickets
Requests become tickets. Tickets get assigned, age-flagged, and resolved. Repeat issues at the same unit surface on their own.
Inspection tracking
Elevator, fire alarm, HVAC, backflow, pest. Contractors get texted when tests are due. Overdue items are flagged automatically.
Lease renewals & notices
Automated outreach well before expiration. Move-out workflow for tenants leaving. Welcome sequences for new move-ins.
White Glove
Every tenant gets the personal touch — birthdays, anniversaries, holiday greetings, special dates tracked and sent at the right moment, automatically. Because 66 units is too many to remember, and every one of them matters.
Inquiry pipeline
Website form submissions land on the dashboard within seconds. Reply immediately or schedule a follow-up. Conversion tracked end-to-end.
Voicemail
Missed calls get transcribed and queued. Listen, convert to a ticket, or set a reminder — all from the dashboard.
Staff directory
Everyone who works the building in one place. Who gets notified for urgent issues, routine maintenance, and off-hours emergencies.
Hosting & backups
The dashboard runs on a Mac Mini in the building office. Nightly backups to local disk and SD card. Battery backup for power outages.
System alerts
A red badge appears when something needs attention — a backup fails, a service is down, a scheduled task didn't run. Silent when everything's fine.
Weekly summary
Occupancy, response time, renewal rate, inquiry conversion. The numbers that matter, in one view, tuned to the building.
SMS consent
Every tenant has a signed consent form on file. The system enforces it automatically — no text sends without documented opt-in.
And then there's Blobby.
The thing nobody else in property-management software has.
Blobby is a virtual tamagotchi-style pet whose stats are wired to the actual building. Joy, energy, XP, evolution stage — all reflecting real metrics: ticket response time, occupancy, tenant-communication silence, compliance overdue counts, renewal rate.
- Evolves through stages. Stage 1 through Champion, then Legend.
- Reacts in real time. Resolve an urgent ticket fast → big-win phrase + XP + joy boost. Let a ticket age 4 days → concern bubble.
- Has 100+ contextual phrases. Keyed to specific events. Easter eggs for holidays and 1% sprinkle chance.
- Sleeps at night. 10pm–6am. Can be woken for 1 hour if an emergency fires.
- Has a lifecycle. Bad months can cause devolution. Extremely bad months trigger rebirth — Gen 2, new Blobby, tougher targets.
- Grows in difficulty over generations. Each rebirth, the thresholds get tighter.
Nobody checks dashboards. Everybody checks on their pet.
Greta checks on Blobby 15 times a day. And because she's already there, she sees the maintenance ticket that's been aging for three days. She sees the unit that hasn't paid. She sees the inspection coming up next week.
She didn't open a business intelligence platform. She didn't log in to anything. She just checked on her fish.
That's the whole idea.
The hardware
The entire dashboard runs on a Mac Mini M4 sitting
in a retro-Macintosh-styled dock on a desk at the building. It looks
like a 1988 Macintosh Classic. It is, in fact, a 2024 Mac Mini. The
dock adds USB ports, an SD card slot, and a tiny screen that boots
up with hello. in Chicago font.
The full kit:
- Mac Mini M4 (8TB NVMe)
- Retro dock case
- UPS battery backup (CyberPower 850VA)
- SD card for daily backup mirror
- Cloudflare Tunnel for private, off-home-IP access
- Twilio for SMS
- SMTP relay for email
- Full printed user guide + on-site training for the team
Outcome
The dashboard makes Greta's day simpler.
When a tenant texts about a leaking sink, a maintenance ticket creates itself. The handyman gets the details on his phone. The tenant gets a reply. Greta sees it happened — she doesn't have to do any of it.
When a lease is coming up in 60 days, the dashboard sends a friendly renewal nudge. Another at 30 days. Another at 7. She no longer tracks lease dates in a spreadsheet.
When a prospect fills out the contact form on the website, their inquiry lands on her dashboard within seconds — ready for her to reply, not buried in email.
When the elevator inspection is due, the elevator company gets a text. When the fire alarm is due, the fire-alarm company does. The paper calendar is retired.
When a new tenant moves in, a welcome text goes out on day one. Another on day three. Another on day seven. Greta doesn't have to remember — the dashboard does.
And when an urgent call comes in at two in the morning, the right people get paged automatically. Greta learns about it when she wakes up — and by then the problem is already being handled.
Now the data lives in one place. A Mac Mini sitting on her desk with a virtual pet showing her the health of the building.
She has her Monday mornings back. She sleeps better. She stops thinking about the building when she goes home.
And Blobby is on the homepage, watching. His mood shifts with how the building is doing. His stage evolves when the month closes strong. He's the reason the team looks at the dashboard three times a day — because there's a fish to check on.
Tech stack, for the curious
Node.js, Express, lowdb (flat-file JSON), vanilla JavaScript, Twilio, Nodemailer, node-cron, PM2. No React, no Redux, no Webpack, no npm audit warnings to fix every other week. Just HTML, CSS, and a single database file that gets backed up nightly.
Want something like this for your operation?
Every business gets its own version. Every business gets its own pet.
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