Barrett Linburg@DallasAptGP
Two people in our office are finishing custom software that will be the backbone our entire company.
Two years ago this would have cost $1M+ and a year of dealing with outside software developers.
We are building it in a few months with VSCode and AI.
Operating apartments is not hard. What is hard is making a hundred people share the same data and do the right thing at the right time.
That coordination is the whole game in vertical integration.
We invest, develop, build, and manage Texas apartments. Four functions under one roof. Most operators outsource three of the four.
The advantage of doing all four shows up only when the four sides share data in real time. Without that, vertical integration is just four separate companies under the same name.
So we needed software that tied the four sides together.
No SaaS product exists for it.
Every SaaS tool we run is a silo. ResMan tracks leases. Procore tracks construction. Sage Intacct tracks the books. LoanBoss tracks the debt. Juniper Square holds investor relationships. ADP holds the people. None of them talk to each other. None of them know about the investment memo or the business plan.
So we built the system that fixes it.
APIs pull data from every SaaS tool above. The data lands in a blob. The blob fills the operating system. Every employee gets a unique login, a custom dashboard, and a task list pulled from live property data.
The MVP ships with eleven modules. Phase two adds eight more.
It tracks every vendor, contract, and renewal date. Every loan with rate, term, prepayment penalty, and DSCR test. Every entity with EIN, FinCEN filings, and CPA deadlines. Every insurance policy with coverage, deductibles, and claims. The original investment memo on every deal with every deviation logged. Portfolio rollups from the property level. Investor reports generated in one click.
The maintenance supervisor in Houston sees his open work orders next to vendor performance scores and the punch list on his renovation.
The CFO sees cash position next to debt maturities and every lender covenant.
The partnerships team sees commitments, distributions, and K-1 status across every fund and entity.
Same data. Different views. Permissions scoped to the role.
There is also an AI assistant inside the system. Every employee can ask it questions in plain English. It answers only from data the employee is allowed to see.
A loan covenant gets close. The system flags it before the bank does.
A vendor underperforms. The renewal alert says do not renew.
An investor asks for last quarter's distribution. The answer takes ten seconds.
The business plan slips by five percent. The variance report writes itself.
Two years ago I emailed a buddy with this dream and we realized it wasn't anywhere near in budget.
So I sat on it.
A few months ago I handed the vision to my business partner. He taught himself how to build it with AI.
He is almost done.
We did not build this to show off the technology.
We built it because you cannot be the best at investment, development, construction, and property management at the same time without a system that ties them together.
The dream every small business operator has is buildable now.
For us, it is what turns four functions into one company.