Case study
CDA Coliving: a system built for 83 suburbs, not one building
1,500+ tenants. 83+ suburbs. Sydney's largest shared housing operator needed a system designed for a model nobody had built technology for before.
At a glance
1,500+
Tenants
83+
Suburbs across greater Sydney
AUD $170k+
Annualised revenue recovered
850+
Staff hours saved per year
About CDA Coliving
Australia
CDA Coliving is one of Australia’s largest shared accommodation providers, managing 1,500+ tenants across 83+ suburbs in greater Sydney. Their residents are young professionals and international workers who need affordable housing in one of the world’s most expensive rental markets.
But CDA does not look like a typical coliving company. They do not operate a single purpose-built tower or a handful of large buildings. Their portfolio is hundreds of individual houses scattered across Sydney’s sprawling metro area. Each house has its own landlord, its own lease terms, its own utility accounts, and its own residents. It is, operationally, one of the most complex coliving models in the world.
Running a city-wide operation on spreadsheets
Here is what a typical Monday morning looked like for CDA’s operations team before JumboTiger.
9:00 AM. The finance coordinator opens three spreadsheets. One tracks which tenants have paid rent this month. One tracks which properties have outstanding landlord invoices. One tracks which tenants are in arrears. She starts cross-referencing bank statements against the spreadsheet. There are 1,500+ tenants paying from different banks, some by transfer, some by card, some with incorrect references. She will spend the next four hours matching payments to tenants. She will find 15-20 discrepancies she cannot resolve without calling tenants individually.
10:30 AM. A WhatsApp message arrives in one of the 40+ property group chats. A resident in Parramatta reports a broken shower. The message sits between a photo of someone’s dinner and a complaint about parking. The operations coordinator sees it at 2 PM. She forwards it to the handyman. The handyman does not respond until the next day. The resident posts a one-star Google review that evening.
2:00 PM. The founder asks for a summary of portfolio occupancy. Nobody has this number readily available. The team starts compiling it manually, calling property managers in different suburbs to confirm who has moved in, who has given notice, and who has not paid. The occupancy report is ready by Wednesday.
Rent reconciliation: 25+ hours per week
The finance team spent over three full working days every week just matching payments to tenants. At CDA’s scale, with hundreds of individual bank transfers coming from residents across 83 suburbs, manual reconciliation was not just slow. It was error-prone. An average of AUD $14,200 per month in revenue was going unnoticed: missed payments that were not flagged, partial payments that were not followed up, and vacated tenants still showing as active.
Maintenance response: 72+ hours average
Requests arrived via WhatsApp messages, phone calls, text messages, and emails. There was no central log, no ticket number, no SLA, no escalation path. Issues disappeared into chat threads. Residents waited days. Some never got a response. The Google reviews told the story.
Tenant onboarding: 5-7 days
Moving a new resident into a CDA property required manual document collection, physical key handoff coordinated with the property manager, a welcome conversation that varied by suburb, and adding the tenant to the right WhatsApp groups. Each step depended on the previous one. If a key was not ready, the entire process stalled.
Zero real-time visibility
The leadership team had no dashboard. No live occupancy number. No property-level P&L. No way to know, at any given moment, which suburbs were profitable and which were bleeding money. Monthly reporting was compiled manually and took 3-4 days to produce. By the time decisions were made from that data, the data was already stale.
Online reputation spiralling
CDA had Google listings across dozens of suburbs. Reviews were accumulating, many negative, and none were being responded to. The Google rating had drifted to 3.6. Every unanswered negative review was a prospective tenant who chose a competitor instead.
What JumboTiger built
We did not install a PMS. We designed one, from the ground up, for CDA’s exact model.
The critical design decision was this: most property management software assumes you are managing rooms inside a building. CDA manages buildings inside a city. The data model, the workflows, the reporting, the team coordination, all of it had to be inverted from how standard PMS platforms think about coliving.
Lead and inquiry management
Built on a CRM architecture where every property, room, tenant, lease and maintenance request exists as a connected object with full lifecycle tracking.
Every inquiry, whether website form, phone call, referral or platform listing, is captured automatically and attributed to a source
Automated response within 5 minutes with availability in the requested suburb
Lead scoring based on move-in timeline, budget match and document readiness
Pipeline view showing all prospects from inquiry to signed lease
Application and onboarding automation
Digital application form with document upload for ID, visa and employment verification
Automated background screening triggered on application submission
Digital lease generation with pre-filled property details and e-signing
Move-in automation: access code generation, welcome email sequence, property checklist for the property manager, and calendar reminders for day-3 and day-7 check-ins
The entire process, from application to move-in ready, now takes under 48 hours against 5-7 days previously
Rent tracking and reconciliation
Automated payment matching using tenant reference codes
Real-time dashboard showing paid, pending and overdue across the entire portfolio
Automated overdue alerts at day 1, day 3 and day 7 with escalating urgency
Weekly reconciliation report generated automatically, previously compiled manually over 25+ hours
Revenue leakage detection: the system flagged AUD $14,200 per month in previously unnoticed missed and partial payments in its first month of operation
Maintenance management
Centralised ticketing replacing 40+ WhatsApp groups
Every request gets a ticket number, a timestamp, an SLA timer and an assigned responder
Automated escalation if an SLA is breached, for example urgent requests not acknowledged within 4 hours
Residents receive status updates automatically: received, assigned, in progress, resolved
Resolution confirmation with a resident satisfaction prompt
Average response time dropped from 72+ hours to under 18 hours
Portfolio visibility
Real-time dashboard covering occupancy by suburb, revenue by property, maintenance backlog and overdue rent
Property-level P&L: revenue minus rent, utilities, maintenance and management costs per property
Automated monthly reporting, previously 3-4 days of manual compilation
Trend analysis showing which suburbs are growing, which are stagnating and which should be exited
Post-move-in operations
A structured resident experience workflow that runs automatically.
Day 3 automated check-in message asking if everything is settled
Day 7 satisfaction survey, three questions
Automated NPS measurement at month 1, 3 and 6
Resolution satisfaction prompt after every closed maintenance ticket
Automated renewal outreach beginning 60 days before lease expiry
At-risk flagging: late payments plus negative survey responses plus maintenance complaints flags a resident for proactive intervention before they churn
Online reputation management
Review monitoring across Google, Facebook and listing platforms
Response templates for 12 common scenarios
Proactive review generation with an automated ask at day 7 and day 30 after positive interactions
Monthly reputation report covering review count, average rating, response rate and sentiment trends
Google rating improved from 3.6 to 4.2 within 5 months
The results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Rent reconciliation time (weekly) | 25+ hours | 8 hours |
Revenue leakage recovered (monthly) | Undetected | AUD $14,200 |
Maintenance response time (average) | 72+ hours | Under 18 hours |
Tenant onboarding time | 5-7 days | Under 48 hours |
Online review response rate | ~15% | 100% |
Google rating | 3.6 | 4.2 |
Monthly report compilation | 3-4 days | Automated |
Lease renewal outreach | None | 60-day automated sequence |
Real-time portfolio visibility | None | Full, 83+ suburbs |
AUD $170,000+ in recovered revenue annually. 850+ staff hours saved per year. Complete SLA visibility on maintenance, and a Google rating up from 3.6 to 4.2.
The takeaway
CDA’s model is unusually complex. Hundreds of houses across a city, no single building to optimise, no central lobby to manage from. Technology that runs this kind of operation does not exist off the shelf. It had to be designed for exactly this use case.
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