Over the past two decades, Trinidad and To­ba­go has seen a surge in the de­vel­op­ment of high-rise, mul­ti-apart­ment build­ings geared to­wards rental to ten­ants.

As a ten­ant in one such apart­ment com­plex, Mar­vin Mar­celle has no­ticed a re­cur­ring prob­lem con­cern­ing the record­ing of trans­ac­tions be­tween land­lords and ten­ants.

He said the germ of the idea orig­i­nat­ed be­cause he is a ten­ant, who has to deal with emails from his land­lord every month.

“Specif­i­cal­ly, when you live in one of these high-rise build­ings, when they email you in­di­cat­ing, they may have mis­placed your pay­ment or may not have record­ed your pay­ment. So in a sense to the ten­ants it seems un­fair be­cause some­times you get these emails in­di­cat­ing that you have not paid when you re­al­ly have paid,” Mar­celle told Sun­day Busi­ness in a re­cent in­ter­view.

Mar­celle ex­plained this frus­tra­tion led him to de­vel­op a plat­form to ad­dress this con­cern: ebox­tenants.

“We thought this must be able to be done bet­ter. But then we put our feet in the shoes of the land­lord be­cause if it’s just one land­lord and one ten­ant, you may not have this is­sue. But if you have one land­lord with mul­ti­ple ten­ants, es­pe­cial­ly in these high-rise build­ings, we could see where the frus­tra­tions come in, be­cause they would have to pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly check with the bank ac­counts, and then tie back the spe­cif­ic pay­ments from the ten­ants to the monies re­ceived in the bank ac­count,” said Mar­celle.

“We did some re­search and we re­alised that there are some plat­forms that ex­ist glob­al­ly. We thought it best that we ac­tu­al­ly brought our own flavour of what we thought a plat­form like this should look like with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and more so the wider di­as­po­ra or the Caribbean. So we came up with the ebox­tenants.”

Mar­celle said the plat­form would al­low both land­lords and ten­ants to keep track of fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions for rental pay­ments, home own­ers as­so­ci­a­tion or main­te­nance fees, while al­so pro­vid­ing no­ti­fi­ca­tions for oth­er prop­er­ty-re­lat­ed in­ci­den­tals.

“It’s geared for land­lords in the sense that the land­lord can up­load their prop­er­ty, they can up­load a num­ber of units as­so­ci­at­ed with that prop­er­ty. They can then add a num­ber of ten­ants and those ten­ants are then able to make on­line pay­ments and you have pay­ments like rent, you have leas­es, you have main­te­nance it­self. You al­so have in­sur­ance fees that you can pay, “ he said.

“All pay­ments from ten­ants are tracked. Not on­ly that, but the sys­tem al­so sends out re­minder emails be­fore the pay­ments are due, when pay­ments are ac­tu­al­ly made the land­lords get a What­sApp mes­sage. So we’ve in­te­grat­ed that sort of func­tion­al­i­ty where the land­lord gets a What­sApp (that a) pay­ment has been made. The ten­ant al­so gets a What­sApp as well as a re­ceipt. In ad­di­tion to which both ten­ant and land­lord can go back in­to the plat­form and re­view pay­ment his­to­ries. So every­thing is more or less struc­tured to build up con­fi­dence that the pay­ments are re­ceived that the pay­ments were sent.”

From the ten­ant’s point of view, there are oth­er checks and bal­ances, such as the abil­i­ty to re­port con­cerns which need to be ad­dressed by the land­lord.

“We’ve al­so done main­te­nance of ser­vice re­quests. So in oth­er words, you have a leak­ing pipe, you have an elec­tri­cal prob­lem, you can see those on the plat­form it­self. Those will then go to the land­lord and they will then ad­dress it with their ven­dors and then that can be re­solved. And you know, there’s a time lim­it and re­port­ing that could be done as well on the sys­tem,” said Mar­celle, who is al­so the cre­ator of pro­cure­ment and sup­ply chain man­age­ment web­site ebox­ten­ders and the on­line tick­et sales plat­form eboxtick­ets.

Mar­celle’s ex­pe­ri­ence in these plat­forms helped in­form his de­vel­op­ment of this new plat­form as he ex­plained he opt­ed not to make ebox­tenants an app as he ac­knowl­edged the wider re­luc­tance in the pop­u­la­tion to em­brace the use of apps for such ser­vices.

He al­so ex­plained that he was still in the process of shop­ping the idea to var­i­ous land­lords, but had re­ceived some pos­i­tive feed­back in the ear­ly stages of the plat­form’s de­vel­op­ment.

“We are in a state of reach­ing out to the home­own­ers’ as­so­ci­a­tions, to­geth­er with land­lords and it sounds promis­ing. It’s still in the ear­ly stages be­cause we are now reach­ing out to them, right? But it’ll be two or three that we have reached out to and they’re very, very in­ter­est­ed in see­ing the plat­form,” said Mar­celle.

He said he is al­so shop­ping the plat­form in oth­er Cari­com states such as Guyana, Suri­name and Grena­da.

Pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Re­al Es­tate Agents (AREA), Sal­ly Singh told Sun­day Busi­ness that such an in­no­va­tion would be wel­comed in the realm of lo­cal re­al es­tate.

“AREA ap­plauds any ad­vance­ment in tech­nol­o­gy that will ben­e­fit the re­al es­tate in­dus­try. In this case, with the in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed, it seems to be more of a plat­form for land­lords and ten­ants to man­age pay­ments. Some of these clients may choose to switch to this plat­form while oth­ers will con­tin­ue ei­ther with on­line bank­ing or have their prop­er­ty man­ag­er per­form these du­ties,” said Singh.

She ex­plained, how­ev­er, land­lords may opt to con­tin­ue with the tra­di­tion­al meth­ods, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the roles prop­er­ty man­agers play in the cur­rent mar­ket.

“While this new ser­vice may be ben­e­fi­cial to some, it does not di­min­ish the role of prop­er­ty man­agers as this pri­mar­i­ly cov­ers pay­ments while prop­er­ty man­age­ment en­com­pass­es re­pairs, emer­gency work, su­per­vis­ing work­ers and jobs done on the prop­er­ty, etc,” said Singh.

Mar­celle ex­plained the plat­form was al­so built with mea­sures to pro­tect the pri­va­cy and in­for­ma­tion of land­lords and ten­ants re­spec­tive­ly, which was a sig­nif­i­cant con­cern be­cause of the high lev­el of crime in the coun­try.

“We are al­so ISO 9001 com­pli­ant, which means that we take in­for­ma­tion se­cu­ri­ty se­ri­ous­ly. We have the as­sur­ance that the in­for­ma­tion that’s on the plat­form is very se­cure. We can have these NDAs (non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments) signed with the land­lord it­self be­cause, at the end of the day, it is con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion that we are go­ing to be stor­ing on our plat­form. But we think with our par­ent com­pa­nies, ebox­ten­ders and eboxtick­ets, we have buy-in from the wider pub­lic, as well as the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties and we want to sort of cas­cade that on­to this new plat­form that we’re bring­ing out,” said Mar­celle.