Hello, we are Dommiva: why this exists

Today Dommiva begins. And as everything ought to begin, we begin by explaining why.

What we saw

Thousands of small residential communities — of 6, 12, 20 flats — manage themselves. Without a professional property manager, because their day-to-day does not need one: some dues, some notices, one meeting a year, the leak of the moment.

And yet managing them feels complicated. The information lives scattered across a WhatsApp group where everything gets lost, a spreadsheet only its author understands, a box of papers and the chair's memory. Every handover of the role is a small trauma. Every meeting, longer than it should be. Every question from a neighbour, a phone call.

The problem is not the work — it is a couple of hours a month. The problem is that it looks harder than it is.

What is broken in the market

There is community management software, of course. But almost all of it is built for professional property managers: dashboards with forty modules, back-office accounting, pricing by portfolio of buildings. Powerful tools for someone managing two hundred communities — and unusable for the neighbour who has just been landed with chairing their own.

The market offered that chair two options: pay a professional for tasks they can do themselves, or the chaos of WhatsApp plus a spreadsheet. That struck us as an unfair choice.

Who we build for

For the chair of a small, self-managed community. The ordinary person, with no technical knowledge, who has been handed the role and wants to do it well without it eating their life. And for their neighbours, who deserve to know what is happening in their building without having to ask.

We do not build for professional property managers. They are not our customer, and that clarity is our advantage: every screen in Dommiva is designed for someone seeing it for the first time.

What we are here to change

One single thing, put simply: that managing a community stops looking complicated.

• Dues are issued in one click and everybody can see who has paid.
• Notices arrive and stay — no more "nobody told me".
• Meetings are called with their agenda and their minutes stay where they can be found.
• Incidents have a status, not chat threads.
• And when the handover comes, the next chair inherits a system, not a box of papers.

No surplus features. No jargon. Learnable in under ten minutes — and if we fail at that, the fault is ours, not yours.

What you can expect from this blog

Every week we will publish a useful guide for chairs: meetings, dues, special levies, arrears, maintenance, the law explained in plain language. Free knowledge, whether you use Dommiva or not — because a well-run community is better for everyone who lives in it.

Welcome. This has only just begun.