CITY ISLAND
A Digital Leap in Property & Facility Management
- PropTech
- Custom Dashboard Development
- Brand
- City Island
- Industry
- PropTech / Facility Management
- Release
- 2025
Case study snapshot
Real estate operationsTL;DR
City Island partnered with Upheave to centralize the management of its 15-building complex through a custom digital dashboard — reducing errors, speeding up leasing, and improving real-time visibility across operations.
Result
Greater efficiency, faster decision-making, and an improved tenant experience.
About City Island
City Island is a large commercial complex in Zagreb, Croatia, comprising 15 modern buildings. It was envisioned as one of Croatia's most advanced business hubs.
The new City Island complex brought 15 modern office buildings under one operational umbrella. With experience in managing complex property operations, the team's main task was to fully digitalize their established processes so that all units, teams, and premium tenants could be managed from a single, centralized system. In this environment, a missed renewal, delayed repair, or incorrect availability update could quickly affect revenue and reputation.
Across Europe, property portfolios are moving away from manual processes toward centralized, digital management platforms that deliver measurable gains in leasing speed, operational efficiency, and tenant satisfaction. That is why for City Island, launching a fully digital management system was the operational foundation for its long-term growth.
Challenge
City Island’s experienced team knew it would be a challenge to keep track of tenants, offers, contracts, and maintenance plans when scaling operations to 15 buildings. The old, mostly manual approach was already cumbersome for a smaller footprint, and in a large, high-profile setting, the risks of inefficiency and errors were far greater.
The most pressing challenges included:
Manual, fragmented processes
Processes such as lease tracking, occupancy monitoring, and maintenance scheduling were spread across different files and departments, making it easy for critical details to slip through the cracks.
No centralized 'single source of truth'
Key information, such as floor plans, pricing, or service history, was hard to access in one place, slowing down decision-making and team coordination.
Balancing structure with flexibility
The system had to enforce consistent workflows while accommodating real-world quirks, requiring extensive alignment before development.
Our Approach & Solution
The project began with a deep dive into City Island’s operational reality. We met with management, sales teams, and reviewed maintenance workflows with the facility staff. This went beyond gathering requirements. It was about understanding how the organization worked day-to-day and where the biggest opportunities for improvement were.
The solution was delivered in three phases:
Discovery & Strategy
- Mapped existing workflows across all departments to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for automation.
- Ran workshops to define where processes should be strict and where flexibility would be allowed.
Design & Build
- Real-time occupancy dashboards, interactive floor plans, building-level overviews, parking availability, and pricing data
- Filterable property listings, automated offer generation, integrated floor plan views, and printable proposals
- Task tracking for planned and unplanned maintenance, detailed contractor profiles, service histories, and technical equipment inventory
Launch & Optimization
- The rollout was staged to allow each team to adapt. Training sessions and iterative adjustments ensured adoption, with sales and management quickly integrating the platform into their daily work.
Results & Impact
The platform gave City Island a clearer operational picture — helping teams move faster, reduce manual work, and manage complex building data from one place.
Centralized leasing overview
City Island teams could access availability, pricing, floor plans, and proposal data from a single interface instead of switching between scattered files and departments.
- Reduced manual lookup time
- Fewer fragmented data sources
- Faster proposal preparation
City Island teams could access availability, pricing, floor plans, and proposal data from a single interface instead of switching between scattered files and departments.
- Reduced manual lookup time
- Fewer fragmented data sources
- Faster proposal preparation
Strategic Takeaways
Technology alone doesn't solve operational complexity. That is why one of the clearest lessons from this project was that process clarity has to come first. Before building anything, City Island's stakeholders needed to agree on how much flexibility to allow in the system without undermining consistency. That conversation, while challenging, prevented bigger issues later.
Another takeaway is the critical role of communication during design. The "rigid versus flexible" debate spanned multiple workshops and iterations, but it was the depth of dialogue that ensured the final product worked for management, sales, and facility teams alike.
Finally, future-proofing from day one proved its worth. Although no integrations were required at launch, the architecture is built to accommodate ERP, CRM, or IoT systems whenever City Island chooses, protecting them from costly rebuilds as needs evolve.
Where Upheave added value
Beyond implementation, Upheave helped City Island shape a platform that balanced operational complexity with long-term scalability.
Fast adaptation
Adapted quickly across two operational environments, keeping the platform useful for both sales and technical teams.
Clear communication
Kept communication open throughout the project, helping resolve structure-versus-flexibility decisions without slowing delivery.
Scalable architecture
Designed an integration-ready foundation that could grow with City Island’s needs without disruptive redevelopment.
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