The Harding Centre.
A 66-unit mixed-use residential + commercial building in Ohio, and the pioneer client for FrontDesk — Blobfish Systems' property management template. We also built their custom public-facing website at hardingcentre.com. Before: spreadsheets, group texts, sticky notes. After: a full operations dashboard, automated tenant messaging, a custom website, and a virtual pet named Blobby.
The situation
Greta is one person managing 66 units. Tenants text her at all hours with maintenance requests, lease questions, noise complaints, rent questions, and the occasional "the elevator is making a weird sound."
Before Blobfish Systems built FrontDesk, the data lived everywhere.
- Twelve spreadsheets.
- Three inboxes.
- A stack of sticky notes.
- A paper calendar tacked to the wall.
- 40 group text chains.
- 300 screenshots forwarded from her phone to the handyman.
- Invoices in a drawer.
- A Rolodex in the top desk drawer.
- And the parts of it Greta had to carry in her head at all times, because nobody else could.
Lease renewals slipped. Maintenance requests sat for days. Inspection deadlines for elevator and fire-alarm testing were kept on a paper calendar. Every time Greta went on vacation, something fell through the cracks.
What we built
FrontDesk — a complete operations dashboard hyperpersonalized to Harding Centre. Every tenant's unit type, every contractor's contact method, every holiday greeting in Greta's voice, every inspection cadence tuned to the building. Runs on an AI-agent-compatible Mac Mini at the property office. Eighteen pages, one database, no mandatory monthly subscription.
Tenant messaging
Tenants text the building. Tickets, replies, and emergency pages happen automatically. Every conversation threaded by unit, so nothing gets lost.
Maintenance tickets
Requests become tickets. Tickets get assigned, age-flagged, and resolved. Repeat issues at the same unit surface on their own.
Inspection tracking
Elevator, fire alarm, HVAC, backflow, pest. Contractors get texted when tests are due. Overdue items are flagged automatically.
Lease renewals & notices
Automated outreach well before expiration. Move-out workflow for tenants leaving. Welcome sequences for new move-ins.
White Glove
Helps Greta keep track of her tenants and their special days — birthdays, anniversaries, move-in dates, holiday greetings — and sends the right note on the right day. So nobody gets forgotten.
Inquiry pipeline
Website form submissions land on the dashboard within seconds. Reply immediately or schedule a follow-up. Conversion tracked end-to-end.
Voicemail
Missed calls get transcribed and queued. Listen, convert to a ticket, or set a reminder — all from the dashboard.
Staff directory
Everyone who works the building in one place. Who gets notified for urgent issues, routine maintenance, and off-hours emergencies.
Hosting & backups
The dashboard runs on an AI-agent-compatible Mac Mini in the building office. Nightly backups to local disk and SD card. Battery backup for power outages.
System alerts
A red badge appears when something needs attention — a backup fails, a service is down, a scheduled task didn't run. Silent when everything's fine.
Weekly summary
Occupancy, response time, renewal rate, inquiry conversion. The numbers that matter, in one view, tuned to the building.
SMS consent
Every tenant has a signed consent form on file. The system enforces it automatically — no text sends without documented opt-in.
And then there's Blobby.
Blobby is a virtual tamagotchi-style pet who lives on the dashboard. His mood reflects how the building is actually doing — happy when response times are fast, worried when a ticket's been sitting too long, delighted when the month closes strong. A fun way to keep the team paying attention to what matters.
Nobody checks dashboards. Everybody checks on their pet.
Greta checks on Blobby 15 times a day. And because she's already there, she sees the maintenance ticket that's been aging for three days. She sees the unit that hasn't paid. She sees the inspection coming up next week.
She didn't open a business intelligence platform. She didn't log in to anything. She just checked on her fish.
That's the whole idea.
The hardware
The entire dashboard runs on a Mac Mini M4 — AI-agent-compatible,
with the Apple Silicon neural engine capable of running local AI agents
on-device — sitting in a retro-Macintosh-styled dock on a desk at the
building. It looks like a 1988 Macintosh Classic. It is, in fact, a 2024
Mac Mini. The dock adds USB ports, an SD card slot, and a tiny screen
that boots up with hello. in Chicago font.
The full kit:
- Mac Mini M4 (8TB NVMe, AI-agent-compatible)
- Retro dock case
- UPS battery backup (CyberPower 850VA)
- SD card for daily backup mirror
- Cloudflare Tunnel for private, off-home-IP access
- Twilio for SMS
- SMTP relay for email
- Full printed user guide + on-site training for the team
Outcome
The dashboard makes Greta's day simpler.
When a tenant texts about a leaking sink, a maintenance ticket creates itself. The handyman gets the details on his phone. The tenant gets a reply. Greta sees it happened — she doesn't have to do any of it.
When a lease is coming up in 60 days, the dashboard sends a friendly renewal nudge. Another at 30 days. Another at 7. She no longer tracks lease dates in a spreadsheet.
When a prospect fills out the contact form on the website, their inquiry lands on her dashboard within seconds — ready for her to reply, not buried in email.
When the elevator inspection is due, the elevator company gets a text. When the fire alarm is due, the fire-alarm company does. The paper calendar is retired.
When a new tenant moves in, a welcome text goes out on day one. Another on day three. Another on day seven. Greta doesn't have to remember — the dashboard does.
And when an urgent call comes in at two in the morning, the right people get paged automatically. Greta learns about it when she wakes up — and by then the problem is already being handled.
Now the data lives in one place. An AI-agent-compatible Mac Mini sitting on her desk with a virtual pet showing her the health of the building.
She has her Monday mornings back. She sleeps better. She stops thinking about the building when she goes home.
And Blobby is on the homepage, watching. His mood shifts with how the building is doing. His stage evolves when the month closes strong. He's the reason the team looks at the dashboard three times a day — because there's a fish to check on.
Tech stack, for the curious
Node.js, Express, lowdb (flat-file JSON), vanilla JavaScript, Twilio, Nodemailer, node-cron, PM2. No React, no Redux, no Webpack, no npm audit warnings to fix every other week. Just HTML, CSS, and a single database file that gets backed up nightly.
Want something like this for your operation?
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