CondoGenie: a modernized condo management SaaS, run by a senior pod

CondoGenie is a subscription condominium management SaaS built to close the communication gaps between a condo board, its property manager, and the residents they serve.

It supports unlimited users and units across condominiums, stratas, HOAs, and co-ops, and keeps announcements, documents, maintenance requests, and amenity bookings in one resident portal. Boards reach every resident by portal, email, text, or voice call. Residents raise a request and follow it to an answer.

CondoGenie at a glance

• Client

  Rafal Dyrda, CEO and Founder, condogenie.com, Canada

• Industry

  Proptech, condominium and HOA management

• Legacy system

  GeniePad, built 2009

• Engagement

  2018 to present, eight years, ongoing

• What was replatformed

  GeniePad to CondoGenie, from 2018, first release after 18 months

• What was modernized in place

  Rails upgrade (August 2025), Playwright test suite (2025), Stripe API version (February 2026), frontend toolchain moving to Node 24 LTS

• Active users

  19,324 in 2025, up from 1,398 in 2019

• Scale, October 2026

  Over 550 condominium and HOA associations, over 80,000 registered users

• First release

  18 months

• Services

  Application modernization, SaaS product development, senior engineering pod

• Architecture

  Three-tier multi-tenant SaaS with per-tenant subdomains

• Stack

  React, Ruby on Rails, Node, TypeScript, AWS Lambda, ActiveAdmin, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Rotessa, Twilio, Playwright, Sentry

• Property types

  Condominiums, stratas, HOAs, and co-ops

• Product type

  Condo management SaaS with a resident portal, property manager portal, maintenance tickets, and billing integrations

• Engagement model

  Senior engineering pod, 2018 to present

CondoGenie, 2018 to 2026: what was replatformed and what was modernized in place

CondoGenie has been modernized twice over. In 2018 the platform was replatformed: a new codebase was built to reproduce GeniePad's behavior deliberately, and GeniePad's users and data moved onto it. Since the first release, the same codebase has been modernized in place, one upgrade at a time, on a live platform with paying accounts.

• Replatform, from 2018

  First release after 18 months. New codebase, new name, new interface, three-tier multi-tenant structure. The product logic, user accounts, documents and histories, and the customers all carried over.

• Modernization in place, since the first release

  Rails upgrade (released 15 August 2025), test suite moved to Playwright (June to September 2025), Stripe API version migration (February 2026), frontend toolchain moving to Node 24 LTS. The codebase, the data and the release cadence stayed.

• Engagement

  2018 to present, ongoing.

• Not ours

  GeniePad, built by Rafal in 2009. Brocoders built CondoGenie and has run its development since.

Modernizing CondoGenie in place, 2019 to 2026: Rails, Playwright, Stripe, Node 24

Most of the CondoGenie engagement is modernization in place: upgrades made to the live codebase while it serves paying accounts. This is legacy application modernization performed continuously rather than as a one-off project.

Runtimes and build tooling are reviewed as they age out, scoped with the client, and sequenced into the roadmap alongside feature work.

Every one of those upgrades is proposed as a retention argument rather than an engineering one. A founder paying for development out of subscription revenue funds what keeps accounts, so we scope infrastructure work as the investment that keeps the platform ahead of the tools his customers could switch to.

The current codebase runs 1,806 modules across 4,241 files in two repositories. Recent work against it:

• Ruby on Rails version upgrade

  Scoped June 2025, released 15 August 2025. Framework upgrade on a live platform with no customer-facing downtime.

• Test suite migration to Playwright

  June to September 2025. Full replacement of the existing suite, with the residual Cypress tests retired in 2026.

• Stripe API version migration

  February 2026. Payment API version upgrade against live subscriptions.

• Frontend toolchain modernization

  Scoped August 2026, in progress. Moving the build and runtime to Node 24.19.0 LTS ahead of the older versions reaching end of support, which requires replacing the retired CRA and Webpack builder, and that in turn unblocks the TypeScript and React upgrades.

• node-sass to dart-sass

  August 2026. Dependency retirement identified in the same scoping.

• Daily Summary query optimization

  August 2026. Removed a standing source of server CPU load.

• Global Settings restructure

  2025 to 2026. Tabbed navigation and centralized task categories, a structural refactor rather than a visual one.

Sentry runs in production, so defects surface to us before they reach Rafal or his customers.

The sequence is what makes this work on a live platform: Node before the builder, the builder before TypeScript, TypeScript before React.

Migrating nine years of GeniePad data to CondoGenie, run by run, while the business kept running

Migrating GeniePad's existing user data into CondoGenie was the highest-risk part of the engagement, and it ran alongside feature development rather than after it.

Early migration runs surfaced schema mismatches and records that did not map cleanly, the normal result of moving data out of a system that had accumulated 9 years of exceptions. Every one was fixed or restored, under the release timelines the business needed to keep. Rafal's end users reported anything they spotted directly to us, which shortened the fix cycle.

How GeniePad, a 2009 condo system, became CondoGenie

Rafal Dyrda is a Canadian entrepreneur who moved to a condominium in downtown Edmonton in 2003, joined the condo board, and built software to fix what he found there.

The tool he built for his own board became GeniePad, a product sold to condominiums across the United States and Canada, and Rafal joined the Canadian Condominium Institute on the back of it. This is the classic path of turning an internal tool into a SaaS, and it carries the classic problem with it. Nine years of features had accumulated on an architecture originally built for one building, and it could not carry the multi-tenant, self-serve product Rafal wanted to sell next.

He came to Brocoders in 2018 looking for a proptech software development team that could rebuild the platform without losing the customers already on it.

The 2018 decision on CondoGenie: replatform GeniePad rather than extend it

Request

A brief that asks for new features, a new interface, and a new name can be delivered two ways, by extending the system that exists or by building a new one. That question came before any code.

Audit

We ran requirements elicitation with an in-house business analyst first, working through the existing system's behavior and its undocumented edge cases.

Verdict

The answer was to build new. So the development process was set up in accordance with the existing system, and the new platform was built from scratch. Every behavior the legacy system had was mapped and reproduced deliberately. That distinction is the whole engagement in one line: the rebuild was of the code, not of the product logic, which stayed continuous for users who had been on GeniePad for years.

Rebranding GeniePad as CondoGenie, and redesigning it without losing its users

Modernization is usually sold as backend work. On CondoGenie the visible half was the harder half, because the platform was being renamed at the same time it was being rebuilt.

Rafal asked for a complete rebrand, including a new product name. GeniePad, the name his customers had used since 2009, became CondoGenie. A rename of a live B2B product is a commercial decision before it is a design one, and it carried the whole interface with it.

Against that, one constraint from the client that shaped every screen. The majority of GeniePad's users were non-technical condo board members and residents who had learned one interface and had no appetite to learn another. The new product had to look current to a prospect and familiar to an existing user, at the same time.

So the design work ran as a loop rather than a handover. We built prototypes, Rafal put them in front of his real end users, and we changed them on that feedback rather than on design opinion. Development ran in Scrum with small increments, and each module was demoed to Rafal before it was accepted, with several demos for the Account module because of its size.

Multi-tenant architecture for condominiums, HOAs, and property management companies

CondoGenie is a multi-tenant SaaS platform. Three tenancy levels carry different permissions, different billing, and different administration:

Property managers, boards, owners, and renters each get their own view of the same account. Tenant workflows run through the resident portal: maintenance tickets, amenity bookings, document access, and building announcements.

Four user roles sit inside that structure and behave differently: administrators (board members and head-office staff) work in news, documents, buildings, and requests; managers work in forums, classifieds, and announcements; owners and renters live in the community and maintenance modules. Access control is enforced at category level across documents, forums, and forms, with default groups for owners, administrators, board members, and general residents.

Real multi-tenancy is proved by its edge cases. In August 2026 an account arrived with 34 buildings registered at a single street address, a shape the registration flow had never met. We found it, unblocked the account, and changed the flow. Unit numbering is configurable at account setup, odd, even, or sequential, for the same reason: condominium buildings in the wild do not agree on how to number anything.

We applied the same multi-tenant model later on an HOA management platform for a different client.

The CondoGenie resident portal: 6 features at launch, 23 today

The first CondoGenie release took 18 months and shipped six features: news posting, document posting, tasks, calendar events, amenity bookings, and emergency SMS.

CondoGenie today runs 23: unlimited users and units, a public website and private resident portal, automated email notifications, news and announcements, AI news generation, unlimited document storage, FAQ, classifieds, message forums, requests, unit messages, SMS broadcasts, phone voice broadcasts, tasks, projects, reports, amenities and bookings, calendar, analytics, surveys, maintenance, parking, and forms.

Requests are the platform's maintenance ticket system, and 40% of resident requests are maintenance and repair, ahead of community rules and complaints at 15%, and document retrieval at 12%. The maintenance module was built on that distribution, with asset overviews, QR-code access to maintenance records, recurring inspection schedules, customizable checklists, and multi-user task assignment.

Building resident requests on top of the tasks module would have forced access-control compromises, because tasks carry permissions that residents should not hold. We reused and extended the requests module instead.

What CondoGenie does today: the full feature set

Twenty-three features, grouped the way a condo board and a property manager actually use them.

Subscription billing and billing integrations for property management accounts

CondoGenie sells subscriptions to condominiums and management companies across four tiers, Inform, Communicate, Collaborate, and Manage, and until 2026 every plan change between them went through a human.

Plan Upgrade Automation was delivered on 13 May 2026. Accounts now change plan themselves, with the prorated difference calculated automatically for annual accounts, an invoice generated on the spot, and a 7-day payment window before the change lapses. Monthly-to-monthly and yearly-to-yearly shipped first, with the cross-period switches scoped as a second phase.

Billing also gained an active payment method display, immediate invoice generation on a plan switch, and date-range filtering. Payments run through Stripe for cards and Rotessa for Canadian pre-authorized debit, with Xero on the accounting side. On CondoGenie the annual accounts pay largely by pre-authorized debit, so a Canadian condo platform needs that rail alongside cards. A referral program reached staging on 31 August 2026.

Shipping an AI feature inside a modernized proptech platform

Condo boards write announcements, and most board members are volunteers who do not enjoy writing them.

Genie, released in August 2025, drafts announcements from a short prompt inside the news module. The client named it as a character rather than as a capability, and the button reads "Generate with Genie", which is the opposite of how condo management competitors present AI. It has been live in production since August 2025.