The year was, as for all across the country, unexpected. While the virus spread across the world and large parts of the country, our thoughts are with those whose lives have been impacted by the pandemic. We made it through the year and have our users to thank for this. We can’t express our gratitude towards our users enough for sticking by us during these times, as we are so impressed by the resilience and solidarity of the Brisbane business community.
A set of new features were added to Castellan in 2020, including full rule support, allowing important rules and documentation to be shared easily with residents. We hope that this increase in transparency will make it easier for people to engage with body corporate by laws, and a better understanding of rules/policies surrounding shared amenities. The ability to send building notices to users was also included towards the end of the year, providing a new way for building managers to seamlessly send branded emails to their residents.
We also collected feedback from our users. It’s encouraging to see that people using Castellan like it and enjoy the ability to book shared amenities easily. We hope to continue collecting feedback on a regular basis, further developing our completeness of understanding around how people are looking to engage with their building and building community and in so doing, better develop Castellan to provide an even better intelligent living experience.
Looking forward, 2021 will see some big exciting changes to Castellan.
Shortly we’ll begin to roll out the events feature. Allowing buildings to organise and coordinate community events through the Castellan ecosystem. We’re hoping this means we’ll see more people enjoying the morning teas, yoga, and personal training sessions, but also that we’ll also see those managing the buildings maybe provide other interesting events for their tenants, movie nights, cooking classes, or craft groups perhaps? This feature includes everything you’d expect from an events management system along with a payment gateway and overall UI update.
We’re also listening to our users, developers, managers, and of course, the residents, and are looking to solve some of the other pain points many have within buildings. These include:
- Managing car park spaces - specifically guest car parks which can be a point of contention in many buildings
- Booking lifts for moving days
- Integrating with the door systems of the shared facilities to allow automated access.
Other points of interest in our development path include:
- Investigating how we can incorporate more concierge features such as general home cleaning, dry cleaning, and parcel management
- Looking at integrating with businesses in the local community to offer catering options for dining room upgrades - hoping to further bring the neighborhood together
Our resolution for 2021 is to keep everyone more informed on how things are developing, so we have created this blog where we can keep everyone up to date with recent developments on the Castellan, new features, stories, thoughts we have around intelligent living, and how developers can better integrate technology in their developments.
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We’d like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our users over the past 12 months. We couldn’t have done it without you. We hope that 2021 continues to be a strong year for our property development and management partners as we move from strength to strength in bringing the future of intelligent living to people across the country.