Owners ask for the same four documents, forever

Droplana is a client document portal for property and block managers. Each owner gets one private, persistent portal: you send statements, reports, certificates and invoices, and they return signed agreements and instructions the same way. Owners need no account.

The recurring-question problem

Property management generates a specific kind of administrative load: not hard questions, but the same handful of easy ones, from many people, forever.

An owner wants last month's statement. Another wants the inspection report from the summer. A third is querying a maintenance invoice and needs to see it again. A fourth is remortgaging and their broker wants the current gas safety certificate and two years of statements by Friday.

None of these takes long individually. Each one is a search through sent mail, a re-attachment, and a reply. Across sixty owners it adds up to hours a week spent re-sending documents that already existed and were already sent once.

The structural fix is not faster searching. It is making the document reachable by the person who wants it, without going through you.

That is what a per-owner portal does. The March statement was put in their portal in March. In September it is still there, above the April one. The email asking for it does not get sent, because the owner already knows where to look. For the general case, what a client portal is and how to evaluate one, see our client portal guide.

A property manager client portal, from inspection to reply

Send Oak Street - Inspection summary.pdf to the owner's portal. Ask them to return Oak Street - Repair instruction.pdf and to put questions on the summary or on the relevant photograph. The instruction arrives beside the report you sent.

Actual product view with fictional property documents.

Name files by property, document type and date, such as Oak Street - Statement 2026-09.pdf. New versions are separate files, so include the issue date and tell the owner which one to use. A returned instruction is a document, not a work order: book the contractor in the system you use for maintenance.

Why property managers use Droplana

The same link, every time

Each owner has one portal at one address that does not change. Not a new link per statement, per quarter or per year. Once an owner has bookmarked it, the retrieval question is answered. Active paid plans have no plan-imposed file retention limit; Free keeps each file for 180 days.

Photographs are the point, not an edge case

Inspection reports, condition schedules, maintenance evidence and works progress are all photographic, and photographs are exactly what email handles worst. Upload the set to the owner's portal and comment on the specific image that matters.

Documents arriving, not only leaving

Owners owe you things too: signed management agreements, updated bank details, insurance documents, proof of ownership for a new instruction. A document checklist shows them what is still missing. If nothing happens for 7 days, the owner gets an email naming those items, and after 14 days the reminder comes to you, so onboarding a new landlord is not four rounds of email.

Invoice queries resolve on the file

Per-file comments mean the discussion about the invoice sits with the invoice. Four months later, the question "what did we agree about that charge?" has an answer in the same place as the document, not in somebody's mailbox. Either side can mark the file Approved or Rejected; payment authorisation stays in your accounting system.

Handover is not a crisis

When an owner leaves, everything of theirs is in one place. Download it, hand it over, revoke access. When a staff member leaves, you remove them from the team, and no client documents stay behind in a personal mailbox. Practice has a team size of 5, including the owner. Studio has unlimited team size.

Compliance documents have a home

The current certificate lives in the owner's portal. So does the previous one. Nobody has to establish which version was in force in 2024 by reading email. Owner documents sit on infrastructure in Germany and are encrypted at rest with a key derived per file; our security page covers what that does and does not protect against.

Where Droplana is not the answer

This one matters more than usual, because the category is close enough to mislead.

It is not a property management platform. No tenancy records, no rent ledger, no arrears tracking, no maintenance workflow, no accounting, no viewings, no tenant portal. If you are choosing your core system, this is not a candidate for it.

It has no concept of a property. The organising unit is the client. A landlord with six flats has one portal holding documents for six flats, organised by whatever naming you use.

Owners, tenants and contractors need separate clients. Contacts on one client share everything in that portal, so never give a tenant or contractor the owner's link. A tenant can be a separate client with a separate portal; on Free that uses one of the 3 client places, while paid plans have unlimited clients. There is no property record linking the portals, and your team members can open every client.

No connector to your management software. Nothing syncs automatically, and documents come out of the portal by hand. An automation tool can connect through the MCP server to upload files or check what is missing, and webhooks report new uploads.

In-browser signing is not a qualified signature. It records who signed, when, from what IP and with which login, with a public verification page. Where a lease or statutory document requires more, use a dedicated provider.

It is not archival storage. Storage is capped per plan with no overage billing: when the limit is reached, new uploads stop and existing files remain accessible. Photo-heavy portfolios should size for that honestly; each Storage add-on adds 500 GB and raises the maximum file size to 5 GB.

The realistic shape is Droplana beside your management platform, as the owner-facing document layer, not instead of it. Property managers often work with accountants, contractors and real estate agents on the same properties, and those businesses use the same per-client structure.

Check our simple pricing (or start free)

Droplana is priced per business, not per owner or per property. Free includes 3 clients, 2 GB storage and 100 MB per file. Solo is €19/month plus tax for unlimited clients, 50 GB and 1 GB per file. Practice supports 5 team members including the owner with 250 GB; Studio has unlimited team size and 1 TB.

On Free, each file expires 180 days after upload. Your clients and their access stay active, so you can keep sharing new files. Active paid plans have no plan-imposed retention limit. Expiry settings, deletion and cancellation rules still apply; a persistent portal address does not guarantee permanent file availability. Team sizes include you. No setup fees or automatic overage charges. Prices exclude applicable tax.

Compare plan details

Plan limits and services. Team sizes include the owner.

Included	Free	Solo	Practice	Studio
Team size	Just you	Just you	5	Unlimited
Clients	3	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage	2 GB	50 GB	250 GB	1 TB
Maximum file size	100 MB	1 GB	2 GB	5 GB
File retention	180 days from upload	No limit	No limit	No limit
Your Droplana address	Includes a random suffix	Your chosen name	Your chosen name	Your chosen name
Data Processing Agreement	Standard	Standard	Countersigned available	Countersigned available
Support	Email	Email	Priority	Priority
Personal setup call	Not included	Not included	Not included	Included

Need more storage?

Add 500 GB for €15/month + tax, or €150/year + tax. Each storage add-on also raises your maximum file size to 5 GB.

Available on all paid plans from your billing page. Add more than one for another 500 GB each. Your team size stays the same.

Questions before you start

Is there one portal per owner or per property?

One portal per client. An owner with several properties has one portal, with filenames telling the properties apart. Owners cannot see each other's portals. Separate client entries create separate portals, not property records or linked spaces.

Do owners need to create an account?

No. There is no account and no password. Under the default Strict setting they confirm their email on a new device, by magic link or by signing in with Google or Microsoft, and the browser is then remembered for 90 days.

Can tenants use it as well as owners?

Yes, as separate clients with their own portals. Do not add a tenant or contractor as a contact on the owner's portal, because contacts on one client share everything in it. There is no shared tenant-owner workspace and no automatic distribution of files between parties.

How large can inspection files be?

Free allows 100 MB per file, Solo 1 GB, Practice 2 GB and Studio 5 GB. A Storage add-on on a paid plan adds 500 GB of storage and raises the file limit to 5 GB.

How long do statements and reports remain available?

Free keeps each file for up to 180 days from upload. Active paid plans have no plan-imposed file retention limit, subject to expiry settings, deletion and cancellation. A persistent portal address is not an archival backup.

Compared with what property managers use now

• Droplana vs email: what changes when statements and certificates stop living as attachments.
• Droplana vs a cloud drive: shared folders per owner compared with one private portal per owner.
• Droplana vs messaging apps: why inspection photos in chat are hard to find later.
• Droplana vs SharePoint: what running an owner extranet on Microsoft 365 involves.