One dashboard for every property you manage
If you manage more than a handful of properties, you already know where the pain is. A tenant messages at 9pm saying the unit feels cold. A vacant listing goes three weeks without anyone walking through it. A pipe lets go in a crawlspace on a Saturday and nobody finds out until Monday. And in every one of those cases, the first question from the owner is the same: why didn’t we know sooner?
Watchman is a WiFi-based smart sensor and data logger built for exactly that gap. It watches temperature, humidity, pressure, water, gas and noise at the property, and it tells you the moment a reading moves outside the range you set — so you find out from an alert instead of from a phone call.
A single dashboard for all your properties
You have a single dashboard to monitor all your properties, reliable alerting, fewer unnecessary trips, and a way to differentiate your service in the market. That is the whole value proposition in one sentence, and each piece of it is worth unpacking.
- One account, many units: Every Watchman you deploy rolls up into the same pp-Code portal and the Watchman.Online app on iOS and Android. You open one screen and see the current state of your whole portfolio instead of logging into a different thing for each building.
- Alerting you can rely on: Set your acceptable range and Watchman logs on a schedule — hourly by default, or every 15 minutes on a subscription. A sudden temperature swing of more than 5°F triggers an immediate alert regardless of the interval, so a fast-moving problem doesn’t wait for the next scheduled reading.
- Fewer unnecessary trips: Most drive-outs are confirmation trips, going to check that nothing is wrong. When the data is in front of you, you only go when there is an actual reason to go. Over a portfolio, that is real hours and real mileage back in your week.
- A service differentiator.: Very few management companies can show an owner a documented environmental history of their property. When you can, you are no longer competing on management fee alone.
Owners feel assured — and can be looped in directly
Property owners are usually far away and always a little anxious. Watchman gives them something concrete to be reassured by. If an owner wants to see for themselves, they can be added to monitor and for alert notifications as needed.
In practice that changes the tone of the relationship. Instead of “trust us, we check on it,” the answer becomes “here is the reading, and here is what it has looked like all month.” Owners who want visibility get it; owners who would rather not think about it simply notice that nothing ever goes badly wrong.
A quiet benefit worth naming: owners who feel informed call less. The same alerting that protects the asset also protects your team’s time.
24/7 coverage without staffing for 24/7
Watchman achieves round-the-clock monitoring for you and for the property owner without either of you having to staff for it. The sensor doesn’t take weekends, doesn’t go on vacation, and doesn’t need an on-call rotation. Overnight, over a holiday weekend, in the middle of a cold snap — it is reading, logging, and ready to alert.
Logs you can keep — and lean on when there’s a dispute
You have the ability to retain logs for as long as you need, and they become very handy in case of claims or disputes.
Without a subscription, the portal holds six days of history. With a subscription, that extends to 60 days in the portal, plus the option of a daily email containing an Excel file of that day’s logs. Archive those daily files and you have an environmental record going back as far as you care to keep it.
That record is what turns an argument into a fact. Was the heat actually off during the freeze? Did the humidity in that finished basement ever leave range before the flooring complaint? When an insurance claim, a tenant dispute, or an owner question comes up, a documented temperature and humidity history is a far better answer than a recollection.
Watchman gives you a documented environmental history that helps you keep the kind of logs auditors and adjusters ask for. It is not a substitute for any formal certification your organization is required to hold.
Buy vs. Lease: which makes sense for a portfolio?
Both options exist, and for a management company the answer is usually straightforward. The comparison below is based on unit purchase-with-all-features (referred as BuyOut). Property manager would need access to all features.
| Lease (recommended) | BuyOut purchase | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | From $5 to $7 per month, per unit | Starts from $85 per unit |
| Features | All features included — standard and advanced | All features included — standard and advanced |
| Upfront capital | None | Full cost per unit at purchase |
| Warranty & service | Fully warranted product and service, with unit replacement included every 3 years | 1-year warranty terms |
| Best for | Managers deploying across a portfolio who want every feature and no capital outlay | Single-site or one-off deployments |
Since you will want access to all features across your portfolio, the recommended approach is the Lease option. It avoids upfront capital spend, comes fully warranted as both product and service, and keeps every advanced capability — 15-minute logging, SMS alerts, extra alert recipients, daily log emails, additional user access, and Health Check etc — switched on from day one.
There is a revenue side to this as well. Monitoring is something you can charge an additional premium for, or use as an add-on that attracts more owners to your door. At a lease cost measured in single-digit dollars per unit per month, the margin case tends to make itself — and the competitive case is even stronger, because the manager who can produce the data usually wins the contract.
Getting started is deliberately simple: Watchman runs on 2.4GHz WiFi with no gateway required, and works up to about 75ft from the access point (50ft for a consistently stable connection).
Where managers deploy it first
Most portfolios start small and expand once the value is obvious. Common first placements:
- Vacant and between-tenant units, where nobody would notice a heat failure
- Seasonal and vacation rentals during the off-season
- Basements, crawlspaces and utility rooms, paired with a water sensor
- Mechanical and server rooms in commercial buildings
- Storage sites, sheds and barns on larger properties
- Cold rooms and freezers where a failure is expensive and fast
Talk to us about a portfolio deployment
Tell us how many properties you manage and what you want covered, and we will put together a Lease plan sized to your portfolio — all features included, no upfront capital. Contact Us
Or email tech@pp-code.com · Compare features at watchman.online/features