Singapore has spent years pushing the built environment towards digitalisation. The government’s Smart Nation initiative champions drones, sensors, and automation to make city infrastructure more efficient, and BCA’s Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) programme pushes the same digital-first thinking across the building lifecycle, from design through to asset management. On paper, MCSTs today have no shortage of CMMS options to choose from.
And yet adoption is close to zero. Ask most council members or building managers, and their CMMS either sits unused after the first few months, or never got past the pilot stage. The only category of app that has genuinely caught on with residents is community-focused apps like iCondo — and those have nothing to do with actually running the estate’s operations. They handle bookings and announcements, not maintenance, vendors, or compliance.
That gap between “software exists” and “software gets used” isn’t a technology problem. It’s a design problem. Here’s how MCSTs actually work. When council members engage a managing agent, and if the budget allows, they’ll want someone onsite to attend to occupants directly. So they add headcount — anywhere from just a building manager, to an admin staff and a technician (handyman). How much they can add usually comes down to the maintenance funds contributed by subsidiary proprietors (SPs). Bigger estates, bigger budgets, more headcount.
But the heavy, important work — a lift breakdown, a leaking rooftop — is done by vendors. So the MA’s real job is managing these vendors professionally and promptly. And this is where most CMMS implementations fall apart.
Problem 1: CMMS is built for internal staff, not vendors — even for MAs like Smart Property
When an MA implements a CMMS, vendors often don’t follow it. Most of these systems aren’t mobile-first, and they’re designed with internal staff in mind — which means they ask for more information than a vendor technician actually needs or wants to fill in. The learning curve is too steep for vendor technicians and vendor managers, and that’s usually where CMMS adoption quietly fails.
How Basementgrid solves this: We split vendor managers and vendor technicians into two distinct roles, each with only what they need to do — and a single primary action button that tells them exactly what’s required next. Basementgrid also works as field service management software for vendor managers themselves. They carry one verified profile across every estate they work in, so they’re not learning a new system each time — just repeating the same procedure somewhere else. Mobile-first, role-specific, and structured so no one can skip a step in the maintenance process.
Problem 2: Building managers have no leverage over vendors
BMs usually start out enthusiastic when a CMMS is launched. But when vendors don’t cooperate, that enthusiasm fades fast, and the software gets abandoned — a pattern we’ve written about before in why building managers can’t put maintenance on autopilot. The real issue is leverage: BMs don’t have much power over vendors, because the supply of vendors willing to do the work at a reasonable price is limited. Unlike a large corporation dealing with vendors, the balance of power here tilts toward the vendor, not the buyer.
How Basementgrid solves this: We built payments directly into the maintenance process. Invoices are submitted through Basementgrid as part of the workflow, not handed off to a separate finance process. This does two things. First, it gives vendor managers a reason to follow the procedures we require, because completing them is the path to getting paid. Second, it gives building managers instant visibility into payment status. The two departments stop working in silos — and for the MAs who outsource accounting (about half of them do), everyone knows immediately whether a job has been invoiced, paid, or stuck.
Problem 3: Council members are more than “requestors”
Most CMMS platforms are built for the building management team and technicians, which means council members are treated as just another requestor in the system. But that undersells their role. The maintenance health of the estate, and its statutory compliance, ultimately rests on their shoulders — even when an MA is engaged. They can’t hand off responsibility entirely if a vendor, MA, or technician drops the ball. The same goes for the funds they’re accountable for, whether management funds or sinking funds.
How Basementgrid solves this: We keep it simple. Council members only need to give majority approval when maintenance or repair costs exceed a set threshold, and they have view access to all work orders at all times. If they want an overview of the estate, they can generate reports — but it’s optional, not mandatory. We call this role “Approver,” and it does double duty: it also keeps building managers accountable, since they know council members can see what’s happening in the estate at any time.
Try it for yourself
To be clear, Basementgrid isn’t trying to replace iCondo, and it doesn’t need to. iCondo does community well — bookings, announcements, keeping residents in the loop. We do operations — maintenance, vendors, payments, compliance. Different jobs, different users, and there’s no reason an estate can’t run both side by side. The problem was never that community apps exist. It’s that operations software never solved the vendor problem, so it never got the chance to matter the way iCondo did.
Whether you’re a council member, a managing agent, or a subsidiary proprietor who owns just a small fraction of the estate, you can download the app here and reach out if you need a hand getting started.
We’re always happy to partner with managing agents looking to integrate Basementgrid into their operations, help council members set it up and customise it for their estate, or support onboarding for building managers and vendors. It’s the same spirit behind Savills’ partnership with iCondo on the community side — we’d like to be that partner for MAs on the operations side.
Because at the end of the day, if the process is broken, changing the people running it won’t fix anything.
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