We're Growing - And It's Because of You

Last month, we wrote about Making Tax Digital and why we believe compliance shouldn't cost everyday landlords a penny. That post laid out our philosophy: radical transparency, users first, no hidden agendas.

Since then, something remarkable has happened. People signed up. People sent feedback. People told us what they needed and we listened.

This post is a thank you, and a look at everything we've been building.

You Showed Up And We're Grateful

When you're a small team building something from scratch, there's always a nagging question in the back of your mind: will anyone actually use this?

You answered that question for us. And not just by signing up, by engaging. By sending messages through the feedback tool. By telling us when something didn't work. By suggesting features we hadn't thought of. By sharing Latch with other landlords in your network.

Every single one of those actions shaped what we built over the past two weeks. This isn't a figure of speech. If you scroll through our commit history, you'll see user feedback fingerprints on almost every feature we shipped.

We read every message. We act on every suggestion that makes sense. And we're not stopping.

Introducing SmartFlow: Automation Without the Complexity

The most common piece of feedback we received? "I keep doing the same things over and over."

Sending rent reminders. Chasing late payments. Following up on expiring leases. Checking compliance certificates. These are repetitive, time-consuming tasks that eat into your life as a landlord. And they're exactly the kind of work that software should handle for you.

So we built SmartFlow.

What is SmartFlow?

SmartFlow is our visual workflow builder. It lets you create automations for your property management tasks without writing a single line of code.

Think of it as an "if this, then that" engine built specifically for landlords:

• If rent is 7 days overdue, send a friendly reminder email to the tenant
• If a lease expires in 60 days, send a renewal notice, wait 14 days, then follow up
• If a gas safety certificate is expiring in 30 days, use AI to find contractors and get quotes
• Every Monday at 9am, generate a rent roll report and email it to you

How It Works

You drag and drop nodes onto a canvas. Connect them. Configure them. Save. Done.

Six types of building blocks:

• Triggers: What starts the workflow. Could be an event (rent overdue, lease expiring, new tenant), a schedule (every Monday), a webhook, or a manual button press.
• Actions: What happens. Send an email, record a payment, create a maintenance ticket, generate a report. Over 40 tools available.
• Conditions: Branch your workflow. If the amount is over £500, take path A. Otherwise, path B.
• Delays: Wait before the next step. "Wait 14 days, then send a follow-up."
• AI Steps: Let Matt analyse data or generate content. "Read this document and extract key dates." "Write a professional late payment notice."
• Integrations: Connect to external services like Slack.

We've also included 12 pre-built templates so you don't have to start from scratch. Rent chase escalation, lease renewal pipelines, maintenance SLA enforcement, compliance renewal reminders, all ready to go.

Why This Matters

Property management is full of processes that follow the same pattern every time. The difference between a landlord who's on top of everything and one who's drowning in admin isn't skill, it's systems.

SmartFlow gives you those systems. Set them up once. Let them run. Get your time back.

SmartFlow is currently in early access. We're rolling it out progressively to make sure it's rock-solid before it's available to everyone. If you want early access, let us know through the feedback tool.

The Commercial Portal: Built for Operators and Agencies

Not every Latch user manages three properties from their kitchen table. Some of you manage dozens. Some manage hundreds. Some run agencies with teams of property managers spread across cities.

The standard landlord dashboard wasn't built for that scale. So we built something that is.

What's in the Commercial Portal?

Portfolio-Level Overview: See all your properties at a glance. Total units, occupancy rates, rent collected this month, outstanding balances, and which properties don't have a manager assigned yet.

Three Ways to View Your Portfolio:

• All Properties: A searchable, filterable grid of every property
• By Manager: Properties grouped by the property manager assigned to them
• By Entity: Properties grouped by legal entity (LLC, trust, partnership, etc.)

Team Management: Invite property managers to your account. Assign them to specific properties. Track who's managing what. Revoke access when you need to.

Entity Management: If you hold properties through different legal structures, you can create entities (with Companies House registration numbers, tax references, addresses) and assign properties to them. Reports can then be filtered by entity.

Bulk Operations: Adjust rent across multiple leases at once. Percentage or fixed amount. No more updating them one by one.

Portfolio Reports: Unlimited report generation (no quotas). Rent roll by property or by manager, P&L by entity, occupancy trends, and collection analysis.

Bank Feeds: Aggregate bank reconciliation across your entire portfolio.

Granular Alerts: Configure notifications per-property, per-event-type. Get notified about overdue rent on Property A but not Property B. Your rules.

Full Feature Access: Everything in the landlord portal (compliance tracking, invoicing, AI agent, documents, maintenance) is available with portfolio-level scope.

Who Is It For?

If you're a property management agency, a portfolio operator, or a landlord scaling beyond a handful of properties and starting to delegate, the Commercial Portal is built for you.

The onboarding captures your company details, team size, property types, and current tooling so we can tailor the experience from day one.

Everything Else We Shipped

SmartFlow and the Commercial Portal are the headlines, but we shipped a lot more. Here's the full picture:

New

• SmartFlow: Custom visual workflow builder that's limitless with premade templates.
• Commercial Portal: Full multi-tenant portal for property operators on a large scale.
• Free Landlord Tools: 24 free tools to help landlords from staying compliant to correct rent pricing.
• Google Maps Integration: Address autocomplete on onboarding and invoice forms.

Improved

• Site Performance: Speed up site loading speeds and overall user experience.
• Mobile Compatibility: More responsive and fixed many UI components, added touch targets and responsive layouts.
• Spreadsheet Import: Track exactly what's happening via live progress and better in depth analysis of spreadsheets, allow editing of imports.
• Calendar UI: Easier date selection.

Fixed

• UI Polish: UI alignments, clipping, scrollbars.
• Welcome Popup: No longer reappears on new browser/devices.
• Matt Onboarding: No longer reappears on new browser/devices.
• Free Trial: Start trial now can be started on the header of the app.

Removed

• VAPORISED AND REDUCED BUGS TO NOTHINGNESS!!!!!!!!!

What Drives Us

We said it last time and we'll say it again: our mission is to save landlords as much time as possible so they can stop managing and start living.

Every feature listed above exists because a real person, a real landlord, a real agency owner, a real property manager, either told us they needed it or would clearly benefit from it.

We're not building features to pad a marketing page. We're building them because they solve real problems for real people.

What's Next

We're not slowing down. Here's what's on our radar:

• SmartFlow general availability: Currently in early access, we're working toward making it available to all users.
• Property Manager Portal: A dedicated portal for delegated property managers (currently in development).
• HMRC MTD Integration: Direct quarterly submissions when the April 2026 deadline hits.
• More automation templates: We're building a library of common workflows so you can automate in minutes.

But honestly? The roadmap is shaped by you. If there's something you need, tell us. Use the in-app feedback tool, reply to any of our emails, or just message us directly. We read everything.

Help Us Keep Building

If Latch has saved you time, helped you stay organised, or just made property management a little less painful, here's how you can help:

• Keep sending feedback. Every message gets read. Every good idea gets built.
• Tell another landlord. Word of mouth is the best marketing we could ask for.
• Be patient with us. We're a small team moving fast. Things will break. When they do, tell us and we'll fix them quickly.

We started Latch because we believe landlords deserve better tools. Your support proves we're on the right track.

Thank you for being here. Let's keep going.

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The Latch Team

Have feedback or feature requests? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out anytime, we read every message.