A proposal for estate management & the board of trustees
Your residents already trade with each other. Give them somewhere safer than the group chat.
Every estate WhatsApp group runs the same three messages on repeat: does anyone know a plumber, selling a couch, who does hair? The demand is real — it's just scattered, unvetted, and invisible to management. Nearra gives the estate a private, residents-only marketplace inside a real app, where every member has been approved by the estate office.
For the board, in one minute
- What it is
- Verified residents, trading locally. A private community inside the Nearra app where every member is a resident the estate office has approved, and residents find, hire, buy from and sell to each other. Skills, a marketplace, requests and messaging all sit behind that one idea.
- What residents pay
- Nothing. The estate sponsors it as a resident benefit.
- What the estate pays
- From R1,490 a month by estate size — under R10 per home per month. The subscription activates the board.
- What the estate controls
- Who is a member, the estate's own notices, and the right to stop at any time. Nothing installed, nothing integrated with your systems.
- What the estate owns
- Its residents' community. Nearra never sells resident data, never runs ads to them, and never takes a cut of anything residents arrange with each other.
- Who's behind it
- Nearra (Pty) Ltd, a registered South African company based in Cape Town. The product is live today — open it on your phone before we meet.
What residents see
Their estate, one tap from the neighbourhood around it.
The estate's own space. Residents only, a notice from the estate office at the top, and the public map one tap away.
Every listing is a verified resident. Name, face, trade — and the mark that says the estate office approved them.
Screens from the demo board with sample residents. Your estate's community carries your name and your people.
What residents get
A directory of who does what, inside the gate — the braider three houses down, the resident who fixes laptops, the maths tutor by the clubhouse: listed, searchable, and still findable in April when the group chat has moved on.
A resident marketplace — furniture, appliances, kids' bikes. Collection is a walk across the estate, not a courier and a stranger.
Requests — “anyone do gate-motor repairs?” goes to the residents who do, not to four hundred people who don't.
Messaging and reviews built in — residents contact each other in-app and rate the work, so trust builds inside the community and stays there.
The wider neighbourhood too — the estate community sits on top of Nearra's public map. Residents choose which side they're browsing.
What management gains
An alternative to strangers from outside — residents can look inside the estate first, before calling someone off Facebook or a classifieds site. The manager dashboard shows whether the community is actually being used.
Fewer “do you know anyone who…” calls — to the estate office — the answer becomes a link.
A notice, in the same place — water outages, braai day, security updates: one card at the top of the community, from the office. Not a chat, not a WhatsApp replacement — a noticeboard residents pass on the way to the directory.
A resident benefit with a number on it — a visible lifestyle perk, defensible at the AGM at under half a percent of a typical levy.
A community you can see — a monthly one-page report: residents joined, listings, requests answered, connections made.
What it costs
Sponsored by the institution. Free for every member.
| Up to 100 homes | R1,490 / month |
| 101 – 300 homes | R2,990 / month |
| 301 – 700 homes | R4,990 / month |
| 700+ homes, and multi-estate groups | Custom |
Annual billing is 12 months at the same monthly list rate. Free for every resident, always. No setup fee or minimum term beyond the period paid for.
How activation works
Create the account, choose the subscription, then invite the residents.
Step 1
Create the estate account
Add the estate name, location and approximate number of homes. No document upload or pre-approval queue.
Step 2
Choose a subscription
Pay monthly or annually at the published list rate. The annual option has no discount.
Step 3
The board activates
Paystack confirms payment, then the resident code and launch message become available.
Ongoing
Manage from one dashboard
See adoption, renew the subscription and add more estate branches from the owner account.
What the dashboard measures
For a 300-home estate, these are useful adoption targets after launch:
- 75 homes joined — one in four
- 40 residents listed a skill or an item
- 30 resident-to-resident connections made
- Half of active members back in month three
These are management targets, not conditions for a discount. The published subscription price remains the price.
Managing more than one estate?
Each estate gets its own private community — local stays local, and a resident in one province never wades through another's noticeboard. For managing agents and property groups: one contract, one invoice at the sum of each board's published list price, rolled out estate by estate at your pace.
What it replaces — and what it doesn't
Nearra isn't competing with software the estate might build. It replaces the way this already happens: the WhatsApp scroll, the Facebook group, the noticeboard, word of mouth — and often nothing at all.
- What stays: the WhatsApp group, for conversation. Nobody is asked to leave it.
- What moves: finding people. A persistent, structured directory of who does what inside the estate, with membership the office has verified and reviews that accumulate — instead of a recommendation that scrolls away by next week.
- What never changes: residents still arrange and pay each other directly, off Nearra, exactly as they do today.
The questions trustees ask
“Why not just a WhatsApp group?”
“We already have a WhatsApp group.”
Keep it. The group is where residents chat; Nearra is where they find each other. A plumber recommended in March is unfindable in the group by April — on Nearra he's listed, reviewed and one tap away for as long as he lives there.
“Who decides who's a resident?”
The estate office. Residents request to join; the office approves against its own records or hands out an estate invite code. Nearra never guesses who lives there, and a resident who moves out is removed in one tap.
“Who moderates it?”
Residents can block and report in two taps, and every report reaches a human at Nearra. The office can remove a member at any time. No money passes through the app, so there is nothing for a scammer to collect.
“What about residents' personal information?”
Nearra is a South African company operating under POPIA. Residents decide what appears on their own profile; phone numbers are hidden from strangers, and nobody's address or exact location is ever shown. The estate never hands Nearra its resident database — approval happens on the office's side.
“Can we stop?”
Yes. The board stays active for the period already paid for, then the institution can choose whether to pay for another period. Residents keep their free public Nearra profiles either way.
“We could build this ourselves.”
You could, and the instinct is right — this should exist for your estate. Building it means a budget line and then software to maintain forever: hosting, security, updates, support, app-store accounts. Adopting Nearra means live in a week, maintained by the people who built it, and reversible — no lock-in, no data held hostage if you ever want your own.
“Who needs to sign this off?”
Usually the managing agent or trustees who control the resident-benefit budget. The owner account can be created first, but payment is required before the board goes live.
The question residents ask first
“Is it safe?”
Nobody's exact location is ever shown.
A profile shows an area name and a rough distance — never an address, never a pin on a house.
Contact details are not public.
Phone numbers and WhatsApp are hidden from strangers — only signed-in people can see them, and every reveal is recorded.
Each resident chooses what they share.
They pick which contact channels appear — or none, using only in-app messages.
Block and report are built in.
Anyone can be blocked or reported in two taps, and reports come to a human.
No money passes through Nearra.
Residents deal with each other directly, exactly as they already do — Nearra just makes finding each other easy.
Verified means a resident, not a guarantee of the work.
The Resident mark says the estate office approved this person as a member. How good they are at the job is what reviews from neighbours say — built up honestly, one job at a time.
See it before we meet
Open it on your phone. Nothing to install, no account needed to look.
The product is live today. Open the sample board, then create the estate account and activate it with a subscription when the trustees are ready.
Nearra — your neighbourhood, mapped
Nearra (Pty) Ltd · Reg. 2026/669169/07 · Cape Town · www.nearra.app · hello@nearra.app