askporter partners with PropeyeHome to bring building intelligence into Housing and Facilities

Most building problems don't announce themselves.A boiler starts running a little off for days before anyone notices the cold radiators. A cooling system loses efficiency for weeks before anyone questions why a communal area feels off. A cold, poorly heated home quietly tips into a damp and mould problem long before anyone reports either. The signal is usually there long before the symptom is, sitting quietly in performance data that nobody's watching closely enough to catch it early.

That's the gap our new partnership with PropeyeHome is designed to close.

What does the askporter and PropeyeHome partnership do? PropeyeHome describes itself as an environmental intelligence layer for buildings. Rather than simply logging sensor readings, it continuously interprets what's happening across a building's systems, heating, cooling, and hot water, through what it calls Propeye's Virtual Engineer, the layer that sits above the raw sensor data, identifies emerging issues, and works out where action is actually needed. It also picks up on tenant-behaviour patterns, like a home being kept too cold, that can quietly develop into damp and mould risk, and builds up a picture over time that can inform longer-term asset planning as well as day-to-day repairs. Sensors supply the data; Propeye's Virtual Engineer turns that data into something useful. For askporter, the first place we're putting that intelligence to work is heating and hot water, where an early signal from Propeye's Virtual Engineer can trigger automated triage and resident outreach in askporter Housing well before a fault, or the damp and mould risk behind it, becomes a reportable emergency.

How the partnership works

Sensors sit on the heating and hot water system itself, capturing performance data continuously. Propeye's Virtual Engineer sits above that: it interprets those readings, notices when something's drifting from normal, and works out where the emerging issue actually is, rather than simply flagging that something, somewhere, looks off. When Propeye's Virtual Engineer identifies a fault or an early warning sign, askporter Housing's Smart Repairs capability takes it from there, running diagnostics, allocating a supplier, and scheduling an appointment without a resident ever having to report the problem first. Proactive Care handles the human side of that: reaching out to let someone know their heating issue has already been picked up, rather than leaving them to discover it the hard way and pick up the phone themselves.

Every part of that chain, from Propeye's Virtual Engineer's original signal through to the triage decision, the work order, and the resident contact, is captured by Proactive Care.

Why this matters under Awaab's Law

Awaab's Law requires emergency hazards to be made safe within 24 hours and investigated within 10 working days. Damp and mould already sit within scope, and Phase 2 widens it further to include excess cold, which changes the nature of a heating fault considerably. It's no longer simply a repairs issue that gets logged when someone calls in; it's a compliance deadline that starts the moment the fault, or the damp and mould risk that a cold, poorly heated home creates, begins, not the moment it happens to be reported.

That distinction matters more than it might first appear. A resident-reported fault has usually already lost several days by the time anyone logs it, the days it took to notice, describe, and report the problem in the first place. A fault flagged by Propeye's Virtual Engineer starts the clock at the earliest realistic point, and just as importantly, it gives your team clear evidence of exactly when that happened and what was done in response.

The facilities management scenario

Heating and hot water problems aren't unique to housing, and neither is the wider idea behind PropeyeHome. Commercial buildings and FM contracts carry much the same risk, just under different names: a failed system becomes a missed SLA, a client escalation, or a tenant complaint, and it's usually discovered well after the fact rather than as it develops. PropeyeHome's ambitions reach further than heating faults too. Propeye's Virtual Engineer is built to watch over a building's energy performance, environmental conditions, maintenance needs, and operational efficiency more broadly, not just the moment something breaks.

Take a commercial office block fitted with PropeyeHome's sensors: a signal from Propeye's Virtual Engineer overnight could trigger askporter Operations' Outreach capability to notify the building manager and any affected tenants first thing, with the job already logged against the SLA before the first complaint comes in. We see askporter as a natural fit within that wider ecosystem, particularly as a route for turning Propeye's Virtual Engineer's intelligence into action inside existing FM workflows, helping move buildings from reactive maintenance towards something more measurable and preventative.

Get in touch

If you manage stock where heating and hot water faults are a recurring headache for both compliance and resident experience, we'd like to show you how this works in practice. [Get in touch / Read more →]

‍