Why We Founded VeraHold

VeraHold was not born as a complex software idea. It came as the result of two different, yet surprisingly similar, real-life experiences.

My family owns flats in Italy, and I had spent time thinking about the way residential buildings are administered there and elsewhere in Europe. The same questions kept returning. Why was it so difficult for an ordinary owner to understand how decisions had been made? Why were important financial documents often fragmented across statements, invoices, meeting minutes and years of correspondence? And why did understanding whether a cost was justified require so much time, persistence and specialist knowledge?

Even where nothing improper had occurred, the structure itself created uncertainty. The people paying the bills frequently had the least organised view of the information behind them.

That observation stayed with me. When I later discussed it with Joshua Poh Ee Kheng, my irreplaceable cofounder and friend, he immediately recognised the problem.

Joshua’s family had experienced the practical reality of trying to understand and question the management of a residential development in the UK: unclear charges, incomplete explanations and the difficulty of knowing what evidence mattered or what to do next. What appeared simple from the outside became far more complicated once budgets, contractual responsibilities, historical accounts and communications had to be examined together.

Our experiences were different, but they pointed towards the same underlying problem: residential property administration contains a significant imbalance between those who hold the information and those who bear the financial consequences. It did not feel fair to us. We felt it was the time to bring new energy and perspectives to an industry that seemed reluctant to change. So we decided to act.

Discovering the scale of the UK problem

The more we examined the UK market—particularly the leasehold system in England and Wales—the more unusual the separation appeared.

A leaseholder may have invested a substantial part of their savings in a home and remain responsible for service charges, insurance, maintenance and major works. Yet the information needed to assess those costs may sit across several organisations, accounting periods and document types. Financial responsibility and operational control do not always rest with the same people.

The government’s own programme of leasehold reform now places considerable emphasis on clearer service-charge demands, annual reporting, stronger information rights and greater accountability. That direction reflects how fundamental the transparency problem has become.

We did not want to build a company around assumptions, so we began speaking to people who understood the system from different positions. We embarked on a long process of research and learning.

We held dozens of discussions with individual leaseholders, Right to Manage directors, resident-led companies, industry associations, journalists, advisers and other professionals working around residential property. We heard about very different buildings and circumstances, but the same patterns appeared repeatedly.

People were receiving large quantities of information without being given clarity. Budgets could change sharply without a sufficiently useful explanation. Reserve-fund movements were difficult to trace. Major-works proposals arrived without an accessible way to assess their history, scope or financial impact. Documents supplied in response to questions created further questions. RTM and resident-management directors, many of whom act voluntarily, were expected to oversee complex financial and operational matters without the analytical support available to professional property organisations.

In more serious cases, leaseholders suspected errors, conflicts or unreasonable costs but did not know how to convert that concern into a documented position. Some approached lawyers before the evidence had been properly assembled, increasing cost and making it harder to identify the precise issue that required legal advice.

The problem was not simply that service charges could be high. The deeper problem was that people often lacked the structure, evidence and context needed to determine whether a charge was justified, whether a process had been followed properly and what action would be proportionate.

The real issue is an information imbalance

During my time at the London School of Economics, I had the honour of being lectured by Sir Cristopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010. I remember being impressed by his research on how information asymmetries impact unemployment by creating frictions in the market. The information exists in the markets, but for structural reasons it is not properly used, and this ends up reinforcing unemployment. I reflected on this concept and I was struck by the similarities with the property industry. Property management produces a great deal of data: leases, annual accounts, budgets, invoices, contracts, insurance schedules, reserve-fund statements, Section 20 notices, specifications, tender documents and correspondence.

But having documents is not the same as having intelligence. A leaseholder may receive hundreds of pages and still be unable to answer basic questions:

• What changed from one year to the next?

• Which costs are recurring, exceptional or unexplained?

• Does the allocation appear consistent with the lease?

• Can expenditure be reconciled with the accounts and supporting documents?

• Is money being held in a reserve, and what has it been used for?

• Which points are confirmed by evidence and which remain unresolved?

• What should be requested next?

• When does an issue justify professional or legal escalation?

Answering those questions manually requires time, financial literacy and familiarity with a highly specialised system. The result is a structural information asymmetry: one side works with the records continuously, while the other may be trying to reconstruct several years of decisions in the evenings and at weekends. I felt like we had to use what we knew to change this.

That’s why VeraHold was founded: to reduce that imbalance and empower leaseholders with the information they need the most.

A different starting point for property technology

A large part of property technology has understandably been built to help managing agents, landlords and property organisations operate more efficiently. Established platforms commonly focus on accounting, maintenance, invoicing, lease administration and operational workflows.

Those tools serve an important purpose. But we believe the people paying for and overseeing residential buildings also need a serious analytical infrastructure of their own.

That is the deliberately different starting point behind VeraHold.

We are not building another portal that simply stores documents or displays the latest balance. We are developing a highly automated financial intelligence layer capable of reading information across documents and accounting periods, reconstructing what happened, identifying inconsistencies and turning complex records into decisions.

The first applications include detailed service-charge and budget analysis, cost comparisons, reserve-fund tracking, major-works review and the identification of missing or contradictory evidence. But VeraHold’s intended scope is much broader than checking whether an individual line item looks expensive.

The platform is being designed to help leaseholders, RTM companies and resident-led organisations:

• understand the complete financial position of a building;

• trace costs and explanations over several years;

• identify material changes, anomalies and unresolved discrepancies;

• assess whether records support the narrative being presented;

• organise evidence before contacting a managing agent, surveyor or lawyer;

• prepare precise requests rather than broad complaints;

• monitor recurring risks and future expenditure;

• improve oversight of contractors, budgets and major projects;

• and make better-informed decisions about how their building should be managed.

Where legal escalation becomes necessary, VeraHold is intended to sit upstream of the lawyer. Our role is to help establish the facts, organise the documentary trail and define the unresolved questions so that specialist legal time is used on the issues that genuinely require it, avoiding unnecessary expenses.

Transparency does not mean conflict

It is important to be clear about what VeraHold is not.

We are not building a platform that assumes every managing agent has acted wrongly, nor do we believe that adversarial relationships produce better buildings.

Managing agents operate in a demanding environment involving ageing buildings, regulatory change, contractors, insurance, safety obligations and competing expectations from residents. Many agents work hard to manage those responsibilities properly.

Better information should support good management, not attack it.

A clearly documented question is easier to answer than a general accusation. An organised financial history reduces misunderstandings. Earlier identification of inconsistencies can prevent a manageable issue from becoming a dispute. RTM directors and managing agents should be able to work from the same evidence, even where they reach different conclusions.

Our approach is therefore evidence-led rather than adversarial. VeraHold does not begin by asking, “Who is at fault?” It begins by asking, “What do the documents show?”

Where the records support the explanation provided, leaseholders should be able to see that. Where they do not, the gap should be identified precisely and addressed proportionately.

Building the early model

VeraHold brings together complementary financial, operational and technical perspectives.

I lead the company’s strategy, research and development of its analytical approach. Joshua leads operational and financial execution.

We have also received limited, project-specific technical support from Kingsley Wat, an Imperial College London student, who has contributed to early backend prototyping for the model. Kingsley is not an employee, director or co-founder of VeraHold.

The early service remains intentionally hands-on. Every case teaches us more about how information is presented, where records commonly break down and which findings are genuinely useful to leaseholders and resident directors. That work is helping us develop a system that can automate the repetitive parts of document extraction and financial reconstruction without removing the careful judgement required for complex cases.

Automation should not produce generic summaries faster. It should make thorough analysis accessible to people who could not otherwise spend days examining every document themselves.

What we want VeraHold to become

Our long-term ambition is to create the financial intelligence infrastructure for residential buildings.

That means a platform capable not only of reviewing historic costs, but of maintaining an ongoing understanding of a building’s finances, contractual obligations, reserves, planned works and emerging risks.

A leaseholder should not have to become an accountant, property manager and legal researcher simply to understand what they are paying for. An RTM director should not have to rebuild the financial history of a development from disconnected spreadsheets and email chains. A serious concern should not depend on who has the most time, money or technical knowledge.

VeraHold exists to make the relevant information understandable, testable and actionable.

The company began with experiences in two families and a question about why residential property administration was so difficult to scrutinise. It became a much larger mission after listening to the people living with the consequences of that system every day.

We believe transparency works best when it is supported by evidence, and that better-informed leaseholders can contribute to better-managed buildings.

That is why we founded VeraHold.