Managing Lobby Screens Across an Entire Property Portfolio (Not Just One Building)

Managing one building’s lobby screen is simple. Managing lobby and elevator screens across a portfolio of a dozen buildings - each with its own maintenance schedule, its own building admin, and its own residents - is a different problem entirely. The moment signage scales past one property, “log in and post a notice” stops being a viable workflow, because someone has to do that separately for every building, every time.

Two problems that only show up at portfolio scale

Who’s allowed to post where. A building admin at Riverside Residence shouldn’t be able to post a notice at Northview Towers three blocks over, and a portfolio manager overseeing both needs to see everything without switching accounts. Without role-based access built in, this either means shared logins (a security problem) or a separate account per building (an admin nightmare).

Getting an urgent message everywhere at once. A gas leak, a building-wide water shutoff, or a severe weather notice needs to reach every screen in the portfolio in seconds - not “whichever building’s admin happens to be logged in right now.”

How Atracast handles both

The property management module is built around a two-tier permission model: portfolio-level admins see and manage every building, while individual building admins are scoped to only their own building’s screens and announcements - enforced at the API level, not just hidden in the UI. A building admin posts a maintenance notice for their building only; a portfolio admin can push an alert to every building simultaneously with the emergency override, and it reaches every screen within 30 seconds.

Every announcement also carries an urgency level - info, warning, or urgent - rendered as a color-coded bar so residents can tell severity at a glance, and an optional expiry date so a maintenance notice or event reminder disappears on its own once it’s no longer relevant. Nobody has to remember to log into twelve separate buildings to clean up old notices.

What this actually costs as you scale

The question every property management company asks eventually is: what happens to the bill as we add buildings? This is where per-screen pricing matters more than it seems at first. Atracast charges $9 per screen per month, with every feature included - the condo board module, multi-building role-based access, emergency overrides, and everything else - regardless of portfolio size. Adding a building with three lobby screens adds $27/month. There’s no “portfolio tier” negotiation, no feature that unlocks only after you hit a certain building count, and no per-building base fee stacked on top of per-screen costs.

That flat structure matters because portfolios don’t grow in neat tiers - you add one building this quarter, maybe two more next year. A pricing model that jumps in big steps (three buildings covered, a huge price increase for the fourth) makes budgeting for growth harder than it needs to be. Per-screen pricing scales exactly with what you’re actually running.

What to check before rolling out screens across a portfolio

• Can a building admin manage only their building, with a portfolio admin seeing everything, enforced by permissions rather than trust?
• Does an emergency alert reach every building simultaneously, or does someone need to post it building by building?
• Do maintenance notices and event reminders expire automatically across all buildings?
• Does the pricing model scale linearly as you add buildings and screens, or does it jump in tiers?

See the full breakdown for management companies on the Property Management page, and the complete pricing model on Pricing.