A conversation between Leor Shavel (Co-Founder & CEO, Settld) and Sam Khalef (Founder & CEO, MYBOS), recorded as part of our recent joint webinar. Watch the full replay below, or read the highlights below.
Off-the-plan property settlement is the two-to-three-year window between contract exchange and key handover. It’s the phase that defines whether a buyer walks into their new apartment feeling looked after, or feeling abandoned. And it’s the phase where most developments still rely on manual processes, disconnected systems and last-minute coordination between teams who haven’t worked together before.
In our recent webinar with MYBOS, Leor Shavel and Sam Khalef worked through what actually happens in that window – what goes wrong, what it costs, and what best practice looks like when settlement management and building management operate as one connected process.
What is the settlement gap in off-the-plan property?
The settlement gap is the period between when a buyer signs an unconditional contract and when they receive their keys – typically 18 to 36 months. During this window, the buyer needs structured communication, milestone visibility, and a clear point of contact. In most projects, none of those are formally owned by anyone.
Leor framed it through the lens of buyer experience:
“We consider purchasers VIPs. Buying a property is probably the most important purchase of someone’s life, and we’ve seen real cracks in the off-the-plan settlement experience that we believe can be closed.”
The pattern, project after project, is the same. The agent owns the buyer beautifully through the sales phase. Exchange happens. And then the buyer is effectively handed off – except no one is consistently positioned to catch them.
“Once a buyer exchanges, the structured communication often stops. They can be left without a clear point of contact, and that’s where the gap opens up.”
It’s not a question of effort. Solicitors are focused on the legal process. Agents have the next launch underway. Without a settlement specialist or platform sitting in the middle, the buyer can spend two years without consistent updates on the most significant purchase they’ll ever make.
The same pattern can repeat at the other end – the handover from settlement into building management.
A real story: when the handover runs out of runway
Leor walked through a project his team managed pre-Settld: 300+ units, mid-COVID, colour schemes blown out, valuations falling short. His team did a year of careful work – building rapport with purchasers, getting ahead of risk, sorting valuation gaps before they became settlement failures.
The building manager was appointed four weeks before completion.
“By the time the building management team came on board, there wasn’t enough runway to set up systems or get familiar with the buyers. The role had been scoped as facility-focused rather than customer-facing, which meant the buyer-facing work fell to us at the last minute. A year of careful buyer experience work was harder to land than it should have been – and it was avoidable with earlier engagement.”
Sam recognised the pattern immediately. He sees it from the other side regularly:
“When building managers are appointed close to completion, they’re trying to collect resident data, pre-settlement documents, and move-in details all at once. It often becomes a full reset, even though most of that information already existed earlier in the project.”
That word – reset, kept coming up. Pre-exchange to exchange. Exchange to handover. Handover to ongoing management. At each junction, a new team steps in without the context the last one built, and the buyer is asked to re-explain who they are.
“Buyers are asked for the same information two or three times across the journey. The transparency that should be there from day one isn’t, and that’s what we’re working to fix.” ~ Sam
Why disconnected systems are the root cause of settlement risk
Settlement risk isn’t usually one big failure, it’s the cumulative effect of small information losses across a long project. Leor described the operating reality before Settld existed:
“Before we built Settld, we were often working across multiple platforms. The CRM held some buyer data, the construction software held defects, the project manager kept a separate list, and the settlements team produced another. It wasn’t unusual to see three or four different defect reports for the same unit. None of it was anyone’s fault, it was a structural problem that no platform was solving.”
Multiply that by 200 buyers and a two-year program, and the cost stops being abstract.
The cost to developers
For developers, the financial exposure is direct.
“When settlements don’t happen on time, developers face significant default interest costs. If pre-sales sit at a 2-5% margin, the CFO needs to know exactly what’s settling on time, what’s settling late, and what isn’t settling at all – early enough to put residual stock loans in place or to start reselling units. Visibility is what unlocks those options.” ~ Leor
Without that visibility, none of those mitigations happen in time. With it, half a dozen solutions open up.
The cost to building managers
For building managers, Sam pointed at the 90-day defect liability period as a reputational pressure point:
“You have a tight window to leave buyers with a strong impression. They’re the people who’ll move into the developer’s next project, and they’re the ones who’ll recommend a building manager to the next property. Disconnected systems make it harder for everyone in that chain to deliver the experience they want to deliver.”
He also raised something every operator in this space recognises – the public narrative around the industry doesn’t reflect the work being done inside it.
“The coverage of our industry tends to focus on what goes wrong. We’ve been working in this space for over a decade. The vast majority of building managers, developers and strata teams are genuinely committed to doing right by their customers every day. The challenge is that disconnected systems make that harder to demonstrate.”
Disconnected systems aren’t just an operational issue. They make it harder to show buyers the care that’s actually going into the work.
What best practice looks like in off-the-plan settlement management
The conversation pivoted from problem to solution, and this is where the Settld–MYBOS partnership starts to do real work.
Leor’s view of best practice begins three to four months before completion:
“Three to four months out, we run a buyer information event with every stakeholder in the room – the strata manager, the building manager, the settlements team. The building manager introduces their platform. The settlements team takes buyers through finance readiness, valuations and pre-settlement inspections. It’s the moment buyers meet the people who’ll be looking after them once they have their keys, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.”
On the back end, the data and history captured in Settld over the prior 18–24 months pre-loads into MYBOS, so the building manager has full context from day one.
Sam’s framing of where MYBOS fits:
“Settld is engaged two years before move-in. By the time we step in, that buyer history transitions automatically into the MYBOS environment – branded for the project, with everything the resident has done already there. The building manager has 90 days of focused defect management, and then we move into long-term operations. Done well, that’s the moment everyone – buyers, building managers, developers, looks back on the experience and says it worked.”
The integration matters because the time horizons don’t match. Leor put it cleanly:
“We’re with purchasers for two or three years at most. Building managers can be with them for ten or twenty. Setting up that foundation properly at the start is what makes the next two decades easier for everyone.”
Why the customer-facing building manager matters at handover
One of the more pointed moments in the conversation was the shift Sam is seeing in the building management profession itself.
“Building management has changed substantially over the last decade. The expectation now is that the on-site manager is visible, customer-facing, and engaged with residents. The companies leaning into that shift – investing in customer service, hiring from concierge backgrounds, being present – are the ones we see growing fastest.” ~ Sam
Leor’s view from the developer’s side:
“The owners decide at the first AGM who stays and who doesn’t. That makes the first impression critical. As a settlements team, the key handover is the part of our process we’re least possessive of, because we know how much value buyers get from a building manager who’s part of that moment.”
In the 300-unit project Leor described earlier, the building manager was voted out at the first AGM. Reputation in this market is set in the final weeks.
The reframe: buyer experience is everyone’s commercial outcome
The thread running through the whole conversation is straightforward. When buyers have a great off-the-plan settlement experience, every stakeholder benefits.
“It’s significantly cheaper to sell to people who’ve already bought from you. Some of the best developers we work with see 10 to 30% of pre-sales come from their existing database – they invite previous purchasers in before any new stock goes to market. That only works if those purchasers had a great experience the first time around.”
“Things will go wrong on a long project. That’s unavoidable. What you can control is how you respond whether you go above and beyond to put it right. That’s what buyers remember.” ~ Leor
Sam closed on the same note from the building management side:
“Visibility and transparency are what hold the experience together. Speak to your buyers, your developers, your committees. The more openly the players in this industry work together, the better the outcomes for everyone – and that’s the shift we’re seeing in the companies doing this well.”
Frequently asked questions
When should a settlement management platform be implemented on an off-the-plan project?
The earlier the better, but the practical answer is at the point of contract exchange. That’s when the buyer relationship transitions from sales to settlement, and when the structured communication, document collection and milestone tracking need to begin. Implementing at exchange means every buyer milestone – finance readiness, valuations, colour scheme selections, construction updates, pre-settlement inspections – runs through one system from day one. Implementing later means manually rebuilding history that should already exist.
How does Settld reduce settlement fall-through risk?
Settld gives developers and project marketers full pipeline visibility from exchange through handover, with eleven tracked finance states across every buyer in the project. That visibility lets the development team see which buyers are progressing, which are at risk, and which won’t settle on time. The earlier that signal arrives, the more options are available: residual stock loans, early resales, finance broker support, or buyer-side intervention. Settlement risk isn’t eliminated by a platform, but the runway to manage it expands dramatically.
What does Settld replace in a typical developer tech stack?
For most developers and project marketer agencies, Settld replaces the patchwork of CRMs, spreadsheets, MailChimp campaigns, JotForm landing pages, and the manual handover documents that currently hold the post-sale process together. It sits alongside sales CRMs (Property Base, HubSpot, Property Shell) and integrates with downstream platforms like MYBOS for the building management handover. Settld isn’t a sales tool it, and picks up where the sales platform finishes.
Who owns the buyer relationship after exchange when Settld is in place?
The developer’s client relations or settlements team retains ownership – Settld provides the structure, branded communications and visibility that lets that team operate at scale. Every buyer receives a project-branded app with milestones, documents and notifications. Automated communication templates handle the recurring touchpoints, freeing the settlement team to focus on the buyers and moments that genuinely need a human.
Does Settld work for project marketer agencies as well as developers?
Yes. Settld is used by both developers running settlement in-house and project marketer agencies managing settlement on behalf of developer clients. For agencies, Settld provides white-labelled buyer experience, structured handover into the developer’s reporting cycle, and the operational rigour that lets a small team manage hundreds of buyers across multiple concurrent projects. Traditional settlement agencies like Haven Settlements use Settld as their technology layer.
How does Settld hand over to a building manager at completion?
Settld carries every buyer interaction, document, milestone and note through to the building management platform at handover. With MYBOS, that transition is a direct integration – buyer history, contact details and project context move across automatically, and the building manager opens day one with full visibility rather than a blank page. For projects using other building management platforms, the same data export is available in structured form. The buyer doesn’t get asked for the same information twice, and the building manager doesn’t lose the relationship history Settld has built over the prior two years.
See how Settld and MYBOS work together
Settld manages the buyer journey from contract exchange through key handover. MYBOS picks up at handover and manages the building, the residents, and the defect liability period from day one. The integration carries buyer history across automatically, so nothing is reset, nothing is re-collected, and no one falls through the gap.
Watch the full webinar replay above, or book a walkthrough of the Settld–MYBOS integration.
