Everything the house assumes you already know.
How the heating works. Which bin goes out, and when. If you live somewhere you don’t own, that is knowledge the building holds and nobody has handed you.
The first fortnight in someone else’s house
Most of it was never written down, because for the person who has lived there five years it isn’t information, it’s just the house.
- The heating has a mode nobody understands
- The real manual wants a model number, and the model number is on a plate behind the unit, facing the wall, in the dark.
- Bin night
- Which bin, which week, which kerb — and every new arrival gets it wrong for a month.
- Ten at night, and the cooktop won’t turn on
- Induction, with a child lock on it. The guest messages the host, who is at dinner and answers from memory.
A home and a property are not the same thing
A home is the household — the people. A property is the building: the address, the rooms, the systems and appliances in them, and the maintenance it needs, whoever happens to be sleeping there tonight.
The household
- insurance policies
- rates notices
- what the place cost
- the family's private records
The building
- rooms, systems, appliances
- how the heating works
- where the stopcock is
- who to ring on a Sunday
Someone living here needs the right-hand column, and only that.
The boundary is already load-bearing: when a property is transferred, the next owner inherits the hot water unit’s serial and its service history, and inherits nothing of the last owner’s insurance.
Someone living here needs the building. They don’t need the household.
The answer to the cooktop question is currently a text message, because the two lists live in one folder: handing over the first means handing over the second, and the owner reasonably declines. Split the record where the product already splits it and there is something coherent to give — the building, in full, and the household, not at all.
What it wouldn’t be
Not a message channel. Atty sends no email, no push, no alert and no reminder of any kind, to anyone. No fault reports, no maintenance requests, no thread between a tenant and an owner — that’s a different product, and we’re not going to half-build it in the corner of this one.
None of it exists. There is no resident view, no guest access, no visitor login and no sharing of any kind. What was built recently is a membership layer with exactly two roles, owner and member, and no interface at all — no screen, no door, nothing a person who doesn’t own the house can reach. Bin night isn’t even a field. It’s the shape of a thing, written down before it’s built, so it can be argued with while arguing is still cheap.
Tell us what your house has to explain
If you live somewhere you don’t own, you already know the list. Send it to hello@atty.house. There’s no account to create and nothing to install, and the specific ones are worth far more than the general ones: “the second key sticks, you have to lift the handle”.