# Shared space bookings for apartment buildings

Shared space bookings for apartment buildings is a SaaS idea for building managers, HOA boards and residents’ associations of apartment blocks, priced to test at $49 a month per building. Shared rooms are booked on a paper sheet in the lobby or by emailing the manager. With it, residents book the gym, guest suite or party room online, and building managers set the rules once.

_Published 19 Oct 2026. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build._

## What problem does it solve?

Shared rooms are booked on a paper sheet in the lobby or by emailing the manager. Double bookings cause arguments, and nobody knows who left the party room in a mess.

**Why now:** Residents already book restaurants, classes and doctors online, and expect the building’s shared rooms to work the same way.

## What do they use today?

Most buildings rely on a clipboard by the lobby door and requests sent to the manager. House rules are pinned to a notice board that few residents read, so the manager ends up as the referee.

## How does it work?

The manager sets up a calendar for the party room with opening hours and booking rules, then invites residents by unit number and email. A resident picks a free slot and receives a confirmation, and the cleaner gets a note about the booking. Afterwards the cleaner or manager reports any mess or damage with a photo.

## What goes in the first version?

- Calendar for each shared space with opening hours
- Booking rules for length, notice and limits per unit
- Residents invited by unit number and email
- Email confirmations and a note to the cleaner
- Damage or mess reports with a photo

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Building managers, HOA boards and residents’ associations of apartment blocks
- **Price to test:** $49 a month per building

A building is the natural unit: one set of shared rooms, one manager, one list of residents. A flat price per building lets the board or manager approve it once, without counting residents or bookings.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Ask five building managers how residents book shared rooms today and what goes wrong.
2. Put a booking link for one guest suite on a lobby poster and count bookings in a week.
3. Offer three HOA boards a free month and see who sends resident invites.

## Where to find the first customers

- HOA and condo board groups on Facebook
- Condo and apartment living subreddits
- Local property management companies that run several buildings

## What are the risks?

- Large building management suites include bookings, so start with self-managed buildings.
- Volunteer boards decide slowly, so the first setup must fit in one meeting.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.

**Already in the kit:** Sign-in, Teams and roles, Billing, Emails, In-app notifications

**You build:**

- Space calendars with booking rules
- Resident invites by unit number
- Mess and damage reports with photos

[Get the kit](https://www.shipanysaas.com/pricing)

### The starting prompt

```text
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Shared space bookings for apartment buildings.

Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it.

## The product
- What it does: Residents book the gym, guest suite or party room online, and building managers set the rules once.
- Who pays: Building managers, HOA boards and residents’ associations of apartment blocks
- Their problem: Shared rooms are booked on a paper sheet in the lobby or by emailing the manager. Double bookings cause arguments, and nobody knows who left the party room in a mess.
- Price to test: $49 a month per building (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. Calendar for each shared space with opening hours
2. Booking rules for length, notice and limits per unit
3. Residents invited by unit number and email
4. Email confirmations and a note to the cleaner
5. Damage or mess reports with a photo

## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it
- Sign-in: email and password or Google, plus magic links and passkeys you can switch on
- Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations
- Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments
- Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer
- In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app

## New code it needs
- Space calendars with booking rules
- Resident invites by unit number
- Mess and damage reports with photos

## How to work
1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK.
2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files.
3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next.

## Rules
- Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel.
- Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are.

Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
```

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [How to add Stripe embedded checkout to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-stripe-embedded-checkout)
- [Multi-tenant SaaS architecture: teams, roles and invitations done right](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/multi-tenant-saas-teams-roles-invitations)
- [How to add in-app notifications to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-in-app-notifications)

## More ideas: Property

- [Monthly owner statements for short-let managers](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/short-let-owner-statements): Managers who run short-let homes for several owners import bookings and costs, and send each owner a clear monthly statement.
- [Rental applications and shortlists for small landlords](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/rental-application-shortlists): Applicants fill in one form with their documents, and the landlord compares everyone side by side before picking a tenant.
- [Rent tracking and late reminders for small landlords](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/small-landlord-rent-tracker): Landlords with a few units see who has paid this month, and late tenants get polite, dated reminder emails.

- [All SaaS ideas](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas)
- [Try the free generator](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas#generator)