In our latest Spotlight interview, we spoke with Vish Sobti, Director of Business Development.itbox. VisH shares how ITBOX was created to tackle the complexities of resident engagement under the Building Safety Act, and how the Compliance First Platform helps real estate managers and landlords meet evolving regulatory requirements. “Resident engagement is no longer a best practice. It is a legal obligation. The results of the Grenfell Tower investigation highlighted the tragic consequences of dismissing residents' concerns over failures at Grenfell. The Building Safety Act involves maintaining fire and structural safety, including maintaining fire and structural safety for residents.
Q1: How did it affect the creation of ITBOX? Also, were you trying to solve some important issues in the real estate sector? 
Itbox comes from experience advising landlords and real estate managers on building safety. There, they struggled to meet regulatory requirements for residents' involvement.
Following the Grenfell tragedy, the Building Safety Act introduced normative requirements for residents' involvement in risk buildings that are more than 18 meters or more or seven stories high. The intent of the law is clear, but many housing providers, management agents and freeholders struggled to implement these complex obligations.
In the consulting job, clients invested in a commissioning consultant to write one resident engagement strategy in which they do not have a system in place to provide and track actual residents engagement or evidence compliance. This causes the duty holder to be exposed to serious risk of enforcement action or prosecution if investigated by the building safety regulator.
We knew we had to have a better approach, so we created an ITBOX, a property management platform and resident app designed by former property manager experts who were well placed to understand the problem and design the solution.
Q2: How can ITBOX help clients meet their obligations under the Building Safety Act?
The Building Safety Act introduced complex resident engagement practices included in Sections 91-98 and linked regulations.
ITBOX was designed as a tool that can easily meet the challenging compliance requirements of the law. ITBOX helps residents understand the risks of living at HRB and provides a clear route for reporting and engaging in building safety, but for real estate managers it helps deliver against each of the requirements of the BSA. This includes:
Creating and updating specific resident engagement strategies (RES) for the building. Enables bidirectional engagement and accessible formats in multiple languages. Centralizes safety communications through residents' safety hubs. Capture and escalate feedback, questions and complaints in a structured, reportable way. Maintains a record of audit responses that form part of the golden thread of building safety.
Simply put, iTbox offers clients a structured, scalable way to meet their duties without unnecessary administrative burdens, while helping to keep residents safer.
Q3: Why is residents' involvement an important part of the safety and compliance of buildings today?
Resident engagement is no longer just a best practice. It is a legal obligation. The results of the Grenfell Tower investigation highlighted the tragic findings of dismissing residents' concerns.
In response to Grenfell's failure, the Building Safety Act requires mandatory holders to be actively involved in fire and structural safety decisions. This includes providing timely and accessible information, key safety consulting, and maintaining clear channels for feedback and complaints.
However, engagement is not only a compliance, but also a critical safety mechanism. In many cases, residents are the first to spot a potential danger, and their input can prevent the problem before they escalate.
At the heart of this, residents involvement is building trust, enhancing communication, and creating a shared sense of responsibility for building safety.
Q4: What sets ITBOX apart from house solutions and common communication tools?
Many property managers still rely on internal portals, email updates, SharePoint folders, or legacy ways to communicate with tenants (like paper via letterboxes!). Although these can provide general communication, they are not built to support detailed, auditable, comprehensive requirements of the Building Safety Act.
ITBOX is built to help property managers provide compliance and features specially designed to fulfill legal duties regarding residents' engagement. The key differentiators between ITBOX and legacy systems are:
Automatic generation and maintenance of RES documents for higher risk buildings. Structured workflow for consultation, feedback, and complaints with timestamp audit logs. A multilingual, accessible communication tool that reflects the needs of diverse residents. A seamless handover process to ensure that agent management has been changed and no retraining is required, and data is not lost and the golden thread of residents' engagement is maintained completely.
Unlike general health and safety and building portal tools, ITBOX was built to reflect how accurate steps and actions must be taken to meet compliance requirements. This allows clients to consistently deliver and demonstrate compliance across large or complex portfolios.
That's what sets ITBOX apart, and it's becoming a go-to platform for housing providers, freeholders and management agents focusing on safety, compliance and building trusts.
Q5: How do you see the relationship between technology and regulations as evolving in real estate over the next few years?
Technology is an essential enabler to help landlords and real estate managers meet sector regulatory requirements more easily. The relationship between technology and regulations in real estate has become stronger as profits become clearer. As the sector faces more challenging regulatory hardships around building safety, ESG and governance, technology is shifting from support capabilities to critical tools.
Regulators increasingly demand real-time visibility, clear audit trajectories, and comprehensive engagement, which are difficult to deliver through static documents and manual processes. This opens the door for a smarter, more proactive approach to compliance.
We expect the future of compliance to be embedded in daily operations that are not retroactively managed. Platforms like ITBOX allow this by automating engagement, tracking results, and creating permanent, auditable records of compliance activities.
It's not about replacing people, it's about creating complex tasks easier and providing the tools to work more effectively by meeting the requirements of regulatory requirements. Once the right technology is introduced, compliance is less burdensome, increasing competitive advantage, and supports safer buildings for building owners and better outcomes for residents.
