Putting community back into property sector

Company offers a community management and engagement platform with events and programmes targeted at tenants and providing services specifically based on interests of people living in the community

Lisa Geoghegan explains that ‘community’ is a new area in the property sector, focusing on the people who are using buildings to live and work.

Her company, Sonalife, offers a community management and engagement platform with a wide variety of events and programmes targeted at tenants and providing services specifically based on the interests of the people living in the community.

Lisa Geoghegan plans to take the company to the global stage. Picture: Conor McCabe Photography

Focusing on the office sector and the private rental sector, Sonalife works directly with landlords keen to engender the value of community within their property developments.

“They want to offer more than just a building for their tenants, creating places where people want to be helps build meaningful relationships for those who live and work in these developments, and landlords can see the value in having this service,” Lisa explains.

As the first female-led Irish business to create community experiences in property developments,Sonalife is unique in the general Irish property landscape.

We are unique in that what we are doing is providing a full community package, and quite different to what an event company would do.

As a chartered property surveyor, community leader and a qualified kinesiologist, Lisa previously worked for Green Property Limited, JLL and CBRE before taking up a role as tenant relationship manager at Central Park in Dublin’s Leopardstown.

Passionate about creating a sense of community within housing developments and corporate environments to help people achieve a happier living and working experience, she uses her experience in property management and wellness to manage and maintain successful community programmes.

“Our business is about bringing people together to connect and get to know each other through different events and experiences,” she says. “With Covid-19, we obviously couldn’t physically bring people together in real life and had to adjust how we did things by providing virtual community events and experiences.”

The pandemic forced her to focus on the emerging problems and to develop a solutions strategy: “Our main focus over the last year was to find out what the people in our community really wanted and needed and then to provide that solution in a virtual setting. Like all businesses, we had to adapt, and realising that we could still add value for both our clients and their tenants gave me a whole new lease of life. When I realised Sonalife could do something beneficial for everyone, I knew our business would survive the pandemic.”

Lisa developed the ‘Live Work Grow’ programme Central Park, recognising the need for creating balance within the development and building an authentic community within it. Sonalife is self-funded, initially established through a small business loan that has since been fully repaid.

“We secured a number of high-profile clients upon launching the business, all of which happened organically, through word of mouth,” she says. “That gave me great confidence and it was a fantastic boost for in those early days. It was so important to have such high-profile clients understand the importance of community and to value my service.”

Lisa began her career in the property sector in 2007 working with CBRE in property information consultancy as valuation support to NAMA. She subsequently went on to spend three years with the Jones Lang LaSalle valuation team, before moving in 2013 to Green Property, a small team of asset managers who were solely working on Lloyds’ exit strategy from the Irish property market.

During this time, she became a chartered property surveyor. With a keen interest in emotional intelligence and wellbeing, Lisa admits to a genuine desire to transform how people live and work.

At Sonalife, she uses her expertise in relationship and community management to create and manage successful community programmes for clients: “There is a great satisfaction in the communications received from people in our communities, often people living on their own and who thank us for providing social interactions which enabled them to stay online after events and talk to other people. It is very humbling and gratifying to get messages from people telling us how we helped with their overall wellbeing and mental health.”

Looking into the horizon of 2022, Lisa is optimistic for business returning to a better form of ‘normal’.

“Many developments that were scheduled to come on to the market over 2020 and 2021 are actually only coming on stream now. Similarly, a lot of people we were having conversations with last year are finally in the process of completing their developments this year, in addition to a significant amount of finished development in the private rental sector.”

She points to the office sector as also becoming more popular — often situations where they want to add something extra to retain their tenants, or as leases are coming close to end wanting to add the little extra service in.

With so many people still working from home, encouraging them back into the offices has become a pertinent issue where Sonalife’s presence may well provide an attractive incentive: “Over the past number of months we have been inundated with potential clients — all of whom have come to us through word of mouth and without advertising. We take that as testament to the service we are providing.”

Adding another string to their 2022 bow, Sonalife has partnered with a tech company to create a community development software solution to take the company to the global stage.

“This is something I’m very psyched about and have been working on for some time,” she explains. “The app will enable us bring our communities on to a platform that will be much more user-friendly and a better experience for people who are part of that community. It will be easy and accessible to use with everything we do available in one place, and will essentially operate as a great enhancement to what we are doing.”

Importantly, it will allow the people on the platform to talk with each other — a function that will further accommodate one of Sonalife’s key attributes — bringing people together.