Overview
Diligia is a transaction management platform for commercial property in Australia. A deal that used to live across inboxes, Word documents and spreadsheets sits in one workspace instead, from the first listing through settlement and what comes after.
Diligia's founder, Sean Saliba, spent about ten years on every side of commercial deals, as a vendor, buyer, agent and operator. We designed and built two things for Diligia: the public marketing site that explains the product, and the web app that agencies use to run live transactions.
The challenge
Most commercial property deals still run on email. A request goes out, a reply lands in someone's inbox, and nobody can say at a glance what is still open. Each party tracks the deal in their own way. Settlement adds a pile of separate documents on top, such as supplier transfers, licences and staff entitlements. Problems tend to surface late, when they are expensive to fix.
Diligia's own manifesto puts it in one line: the inbox is not a system. Our job was to turn that sentence into a product that people in a busy agency would actually open every morning.
Two constraints shaped the work. The audience is mixed, from agents who live in a list of deals to solicitors who care about a clean checklist. And the product is early, so the design had to carry real transactions today and leave room for the parts of a deal that are still to come.
Our approach
Discovery
We started from the life of a deal, not from screens. A commercial transaction moves through four phases: campaign, due diligence, completion and post-settlement. Every party needs to see the same facts at each phase, and every open request needs an owner and a date.
That gave us the spine of the product. A deal is the central record. Under it sit the due diligence checklist, the RFI tracker, the data room and an audit trail. Around it sit the people, kept in a client base that links each contact to the deals they appear in.
Design
The app uses a dark interface in deep green and charcoal. The green gives the product a calm tone without the usual corporate blue. Status colours carry meaning and nothing else. Green means complete, amber means in progress, red means overdue.
The marketing site follows the same language. It opens on a Melbourne skyline under the headline "Australia's first Transaction Management Platform for commercial property", then walks through the problem in four short ideas: lost in email, no shared view, settlement chaos, and deals that fall over late. A second section answers with the four stages the product covers. The site ends on a clear invitation for agencies to become founding design partners.
Build
Both products are built for the web. The marketing site is a Next.js site with optimised images. The app is organised around the deal, with each section a page under the transaction, so a link to the checklist or the RFI tracker goes straight to it.
Key features
One list for every deal
The transactions view is where an agent starts the day. Headline numbers sit on top: active transactions, total value, overdue RFIs and what has settled this year. Below them, each deal shows its address, sale price, going concern status, phase, due diligence progress, expiry date and the agent in charge. Overdue items are marked in red so they cannot be missed.
A deal dashboard with a phase tracker
Opening a deal shows where it stands. The header carries the property type, the going concern status, the sale price and overall due diligence completion. A four-step tracker marks the current phase, and a banner says what the team should be watching. In the example below, the campaign is live and the banner prompts the team to monitor expressions of interest. Due diligence progress is broken down by category, next to a key dates panel that fills in with the DD expiry and settlement dates once the deal moves into exclusive due diligence.
A checklist grouped by category
The due diligence checklist groups every item under its category, shows a progress bar for each group and lets the team filter by status. Completed items are struck through. The list can be exported, and an Excel import option sits beside it.
A data room with a fixed structure
The data room opens with folders for financial, legal, operational, building and plant, environmental, contracts and marketing, so everyone knows where a document belongs before the first upload. Files appear in one list with their folder, size and upload date, and can be searched and sorted by name. In the Motley deal, the financial folder holds an advance deposit report, an FY25 budget and a year of financials. Access is set per party.
An RFI tracker that replaces the inbox
Each request for information has a number, a priority, a category, an assignee, a due date and a thread. The example below is a high-priority land tax request in the financial category, assigned to the accountant. The list can be filtered by open, overdue and resolved. The thread tells every party that replies are logged permanently to the audit trail, which is the point of moving requests out of email.
A client base tied to deals
Contacts are filed as vendors, buyers or professionals, with roles such as solicitor, accountant and financier. Each contact shows how many deals they are linked to, the combined deal value, any open RFIs and the last activity. We blurred the contact details in the screenshot below.
What we learned
Make the deal the unit of design. Every screen answers the same question for a different person: what is open, who owns it and when is it due. Keeping that question in view made decisions about navigation and status colours quick.
Fixed structure helps early users. A data room with a standard set of folders and a checklist grouped by category removes setup work and gives parties a shared vocabulary on day one.
Diligia is working with a founding group of agencies who test it on live transactions, free to try with no lock-in, and their feedback is shaping what comes next. The product is planned to cover settlement conditions, supplier contracts and post-settlement adjustments too.
Start a project with us
If you run a business where deals, documents and deadlines pile up in email, we would like to hear about it. We design the workflow, the interface and the build together, so the product fits the way your team already works.