YH Kodit offers rental, right-of-occupancy, and owner-occupied housing, particularly in the growth centers of Tampere and Turku. As a long-term property owner, the company continuously maintains its extensive real estate portfolio. With thousands of apartments and hundreds of renovation projects each year, the information gathered about the properties must remain up to date—including in the form of images.
“We currently have about 8,500 apartments and, as a result, about 16,000 residents,” says Tomi Jokio, Real Estate Director at YH Kotien.
Jokio is responsible for business operations related to YH Kotien’s existing property portfolio. His responsibilities include property management, customer service, leasing, and renovation.
“The scale of our operations is illustrated by an annual renovation budget of approximately 20 million euros. We have about 300–500 planned renovation projects each year.”
Managing an extensive property portfolio requires readily available and continuously updated information on the condition of the properties. Photographs and systematic visual documentation are a key part of this process.
For this, YH Kodit relies on the Pictue mobile app.
Tomi Jokio and YH Kodit rely on Pictue for the photographic documentation of their properties.
YH Kodit has been using Pictue for visual documentation since 2025.
The need for more systematic visual documentation had been identified even before Pictue was adopted. However, no one had actively sought out a suitable tool.
“Before Pictue, our property managers did actively take photos of the properties, but those photos often ended up on their personal phones. Reusing those photos was a clear challenge for us.”
The problem became particularly apparent during the planning of renovation projects. There might have been plenty of valuable visual material from the properties that could be used in planning, but the photos weren’t shared when they were needed to assess the initial condition.
With Pictue, photos taken by an individual property manager are no longer limited to the photographer’s use. The same material is available to the entire organization for use in, for example, apartment inspections, reporting, and renovation planning.
“Once a photo is taken, any of our employees can access it going forward,” Jokio summarizes.
Given YH Kotien’s extensive property portfolio, it’s essential that photos can be easily found in the context of the correct apartment or property.
Photos taken with Pictue are saved to the cloud in real time and archived in the desired location, always with apartment-level precision. At the same time, the photo records form a continuously updated history, for example, in connection with changes in residents and repairs.
“We’ve created a solution for YH Kodit where each of the company’s apartments is its own separate entry in Pictue. This allows photos to be linked directly to a specific apartment in a specific company,” explains Oskar Smeds, Director of Business Development at Pictue.
Apartment and property information can be imported into Pictue from existing data sources, such as Excel spreadsheets. This simplifies the management of a large number of apartments and streamlines the process of adding new properties.
Jokio notes that the constantly expanding image library also provides extensive support for property maintenance and the planning of renovation projects.
“In the past, when we started planning a property renovation, the necessary images might have been stored on a single property manager’s phone. Now we can open the property in Pictu and see what kind of image data has been accumulated over time regarding the apartments, common areas, and outdoor spaces. This allows us to get a sense of the property’s condition even before we visit the site.”
YH Kotien’s photos are easily accessible on the map or by property, both via the mobile app and a web browser. The map view allows users to quickly check details related to a property and effortlessly share information.
The benefits of Pictue aren’t limited to archiving photos. When photos are immediately available to the right people, they can be used to assess repair needs and make decisions faster.
Jokio cites, for example, a few YH Kotien properties in Ostrobothnia that are managed by an external partner. When a repair is needed at a property, the partner can take photos of the situation using Pictue and call Jokio right away.
“It has happened several times that our partner has gone to the property, taken photos, and called me right after. I can view the photos in Pictue during the call, assess the repair needs, and place the necessary order. This speeds up the process considerably.”
Up-to-date photos are also useful in larger repair projects. YH Kodit can share photo material of the site directly with the designers and supervisors involved in the project even before the site inspection.
New photos taken with Pictue during the site inspection are immediately made available to the entire design team.
“This way, the entire design team has immediate access to all the photos taken during the site inspection,” Jokio explains.
According to Jokio, what particularly impressed them about Pictue was the tool’s simplicity and the ability to adapt it to YH Kotien’s own operating methods.
“We chose Pictue primarily because it has a lightweight structure and focuses on photos. We can build our own workflow around it exactly as we want.”
Smeds also highlights Pictue’s adaptability to various use cases as one of its strengths.
“The app’s flexibility is evident, for example, in how existing property data can be imported into the system and used as a foundation to build a solution that meets the client’s specific needs,” Smeds explains.
For YH Kode, another key part of the solution was integration with the company’s M-Files data repository. The goal was to get photos taken with Pictue directly into the same system where other property-related data is stored.
The integration between Pictue and M-Files was developed at the start of the collaboration specifically for YH Kotien’s use.
Although Pictue is primarily a tool for YH Kotien’s staff, Jokio believes its benefits will ultimately extend to residents’ daily lives as well. More comprehensive photo documentation helps provide a more accurate picture of the condition of the properties and ensures that repairs are targeted at the right places at the right time.
“Pictue has improved the quality of our documentation and our understanding of the condition of our properties. For residents, this should be most evident in the quality of their living environment. Since we have access to the photos more quickly, our processes are also faster.”
According to Jokio, adopting the new app took some getting used to at first, but Pictue has now become a natural part of the daily work of YH Kotien property managers.
“Our team has easily adopted Pictue and uses it actively. I think that shows the system hasn’t been difficult to use.”
A conversation Jokio happened to overhear just a few minutes before the interview illustrates how well the service has become established.
“One of our property managers just said, ‘Well, I don’t have Pictue right now.’ I stopped to listen to the conversation, and it turned out that he had switched phones and hadn’t yet set up Pictue on his new device.”
This offhand remark aptly illustrates just how much of an everyday tool Pictue has become at YH Kodit. According to Jokio, feedback on the tool from other staff members has also been consistent. Once you get used to using the app, photos are systematically saved, and it’s easy to compile documents from them later.
Jokio would particularly recommend Pictue to organizations where a lot of visual documentation is created and the information needs to be easily accessible to the entire work community.
“The greatest benefit of Pictue is that the images aren’t limited to just one person.”