beyond-property-management

—- Beyond Property Management —-

So I have a lot of experience working in property management. I worked on a few separate products for On-Site.com from 2013 to 2018. So for five years. One of the teams that I worked on was the integration team, and our work had a lot to do with making sure that we could incorporate different parts of their workflow between apps. So they might want to use a certain feature from On-Site for one thing, and a certain feature from Yardi for another thing.

When I was working at On-Site, one of the first things I noticed and was told during my orientation was that On-Site happen to be one of the most user-friendly pieces of property management software on the market. That surprised me a little bit because while On-Site was fairly nice in terms of the UI, there was a lot of craft and it wasn't particularly world-class when it came to design or usability. But I quickly learned that the claim On-Site made was true after working with some of the other pieces of software that I was tasked to integrate with. For example, Yardie, real page, MRI. All of the those pieces of software were an absolute nightmare to use. And it was mainly because they were so outdated. These applications were so difficult for myself and my project manager to figure out and use while we were trying to build her integrations with them because. And that's not good, because Having been a designer and A programmer for several years, if I can't figure you're about, what are the chances that a non-technical property manager will be able to figure your app out?

In the beginning it it felt really clear to me that it was the software that was the problem for a lot of these folks. I thought that if they had a better user interface and better features that made sense to their workflow that they could probably unlock a lot of productivity and potential using over the software that they were using today. I hadn't really had a chance to learn about their processes but it was my initial intuition to assume such. The real issues didn't actually show until I started to work on the first large in a Gratian for On-Site for one of our property management customers and everything went smoothly in the beginning while I spoke to the regional manager. We spoke with them and got a lay of the land on their use case and their process or how they make use of all the different features of the software I felt like I had a good understanding of their workflow and we started to design the behavior of the integration with the MRI software that they were using. After creating an initial integration we met with them a second time and that's when the problems became more obvious. The call started off OK, and the regional manager brought in there one of their sales agents to look at the integration that I had worked so hard on for several months. I excitedly showed them a demo of the integration that one that was custom tailor to their process and everything seem to be going well so far. After the demo, the sales agent then said "who told youSpace that this is what our process look like, this isn't how I do my process." And the regional manager, said "well that's what we do in our office. " The sales agent responded no way that's not how I do it. And then said that her, and some of the other members of the team did it a certain way. And then also mentioned that there was another couple of people at the company who didn't yet a third different way. As I was listening to this and it also became abundantly clear to me that it was really an issue with the people working there, They are understanding of the technology and their coping mechanisms that they constructed around themselves in their daily work acts that were actually the cause for an issue.

There was another time when On-Site had launched its cloud storage feature, that allowed leases to be permanently stored on the cloud. One of On-Site's main selling points or their use case I should say was that there were enough lease is signed by leasing agents to be able to stock papers to the moon. And filing cabinet space was also very expensive and eventually every leasing agent ends up having to deal with that. So On-Site was very excited about this feature. We had some property management companies purchased the future and would come to find that the filing cabinets didn't necessarily go away in some cases. We still had leasing agents who would print documents. So we would ask them "why are you still printing leases when we have your manager purchased our new cloud storage software feature? "And the leasing agent just responded that they like the feel of the paper and it felt more official to have the customer sign the document at the desk and they felt better about putting the file in the filing cabinet. It made them feel better so they decided that they didn't wanna do it.

I was later assigned to tackle a large project to help determine how to price apartments and this type of weird biased preferences and processes started to rear their ugly head again when we would try to work out in appropriate pricing user interface workflow for our property management staff that worked in the back end. We would have conversations and do user exploration with them and their processes were always wildly different and based on Having the insistent and in efficient workflow's that were inferior, and they would know that they were inferior but for some reason they "just liked it that way "or "that's how they've always done it "and this ended up becoming a huge barrier and usability issue for the pricing software as well.  Your average property manager charges up to $30 to manage a unit per unit, and of that so he's roughly 205 dollars per view property management software. Across the entire industry this results in billions of dollars spent on property management dad isn't done particularly well. I came to realize in this moment that the main issue war were the property managers themselves. The property managers are the reason that innovation will never truly take holes in the property management space for quite a long time. The market needs a disruption, and it can't be done simply by giving property managers new software. Giving a property manager a new piece of software would be like giving a taxi driver a new piece of software to increase the efficiency of the taxi industry. It just simply won't happen. The reason is that the existing taxi dispatch companies and the system they've set up are already technologically and confident and set in their ways. The only way to make an impact in the property management sector is to disrupt and cannibalize it from the outside. Much like the way you Uber enter the taxi market and disrupted it. The property managers need to be addressed head-to-head. They are the ones who ultimately control the process of property management industry and they are the ones who ultimately end up driving is inefficiencies. We must create a new form of property management company, one dad not only solve the software issue, but also solve the people issue. Much like Uber, once this theoretical property management company were to come into existence, it would disrupt the property management market altogether and take on existing property managers head to head.

Our goal would be to provide a complete enter and solution for property management. So that it is not a question of software choice but a question of property manager choice. This new company would reform How property managers work because it is self is a property manager. This company will be called beyond.

So how we do this? The first part is to acknowledge dad the human aspect of property management cannot be automated away or solved with technology it's will forever be there due to the intrinsic nature of needing to make repairs and do you to the fact that you are dealing with the physical space in reality they must be quality check. So first, let's tackle repairs obviously this is something that can have automated dispatch like service titan. So a tenant could sign into the app and Fill out a maintenance request. member from beyond who is capable of interpreting maintenance request and determining where it should be dispatched will overlook the request and dispatch it to the appropriate technicians. For example, a person might say that their air-conditioning isn't working right and that could be due to a lot of reasons that might require a different type of service call for the air conditioner. But they could take some pictures of the affected area and write a description and one of our staff members who is better Train to understand and interpret maintenance request can then forward the correct possible repairs to the air-conditioning company. We could later what time to use machine learning to remove the staff routing elements from the equation.

Next, let's talk about flipping a unit. When a tenant is going to move out. Actually, before we talk about that we need to talk about getting a unit to be available and rentable prior to The tenants move out date. So before the lease is about to expire the best way to reduce revenue loss is to make sure that you have a tenant ready to move in as soon as the current tenant moves out. In order to do that we would need a system to efficiently in sure that the unit is able to be shown or it is rented. Again, this is the reason that you cannot simply Soffe property management efficiency issues with software alone. The nature of new tenants almost always needing to see the unit prior means that you must have some type of physical coordination in order to facilitate this. One way to do that is to provide one time use code for tenants to tour the unit. But we need to make sure that the tenant does not go into the unit alone if the unit is occupied by the old tenant. Because then the old tenant might end up doing things to sabotage the showing. One thing we could do is have allow somebody to schedule A time. However the issue is that we do not know what time the old tenant is available. One way that we could do this is by alerting the existing tenants that the unit must be ready to show me, and for them to provide a showing scheduled. They could also be charged a fee if they do not set their schedule or make the unit available to be shown for certain times. I benefit of using a fee is that it can be done in a human less fashion, without any staff having to call them with courtesy calls to set up their scheduling times. Because by charging them a fee we both, incentivize them to actually set an open schedule, and also recoup any potential lost revenues from the tenants not making the unit available. It is a double benefit. But in the event that that does not work, we can also do courtesy calls with the tenant to have a discussion with them. The second thing we can do, is to provide a discount on rent if the unit has its lease signed when it is sight unseen. That way, we can illuminate any hassle with the fact that the unit may not be available, and that the unit may have damage that might make it unattractive to a new possible tenant. That damage might be fixed before the new tenant moves in, but while they are looking at the unit with its current tenant in it. The damage might end up being there.

Speaking of damage, we will also need to repair any damage before the new tenant moves in. This means that we will probably need at least a week gap between a tenant moving out of the unit and allowing a new tenant to move into the unit. We will want to try to get this gap down to be a smart as possible, and it is entirely possible to get the cab to come down to less than 24 hours.

Dealing with potential damage aside. Once we have the tenants main scheduling times we can then allow other tenants to book a tour of the unit. We would then need our staff to be aware of those booking times and send our staff out to the units at those times. We could also say I have a reminders automated reminders to both the tenant and the staff.

Next, after the tenant moves out, the unit is flipped. In terms of turnaround procedures, what we need to do is clean the unit, make any necessary updates, and repair any damages to the unit. We can use the service titan like system to fix any damages, although having our own maintenance staff would ultimately lend it self to being cheaper and allow us to double dip into the profit model of our business. Because we would be able to not only charge a property management fee with a profit but also charge a maintenance fee along with a profit. It would be ideal to have a plumber, and a handyman on staff. These would be some of our better paid, More tactical logistics operations. It would be cool to have our staff decked out with all of the tools they would need as though they were a tactical team. I would imagine that you would only have to keep one on staff and they could make the service rounds around all of the units or houses that are being managed. We should have an image of a tactical garb dressed man in a tactical truck, kind of like the more tactical looking Amazon prime delivery trucks.

What's the unit has been Turnt then the new tenant must move in. We can completely automated the move-in process. We should also automate checking in with the tenant and asking them to perform an inspection of the unit to make sure that everything looks like it is up to par. We do not need to provide any further assistance to the tenants.

Actually, one aspect that is missing is key handoff. It would be ideal to have the entire system be automated with electronica locks and codes. For example, we could issue Bluetooth August unlock instructions, and then be physical back up keys could come in the mail a couple of days later. Actually, now that I think of it, when the unit is being turned. We could mount an electronica lock box that opens with Bluetooth or code to the left or right of the physical door, or on the door. The lockbox would be empty most of the time and would sit idle. But in a couple of small instances the lockbox would actually have the keys and allow for key handoff to take place. This, however does not necessarily assist with getting inside of a building where entry to the building is blocked. Most building entries allow the unit to be unlocked via phone call. We can automate our systems to have a relay service that can unlock doors by administrators and also have a pass-through that can be configured to whatever lock the user wants it to be configured to. The second issue is buildings that require key fobs. Some buildings require a key fob in order to Press the elevator button. However,. Oh! I got it. We would only need to have two copies of the keys and/or key fobs. When the old tenant moves out we have them mail the keys back to us. When the new tenant moves in, we have the keys mailed to them prior to their move-in. They can also stop at the office in order to pick up the keys. In the worst-case scenario, they can have the keys delivered Buy one of our staff members.

 once the tenant is in the unit, everything mainly becomes a non-issue. One of the other things our property management company does, is finds out how to command the highest rents. Most property management companies are focused on gaining tenants that are going to stay for a long time in order to reduce their operating costs of flipping the unit. We will be incentivized to maximize the return on investment. So we will use machine learning algorithms to find out what aspects of the unit allow it to command a higher ranks. Then we will make suggestions to the owner and get their permission to make those changes.

Another aspect of property management is the escrow account. This will be a portal that will allow the owner to draw down or freeze any funds, or the state of the account currently. This is also where we will make suggestions to make modifications up to the unit and provide our estimated higher rates of returns for the rent based on those changes that are made. For example, our machine learning algorithm might be able to determine with a 99% accuracy that updating the toilet in the bathroom could use 10% higher rents. Or that changing the paint colors or furniture in the unit could yield higher rents.

Our staff will then be able to make other modifications.

The final aspect of the process is the online leasing mechanism. We will have our staff be able to identify good renters and use machine learning algorithm to identify which renters are better in which renters are worse. We could have software to automatically list the unit on listing websites. We could also provide 3-D tours of the unit and allow the tenants to schedule a tour of the unit. If the tenant Ops to want to apply for a lease site unseen we will provide a discount on the rent once the unit decide that they want to live there, they can apply online and we will run the criminal and background. We will also have them upload their drivers license and another aspect of this that could be much better is that we could force the tenant to provide a debit card to hold their security deposit on and to use to expense anything in the future.

In terms of the business model we could undercut or be very competitive against other firms. They typically charge up to $20 to $40 per unit for apartment pricing. Single family long term properties typically charge 10% the rent. 1 months rent to to get a tenant. And a 20% charge every 12 months. All funds are handled in a shared escrow account. That escrow account is managed by the property management company.