#DoorGrowShow - Property Management Growth

Transcript

[00:00:00] I asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro:

[00:00:07] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in."

[00:00:46] It wrote this for me. It wrote this!

[00:00:49] Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust, gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

[00:01:28] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.

[00:01:51] So today's show is going to be very relevant to what's going on right now. So I don't know if you've seen what's going on right now, but what's going on right now is ChatGPT. You've probably heard of it if you're on social media. Everybody's going crazy. Why are they going crazy? And if you haven't heard about this, you should check this out. You can go to chat.openai.com. And what this is, is this is an AI tool. Like you're talking to a robot. You can type like you're chatting to a human and it will give you whatever information that you asked for back. It can write software. It can create stuff. It's pretty wild. And right now it's free. It's ridiculous. So I put in a prompt, I'm going to read this to you. I said, "can you give me the list of the top 10 ways AI like ChatGBT will impact property management in the future?" Within seconds, it spit this out:

[00:02:43] "Here are 10 potential ways that AI and chatbots like GPT could impact property management in the future:

[00:02:49] 1. Automated customer service. Chatbots can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on more complex tasks.

[00:02:59] 2. Tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to.

[00:03:07] 3. Maintenance requests. Chatbots can handle maintenance requests from tenants, triaging and routing them to the appropriate team member."

[00:03:16] This is cool stuff, right? Very cool stuff. So where was I at?

[00:03:21] " 4. Lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. Predictive maintenance is number five. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems."

[00:03:43] There's companies already doing some of this, right?

[00:03:45] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings by predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time."

[00:03:56] This is getting into maybe more commercial management or multi-family, right?

[00:04:00] " 7. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential tenants and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." I imagine the AI doesn't understand most of you want clients, so it also probably could be used for that-- not probably-- it could be, right?

[00:04:19] "8. Space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms or common areas by analyzing usage data and making recommendations for scheduling and utilization. Tenant engagement is number eight (He meant #9) Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience.

[00:04:39] 10. risk assessment. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify and mitigate potential risks, such as detecting patterns of suspicious activity or identifying areas of a building that may be prone to accidents."

[00:04:52] Now to get you interested, I asked it, "What would a good teaser for this-- if I used this list in a podcast episode to get property management business owners to listen? So here's the teaser:

[00:05:03] "Are you a property management business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve? Don't miss our latest episode where we revealed the top 10 ways AI is set to revolutionize the industry and how you can leverage it to improve your business. From automated customer service to predictive maintenance, we've got you covered. Tune in now to learn more."

[00:05:22] I didn't write that and I didn't just make it up A robot just made that up, right? Or ai. So, "What is a good intro? I then asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro. Here's the intro that I could have said at the beginning of this, right? This is all happening in reverse here, but here's intro:

[00:05:45] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in."

[00:06:24] It wrote this for me. It wrote this. So I can put in here, "The first list you gave me seems geared a bit towards multi-family or commercial property management. Could you change it for those that primarily focus? on third party property management for owners of single family homes in the residential space? Note that they want to get more owners as clients." I'll put "more property owners as clients." Let's see what it comes back with here. So now I also asked-- while it's doing that-- it's actually typing it out. Like you see it typing out. It's pretty wild-- so then I asked, um, before I did just that, I asked, "could you also create a list of the top 10 ways AI can improve or benefit small business owners or service-based businesses?"

[00:07:41] So the list has some similarities, like "1. Automated customer 2. Marketing. 3. Personalization." So AI can help personalize interactions with customers, improving the overall customer experience, which is cool. "4. Predictive analytics. AI can analyze data to help business owners make informed decisions about operations and strategies. 5. Process optimization. AI can help business owners to identify inefficiencies in their processes and suggest ways to streamline them. 6. Project management. AI can assist with tasks such as scheduling and task assignments, helping business owners stay organized and on track. 7. Risk assessment. Identifying potential risks, looking at suspicious patterns, et cetera. 8. Talent acquisition," so hiring. Now it says, "AI can assist with tasks such as resume screening and candidate matching, helping business owners find the best candidates for their open positions."

[00:08:35] Now at DoorGrow, we've already, for our clients, partnered with an AI hiring assessment platform. And so what's really cool about this, we can take our ultimate job descriptions, which we call R Docs, which is a very strategic way of doing a job description that actually gets you the right culture fit, personality fit, and skill fit for a team member. We call it the three fits, and we can feed that into the AI tool and it will then change a whole bunch of levers on the screen and tell you like, these are the attributes you likely are looking for in a candidate. And then you can send out an assessment for this, and it will give you results and grade them based on the attributes that are selected, and you can even tweak the attributes. You're like, "Well, I actually want them to be more like this instead of this," so you can pick which attributes are most relevant. It's really cool and it's been really accurate. It's how I got my awesome assistant. We used the AI assessment to get hire other people on our team as well. And I also vetted all of my team members with this. And it grades them on a scale for the role between, you know, zero to a hundred. And anyone above 50 is a good potential candidate. Most of my team are like 70% or higher for the role, which shows they're a good culture fit, good skill fit, good personality fit for the role. We've had a very good hiring process. This has really collapsed time on all the other things we used to use like Wonder Lick and DISC and Myers Briggs and human design and like all these different things.

[00:10:00] Some of them are the equivalent of looking at tea leaves, trying to figure out is this person going to be good or not, and trying to guess and predict the future. This has been really accurate, and the number one indicator according to the AI Assessment Company they said is intelligence, and it can assess people's intelligence through just chatting and completing the assessment, which is like, kind of like a chat. Pretty cool. So we're using that with clients and it's getting us great results. We've even used it on our clients, and some of our clients thought they were the operator personality type for their business and had to control the operations and based on putting them through the assessment in the operator role, they didn't do well, and it helps them see, "I'm not really the person that should be doing this thing." and then they were able to go and find somebody better, right? So, really cool. So talent acquisition for sure. We're already doing that at DoorGrow with our clients.

[00:10:56] 9. it says, "upselling and cross-selling." AI can analyze customer data to help business owners identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 10. voice and language recognition. AI can help business owners handle customer inquiries and requests through voice and language recognition technology, improving the overall customer experience. All right. So very cool stuff, right? So now I had put that question in previously it spit out the 10 things. So we'll go to that and we'll see what it's changed.

[00:11:26] So we'll go through the 10 again just for kicks. " Certainly. Here are 10 potential ways AI could benefit small business owners, who specialized in third party property management for single family homes in the residential space." Oh, so combined both lists and made it very specific. So let's see how this is different from the first two lists that I gave you.

[00:11:46] 1. automated customer service. AI can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on other tasks." Awesome. "2. tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to. 3. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential clients and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." Awesome. "4. lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. 5. predictive maintenance. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems." Magic. Right? What's better than than retroactive maintenance, right? That's typical is proactive maintenance, right?

[00:12:35] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings and predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time." So that might be the case on maybe split units or multi-family units where they are sharing, you know, a boiler or, you know, some of these kind of things. "7. space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms." So they kept that in, I don't know that's relevant to homes. 8. Tenant engagement. Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience." Cool. AI eventually could replace probably a lot of the tools for maintenance coordination and different things or become the new tool, and there are already AI appointment setting things. There's lots of AI stuff coming out. It's really, really a cool time. "9. Risk assessment." We talked about that one before. And then "10. property acquisition. AI can assist with task tasks such as property valuation and market analysis, helping property managers identify opportunities for expanding their portfolio." That's if they're an owner operator, but you can utilize maybe AI for assessing rent amounts or rent range reports or you know, these kind of things of figuring out what a property should rent for.

[00:13:54] Really cool. So this whole episode, I didn't even have to think. I just went into chat AI and asked some questions and it gave me this, which is really, really interesting and really cool. So I highly recommend you check it out. It's going to revolutionize content creation. And one of the most interesting things I heard about ai, this is from the founder of I believe of ChatGBT and OpenAI, or one of the CEOs of an AI company-- but basically he said everybody thought AI when it comes, would take all the menial low level jobs, manual labor work, stuff like that. Robots would replace and then it would gradually and eventually maybe get-- but it'd be really difficult-- to get to the creative. What we're actually seeing, he says, is the exact opposite, the reverse. Ai...

[00:14:46] I have a picture on my fireplace mantle right now of two lion's faces, and it was generated by ai. I used an AI app. I told it the colors I wanted for my living room and I said I wanted a lion and it made two faces and one looks kind of scared and one looks very bold. And I named the picture from fear to focus cuz that's kind of the two energies I saw. And I liked that. And it's really cool. So I had it printed, they shipped it out framed and everything and it's on my fireplace mantle. Really cool. And it was made by AI and it's art. It looks like a painting. You're seeing lots of people with the Lensa app right now. Go and create and have the ai-- you upload a bunch of pictures of your face from different angles, and then it will spit out art. Of paintings and pictures of you that are better than a lot of artists could ever generate. Some of them look really like, really like me, and there's a few that look not so like me. It's a little bit off, just a little bit off. It's like maybe they're related to me, you know? But it's really fascinating.

[00:15:51] So AI is actually taking those top end creative jobs like article writing and blog posts. And here, my podcast episode and can generate that. There's even tools that can mimic your voice. You can upload your voice. There's a tool, we actually use this for our podcast editing, but there's a tool called Descript, and you can actually record a bunch of audio of your voice and feed in recordings, and the AI will learn your voice. And then you can literally just type words in and it will speak it out or play the audio as if you're saying it like naturally. They've used this to like mimic Joe Rogan and mimic Steve Jobs having a conversation and neither of them really did the conversation. So pretty wild. So you can generate scripts and things like that. You can use video AI people. So there's a company called Synthesia and you can actually just upload text in that you just had, maybe ChatGPT create over at chat.openai.com. And you can say, "create a script for somebody that talks about, you know, these things" and you upload the script in or any text in, and this video person will read it.

[00:17:06] There's people creating deep fakes of different actors and different people that AI is generating and it could be anybody. So this, the future is getting crazy. So the creative stuff is going first. Eventually, maybe manual labor and some of the human, like real-time personal tasks will get taken, but it's actually going in the reverse order. So some of the creative stuff is actually being handled and taken off our plate first. Pretty wild times, right? So yeah. Could AI take over the world and is it the most dangerous thing since nuclear weapons? The answer is probably yes. Right? Elon Musk says it's the most dangerous thing for humanity, one of the most dangerous threats. And so I don't know. It'll be really interesting to see, but I do think business owners that are able to leverage AI and leverage it early on will have a competitive advantage over those that are late adopters and don't do it. And AI is a lot cheaper than people and there's a lot of really cool AI tools out there.

[00:18:11] So, maybe as we uncover some of the coolest tools, we'll be sharing those with everybody. But I think it'd be really cool to start hearing from all of you, like, are you leveraging AI in your business? And if so, how? Let us know. I'd be really curious. So feel free to comment on our videos on YouTube when this goes up on YouTube or other channels where we post this. We would love to hear what your thoughts are about the future of ai. So, all right, so that's our episode for today and I hope you have some fun playing around with chat GBT. While they have it open and in beta and you can play around with it while they have their free research preview and you'll probably see that it's locked up sometimes because they have too much usage. It's really popular right now, but people are creating some really cool stuff with it. So anyway, until next time to our mutual growth. Make sure to check us out DoorGrow.com. And if you want to join our free online community in our Facebook group, go to DoorGrowclub.com, answer the questions, and join us and you'll get some free gifts. If you give us your email, we'll send you some free gifts like the Fee Bible and some other cool stuff, and you'll even be able to set up a call with our team and we can help you figure out how to grow.

[00:19:25] And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

[00:19:28] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!

[00:19:56] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

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DGS 195: Using Technology To Increase The Operating Margin In Your Property Management Business With Lindsay Liu 0

Jan 17, 2023

Too many property management entrepreneurs fail to realize the potential for technology to increase the operating margin in their property management business.

Property management growth expert Jason Hull invites Lindsay Liu to discuss how property management entrepreneurs can utilize technology to make their lives (and the lives of their tenants and owners) WAY easier by automating administrative tasks.

You’ll Learn…

[01:39] Meet Linday Liu, the Technology and Real Estate Investing Expert

[03:42] The Ultimate Software for Multi-Family and Governance

[08:13] Diving into the Features of Super

[17:19] The Biggest Challenge in Property Management: TIME

[22:00] How is Super different from Other Software?

Tweetables

“When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging… time is your biggest premium.”

“And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things.”

“It's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things.”

“The amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lindsay: When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective.

[00:00:29] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to The DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

[00:01:07] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.

[00:01:31] All right, today my guest is Lindsay Liu. Lindsay, welcome to The DoorGrow Show.

[00:01:37] Lindsay: Thanks so much for having me today.

[00:01:39] Jason: So give us a little bit of background on yourself for those that don't know Lindsay, which is me as well. So tell us a little bit about you and then maybe how you sort of got connected to your business, and then we'll go into your business.

[00:01:52] Lindsay: Great. Yeah, I can go back in time a bit. So professionally, I've been in the technology space for almost 15 years now. So building, launching digital products on behalf of and with companies. So I've done that for folks like Google, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, the MBA. And then I've also been part of growing the businesses that I've been on that side of, right, really thinking about finding product market fit, creating value propositions that make sense through the lens of technology. And then more recently ventured into the startup world. So I was at a FinTech startup for a bit, actually launched a whole new stock exchange and a software platform around that. And then it finally felt like time to build my own thing out. And the reason that I got into the property management space is that kind of alongside that professional track of work. I'd also been investing in real estate and properties. So I have everything from short-term rentals-- so I've been kind of Airbnb, vacation homes-- to long-term leases and tenants to having done some flips over time. And the common thread with that for me was really just that when you are dealing with the maintenance, when you are dealing with an investment and you're really looking to make that place a home. And a home that's going to grow in value over time. There was just a lot left to be desired in the technology space. And so I thought, why not bring these two passions together? Right? My expertise in technology, alongside my passion in real estate, and start to solve some problems for the space.

[00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. And being passionate about real estate is one thing, but also being super technologically savvy and into technology is a whole different thing. And so that's cool that you're able to merge these two things together and why don't you tell everybody what you came up with?

[00:03:42] Lindsay: Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of Super. Super is a software platform really geared for property management and what we're building is for the multi-family residential space.

[00:03:54] Jason: Okay.

[00:03:54] Lindsay: So we're really looking to build tools that help with efficiency, productivity, streamlining communication, and transparency across all of the different players that exist in the ecosystem of maintaining a healthy building. So we have tools for property managers and their management teams. We have tools for sponsors and developers as well. And obviously for board members, owners, and residents of those buildings as well.

[00:04:19] Jason: Got it. So what makes this particular to multifamily instead of other niches in property management?

[00:04:27] Lindsay: Yeah, I think, you know, in my experience anyway, multifamily is a really unique situation, right? You have a group of people that are paying in for the shared maintenance and so things like repairing a roof, that decision becomes really difficult and more complicated when you're dealing with 50 or a hundred people that are part of making that decision and funding that. And so the governance and the amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up versus single family. And so we thought we would start with that pain point first. We definitely have big ambitions to continue to grow to support other types of real estate. But the multi-family space felt really like the place where we could solve some immediate pain points for folks.

[00:05:13] Jason: Got it. So when you talk about governance, this manages a little bit of the association sort of situation as well.

[00:05:20] Lindsay: Exactly. Yep. So homeowners associations, condos, co-ops, really thinking about the types of tools that are needed to help accelerate decision making and help gain alignment as. Okay, cool. Random questions then. Would this work for HOAs that are not multifamily? Absolutely. We have built the tool with that in mind, knowing that we would need to expand into that. In the case of, you know, for instance, homeowners associations, I think that the level of types of challenges really depends on that community and how healthy it is on its own, right? So the number of shared amenities that you might have, the amount that you're paying in for that shared maintenance and for your common charges. And so, you know, I think if it's just you're paying in for lawn maintenance, that's a different type of responsibility set than if you have, let's say a pool with you know, many common areas that need to be maintained for that homeowner's association as well.

[00:06:17] Jason: Now, is this a tool that a property management company that already has some sort of property management software, they have rent manager or they have Resonant or you know, some sort, is this something that they would use in conjunction or is this replacing that?

[00:06:33] Lindsay: I think we've really intentionally built the product to play very well and to play nice and be complimentary to whatever other suite. I think I deeply recognize that each management company already is going to have its own tech stack, right? Whether that's as simple as: we use email and we have a phone service and we use some out-of-the-box tools like, you know, maybe Slack or Trello or Basecamps, something like that. All the way to: we're using Yardi or we're using, you know, a number of other different types of software. I think our perspective on that is one of the challenges for management teams is how siloed a lot of these different solutions are, and the ability to really pull some of that data together and have that play nicely is pretty powerful on its own.

[00:07:17] Jason: Yeah, I think integrations are going to be a big deal here in the future for property management. I feel like that's a space that's kind of lagged and there's a lot of companies that will integrate with vendors' property management software. But the challenge is trying to get the entire tech stack integrated can be a mess.

[00:07:33] Lindsay: And I think that's exactly where I stand is from what we're trying to build the reason I've been pretty specific around that group that we're building for today, right? We're an early stage startup, is it's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things as well. Right? So we really want to figure out what is the core that we're solving for? What are the biggest pain points that we should be building against, and be the experts in that. And then where we aren't, we want to make sure that we are playing nicely with the people that are the experts in that field.

[00:08:03] Jason: I agree. So tell us what Super does. Tell us about it. Tell us about the features...

[00:08:09] Lindsay: mm-hmm.

[00:08:09] Jason: ...and how you can use it and what problems does this solve?

[00:08:12] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. So at the core, I would say first thing is to really think about us from the lens of a productivity tool, right? So it's software that is supposed to help you save time, save money, and be more efficient. So from a property manager perspective, really this is about increasing your operational efficiency and therefore your operating margin, right? You'll be able to do more things in less time. And so to enable that, we built what we call like an operating core for sets of features and functionality that allow for that. So one of the main things that we're solving for right now is communication. And I think that is the piece that again, and again and again keeps coming up. When you talk to management teams and the residents it's a pain point on both sides, right? Where maybe a request is coming in and the resident is wondering "what happened with that? What is the status of it? Did it ever get done?" And then on the other end, the management team is saying, "I'm so busy getting the thing done. I just forgot to update you on that." Right? And so there's a lot of this unnecessary friction that is happening that we think is a great opportunity for technology to automate.

[00:09:19] And the other thing that we're doing quite differently is we believe that consumers today are quite tired of having to download another app or to learn a whole new experience in order to use something. And what we've realized is we should remove all of that friction and just use the tools that people like to use today and that frankly do work for that baseline communication. So people like to email, and they like to text. So we've built our entire platform around enabling communication around email and text. And what happens is our system is going to parse all of that information and give the managers a really nice dashboard that says "We recognize who this person is, they emailed in, and we're going to make that task automatically for you." So we're really kind of short-cutting some of those steps between if someone emails you today, you have to go look it up. Right? Which property they're in, who they're with, their history, and then you have to go and create that ticket. We do all of that automatically.

[00:10:11] Jason: Got it. So maybe to showcase this audibly, why don't you walk us through an example scenario involving all the parties and how it's facilitating the communication.

[00:10:22] Lindsay: Sure. Let's take a really common one. Someone's got a leak, right? And they think it's the most urgent thing in the world, right? So what they would do if they are using Super, is the resident would either email or text the dedicated phone number that property has. So let's say, you know, I don't know, 1 23 HOA , right? Is going to email and say, "I have a leak in my unit." They don't even have to say, "I'm in unit one A or whatever." We recognize who that user is and we're automatically going to create the task in Super. For the resident, what's going to happen is because they emailed it in, we will automatically send them the confirmation, acknowledging receipt as well, and say, "Hey, we got this," and it will automatically be assigned to the property manager that is responsible for that. That property manager, right, will then get notified that they have a new task that's been assigned to them and they can go in and they can say, "okay, maybe I need to reassign this to the Super that's on staff, right, to go and take a look at this. Or maybe I need to bring in an external vendor, right? I maybe I need the plumbing company to come by and see if this is happening from something that we knew was happening with the toilet upstairs, above that unit," right?

[00:11:29] So they can then bring in the appropriate parties and liaise with all of them within the platform. They can also update the resident within there. So they could just write back and kind of say, "Hey, we're on this. Don't worry, I'm going to send somebody out right now." And that resident's going to get an immediate paper trail of all of that communication. As soon as this issue is resolved, if the management team marks it as done, the resident's going to get feedback saying, this task has been marked as complete. So we're really closing those feedback loops, making sure that that communication, right, any of those gaps where we can automate with technology, we're using technology to do that. So it's just going to save you those minutes every single day on those repetitive types of emails and communication that have to be made so that you can just move on to doing something else with your day.

[00:12:14] Jason: Okay, now what you described is like a really cool maintenance coordination tool. Right? So it's helping to coordinate maintenance. Does Super go beyond maintenance coordination, or is that--

[00:12:25] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely, and this is where things start to get really exciting, right? So think about in that homeowner's association example, you have a board, they have to run regular board meetings. They have the annual owners meeting. We have templates that allow them to support that governance. So think about a task. There's a certain type of task, right? That is just about board meetings and owners meetings. And so what we'll do is we'll create that schedule for them. We'll set a preset agenda. They can update that at any time. They can add all of the board members to it. And then once those minutes are in there, they use that right to log the discussion that they had and next steps. That is saved, and you don't even have to go and create a separate minutes document. It's already there for you to go and look at over time.

[00:13:07] For board members, we also have things like quick polling. So if you need to make a decision on something. I don't know about you, but the times that I've been on boards you're, you know, making a decision on an email thread that's already 70 emails deep, and by the time someone says, "Hey, can you all decide on this?" someone chimes in with something else, and suddenly you're talking better than a topic, and three weeks later, no decision has been made. So we're really trying to make everything very actionable and it's just, you know, it's the fact that if email is the most prevalent tool you're using, it's just not the right tool for creating actionable conversations, right? And so we're trying to build that tooling into a platform that is purpose-built for property management. We also have tools around, obviously all of your file management documentation and storage. That's I think, another challenge with email is you have turnover, you have, you know, for instance, board members that leave and all of that historical information today goes with them.

[00:14:00] I'm still getting emails from boards that I was on years ago being like, "Hey, do you remember that vendor that we used for that thing? Do you happen to have that contract somewhere? You can look for it." That should never be something that happens with good governance of a building, right? So we centralize and store all of that information on behalf of the buildings. We help them keep their contact directories really nice and clean and updated. And then we have a whole finances component as well where we help them visualize these really simple real-time dashboards for what's going on with the association's health, how much are they taking in, how much are they spending every single month? You can kind of look at that throughout the year, dive into transactions, and then the next thing we'll be rolling out is the ability to accept and receive those monthly payments as well.

[00:14:45] Jason: Okay. Very cool. All right, so the two, it sounds like so far, I don't know if there's anything else, but the two big components of this are maintenance, coordination, and then the HOA governance and board meetings and documentation, storage and dashboards.

[00:15:02] Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, if I think about the things that I wish I had as a board member in my previous-- and I've been on the board of three condos at this point, so I'm just pulling from those personal experiences. I wish that I had a way-- what was that?

[00:15:14] Jason: You're a brave person or a glutton for punishment. I don't know. There's a--

[00:15:18] Lindsay: I know

[00:15:19] Jason: --individual that chooses be on a board of an association.

[00:15:22] Lindsay: Well, you know, it's funny because the first time I joined, I remember a friend of mine being like, he was on the board of his co-op. He was like, "don't do it. Just don't do it. Like you're never going to have a life when you go home." And I was like, "I just feel like I'm really able to solve problems and I'm a really proactive person." then I got on and now I'm that person that tells people, I'm like, "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Like, good luck. Good luck to you," so when I think about the thing that I really wish that I had, right, it was that communication piece. I wanted more transparency and visibility into what the property manager was doing, the decisions that were being made, how things were going overall. I wanted that into our building's finances as well, right? How are we doing as far as our targets for what we wanted to be spending from an operating perspective versus how we are tracking? Do we need to think about doing things like raising the fees? Do we need to do things like leverage a special assessment, right? That type of planning. I really wish we had more visibility and transparency into that. Absolutely wish that we just had better governance around the documents, the history of the building, decisions that have been made previously, and tools to help us just operate in a healthier way as well. So we've really built around those cornerstones of what we think are the, kind of the building blocks, the foundation of what a healthy building.

[00:16:36] Jason: Okay. Very cool. This sounds really great. So if people have a property management business and they're managing a large building, a multi-family building, and they're dealing with some of this drama, this would be a great tool for them to systematize things, bring the communication together, deal with some of the maintenance coordination, approvals communication transparency, and then also making sure that the meeting stuff is all held in one place. And I would imagine if property managers are implementing this, then this probably is a really great selling point for these property managers that are doing this work that they have this repository that's been built up with the association's help.

[00:17:19] Lindsay: Absolutely. I think. When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, and I'm sure you have a point of view on this as well it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? The kind of complex logic, the decisioning that needs to go into making sure that this group of people are happy and functioning. That's like totally something that you need a person to be able to manage. And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective, right? So where can we help streamline that? And I think that's a value proposition that resonates time and time again. If we say, I can save you minutes every single day on these 10 types of tasks, right? That ladders up to hours at the end of a week that you are saving and on top of that, your residents feel happier, you're going to have more stickiness and retention. These are things that will help the bottom line of a business.

[00:18:29] Jason: Now, I imagine when it comes to associations utilizing a software like this, rather than the property manager, so the property manager would just build this into their fee structure, I would imagine it's part of their services. They can say, "we have this cool tool and system." and they have an advantage because otherwise the association board members, there's always going to be the negative person that's going to try and like say, "Hey, we don't want to spend all this money on this technology or this software. Somebody can do this and we can figure it out ourselves." And how do you deal with that?

[00:19:03] Lindsay: Yeah. You know what's interesting is even though we don't specifically target the individual board members in HOAs, we get a lot of inbound from them.

[00:19:12] Jason: Yeah.

[00:19:12] Lindsay: People reaching out saying, "I really wish there was a better way. And so if anything, that gives me signal that the residents and the board members are looking for tools. They're looking for a better way to do things. And I think this is, when I think about technology in general and what's happening even in the enterprise space, we've been talking about this consumerization of IT, right? If I can get a Task Rabbit to come and fix a thing for me within 20 minutes and I can know every step of the way, and the payment's just settled, why can't I have that in every other aspect of my life? Why does that have to be so difficult when it comes to getting a plumbing repair done in my apartment? Right? That's the frame of reference that the resident is using is, well, I can get a card just to my door in five minutes with Uber. Like, why is this so difficult? I think more and more we're going to see that is the emerging expectation of residents. They're going to have these high expectations. They're going to expect things to just kind of feel like magic. And so the technology is a great differentiator, if anything, for these property management companies who say, "yeah we're with you on that, and we've already built that into our workflows."

[00:20:16] Jason: Yeah. Got it. Cool. So I see on your website you have pricing for associations and for vendors, but really it sounds like you're just targeting people that are managing their own building. And that would be either they own the building and they are the property manager, they're an owner operator or people that are doing third party management. Is that accurate?

[00:20:37] Lindsay: Yeah, that's right, and I think, you know, we're an interesting tool for those that are more on the self-managed side of things, right? So if you're kind of on that cusp of I need some help, we don't take in enough dues to be able to support hiring a property manager. The software is a great solution for that, right? Where it can come in, it can help you take care of, again, a lot of that administrative, operational stuff give you the peace of mind that we've got your back on the main things that you have to get done. And we'll be a fraction of the price of a management company. The audience that we're really focused on building and kind of finding mutual success with, I think is the property management companies though, because at the end of the day, they are the ones that are responsible for just, you know, some of the companies that we work with and talk to, you know, thousands of units and thousands of doors, right? Where that isn't something that we can help find just even greater scale of efficiency with them. And that's great for our business as well, right? To be dealing with one core customer that's highly motivated to pull this into their business and to find the results of it.

[00:21:40] Jason: Yeah. So even you would rather deal with one company instead of death by committee.

[00:21:46] Lindsay: Learning from the past. We're growing and evolving here.

[00:21:49] Jason: Okay. Cool. Any other major questions that people might or usually ask about this software, about your technology that you want to make them aware of here on the podcast?

[00:22:00] Lindsay: Sure. I think one thing that we hear quite a bit is: "how is this different from..." right? because there are other tools out there. I think one of the things that I would say is we're building for 2020 to 2023 even. Right? So we're really trying to bring best in class technology and engineering practices, thinking deeply about things like security, right? Like you've got information about where people live, about their roles in the building, about if they have kids and right all of their history here. That is really, really important actually, that you have a team that is thinking about the best practices for this modern age, where you've just got more and more kind of threats from a cybersecurity and digital perspective. So I would say that's kind of just one thing is just building best in class. Building from the ground up. And I think what we're also doing is we're really learning from all of those past experiences. We're learning from what has worked and we're also learning from what hasn't worked. We're trying to take a very user-centric approach there. And so even with our customers right now, I would say we are always co-creating. They have space to come and tell us what do they want in the roadmap? We feed that back to them. We kind of say, "here's the things we're thinking about," and we are shipping new things every single week. And that's like a really exciting time for us to be in where every single week there's something new to kind of go to a customer and say, "Hey, we now have this. We now have this." And it's a very rich and exciting roadmap ahead. So I think, you know, it's only going to get more exciting as we get into the next year and the beyond.

[00:23:25] Jason: Very cool. So some people might look at the pricing that might go, "you know, I don't know if we can afford this." How do you help people justify the cost?

[00:23:34] Lindsay: Yep. There's a few ways, right? So one of the key offerings that we have for New York City buildings specifically, and that's where I'm based and half of our team is based out here, is there's a lot of compliance work that needs to be done. So inspections, filings, just, you know, disclosures that need to be sent. And I just think there's a level of need to stay on top of that in New York City that is just even higher than other places. Even especially, you know, there's new laws rolling up for energy efficiency standards, right? New regulation that really adds a lot of extra layers of complexity. So one of the things that we have done is we've automated those compliance workflows. So we actually can look backwards sometimes, see when you last did a certain inspection and give you a reminder automatically for the next time it's due. So that value prop is really simple. The cost of an average violation, we're probably going to be less than that. So if we can save you that money and that time and that headache dealing with it then that's a really clear one.

[00:24:29] For the property managers, I think it really does come down to we're saving you time. I talked to a boutique management company. This week and the owner operator was like, you know, "minimum wage is going up and with inflation and what's happening in the economy right now, I don't know that I can justify to my customers like they're not going to accept a rate increase, but my costs are going up, right?" I think that's a very real thing right now. And so for these teams to be able to operate with the quality of service they want to continue to maintain and to be able to do so in an environment economically where there's some constriction, there's a lot of sensitivity I think from the residents around price, right? Even on the rental side, just the cost of rent has skyrocketed. And there's just a lot of different factors there. If we can provide you with the way to be able to scale the number of customers that you can take on without having to increase headcount, that's a huge value add for your business. And so those are the types of conversations that I'm really excited to be having with management teams where there's a very clear value exchange of the ability for us to help them build their business and to be there alongside them for that.

[00:25:35] Jason: Cool. So it's fair to say if somebody has a multi-unit building, they probably should talk to you guys.

[00:25:42] Lindsay: Absolutely. You said it here, so thank you for that.

[00:25:46] Jason: It sounds like you're doing some really innovative things, collapsing time, helping to systemize things. It sounds like it fills kind of a unique sort of gap in the marketplace between property management software and you know, what multi-unit buildings and associations over those buildings need and require. You know, the big challenge with associations though is the pet drama, like pets poop in places. Like that's the real stuff right there. That and packages, right? Those are--

[00:26:15] Lindsay: the packages... huge. Especially this time of year. That's something that I tell you, you know, I'm so glad we have such an amazing technology team. We want to figure something out there, because right now the only package scanning apps work. If you have full-time staff, right? If you have a porter there to actually scan the thing for you. So there's something interesting there that we're definitely trying to figure out. So maybe we can talk about that in the future.

[00:26:36] Jason: That'll be a future episode.

[00:26:38] Lindsay: Exactly.

[00:26:39] Jason: You've got the pet poop and the packages.

[00:26:42] Lindsay: I first heard about the doggy testing kits like years ago. it was a thing in one of the condos I was on the board of, I was like, whose pet is on the stairwell--

[00:26:52] a database of dog dna, pet DNA inside of your software

[00:26:57] See? That feels like priority number one. We'll get on that.

[00:27:02] Jason: That's funny. Cool. Well I appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for coming and sharing this technology with the DoorGrowShow audience. And I wish you success.

[00:27:13] Lindsay: Thank you so much and thanks for having me on. Our website is hiresuper.com. H I R E S U P E R.

[00:27:22] Jason: Perfect. Cool. Check out hiresuper.com if you have a multi-family building. All right, thank you, Lindsay.

[00:27:29] Lindsay: Awesome. Thanks, Jason.

[00:27:30] Jason: All right, so everybody go check out Hire Super. And we appreciate you listening to our show. Please like and subscribe if you're following us on some channels that'll allow you to do that. And please leave us some positive feedback and review. We'd appreciate it greatly. And check us out at DoorGrow. If you're wanting to grow your business, we highly recommend if you are in the single family residential space, check out our DoorGrow Code. Talk to our team and find out about the DoorGrow Code, which is the journey for an entrepreneur going from zero to a thousand plus doors. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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