In the Multifamily Industry we are entrusted with one of the most important assets in many people’s lives, their home. As housing providers we have a tremendous responsibility to ensure that the homes we provide are safe, clean, and well maintained. As easy as that sounds, if you think it’s hard to get your kids to keep their bedroom tidy, imagine the undertaking of keeping a 100+ unit community humming. The staff, the residents, the competing pressures of market conditions, investors and regulators, plus all the innumerable, unpredictable daily events that happen at every community (Flooding in the lobby! A feral cat just had kittens in the maintenance shed! All of the managers in an entire region are out on maternity leave at the same time!) can result in stress, chaos and confusion.
It’s exhausting to think about all the minutiae that can, and does, occur at every property, let alone how much and what exact information should be pushed from the staff to their regional managers at the management company, and then to ownership and their asset managers, and finally to the investors. Connectivity of data sources can help surface issues, but does not necessarily tell a whole and complete picture. Rather the use of technology assists in removing the noise created by repetitive tasks that still need to be done, allowing us to focus on the things that are important and need to be shared to improve the housing experience for everyone.
As a startup founder and serial entrepreneur, I can best describe myself as a generalist. In the world of startups, founders wear many hats; sometimes we wear all the hats! Sina Shekou, the founder and CEO of Aptly, shared in his keynote presentation that when hiring remote teams, it is critical to provide a narrow job focus and detailed documentation. Centralization requires discipline and clarity, which can be hard in the ever changing world of startups. But when hiring remote workers, it is critical to provide detailed, well defined workflows to set people up for success. By providing narrow tasks to each role, the team member can focus and master the steps before adding more.
Sina’s platform provides automation, another necessary tenant of centralization. Not every operator has the size and scale to go all-in with centralization. Still, there are many steps in the resident life cycle that can be centralized (accounting? marketing?) and automated (lease signing? renewals?). Such practices warrant serious consideration for operators of any size.
Lots of discussions were had about the issues related to marketing attribution. It continues to be a problem as there is often no way to nail down the originating source of a marketing lead online, and getting teams to manually code the attribution does not lend to high levels of accuracy.
As the landscape of marketing continues to evolve, professionals in the multifamily property industry have a unique opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technologies like big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform their marketing strategies. By harnessing the power of these innovative tools, property owners and managers can gain invaluable insights, enhance their targeting capabilities, and ultimately optimize their marketing efforts. So what does that have to do with driving more human connection?? The group posited that layering in more and more technology touchpoints will result in an inert craving for human connection, and perhaps result in a drive for more people to pick up the phone and reach out on a personal level. Whether that is the unintended consequence of layering in more AI to our workday routines remains to be seen, but it would still be nice to get a call every now and then.
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