Five startup companies were invited to take the stage to share their companies’ stories.
Kari Warren, Chief Operating Officer - Management at Kairoi Residential; and Mark Chrisman, Managing Principal at 29th Street Ventures; hosted the event that featured Marcus Higgins, Chief Operating Officer at Landing; Lily Liu, Chief Executive Officer at Piñata; Fatima Dicko, Founder and CEO at Sugar; Kerri Davis, Founder & CEO of Fortress; and Jude Chiy, Founder & CEO of Flamingo
Piñata
- Provides financial incentives to residents who do things such as pay their rent on time (in any transactional manner), comment on review sites and other good behaviors.
- Incentives include $100 in value through gift cards and rewards programs such as receiving 20 cents on gas and $30 when shopping at Costco, among other things.
- Clients can customize the incentivize based on things they want their renters to take action on.
- No integration needed because Pinata operates from its own app, and customers can brand it with their company logos.
- Helps residents improve their credit score by posting their rental payment history with the major credit bureaus.
- Provides data on your renters’ behavior.
Landing
- Partners with property management companies who can earn revenue via Landing’s furnished flexible-living apartment homes network across all major markets for renters.
- Minimum stay is 30 days and residents can then move onto whatever market they want to live next either for work or play.
- It’s in approximately 375 cities, covering 24,000 apartment homes and is 92 percent occupied.
- Residents needn’t have to deal with annoying packing, moving vans, utility changes or recurring security deposits. It takes about 5 minutes to move in to a new residence.
- There are never any deposits or application fees. Members can save up to 40% compared to the cost of other furnished housing options.
- Landing has three times the housing inventory as short-term rental providers and at about one-third of the cost.
Sugar
- It’s a resident services app that addresses many necessary apartment living functions by combining the features of the leading consumer apps and merges them with property management companies.
- A sense of community is so important for renewals. If they get to know three people who live in an apt, the chance for renewals goes way up.
- It integrates with residents’ personal calendars so they can track important dates such as when service requests are being filled or things are due.
- It tracks resident data and there’s a manager portal that displays analytics so that managers can work more efficiently.
"It's more than just a way to pay rent, it helps residents connect as friends or to help out fellow residents by doing dog-walking, etc, said Fatima Dicko, Founder and CEO at Sugar.
Fortress
- Originated through it serving as the property management system for Elmington Property Management company as it goes through “crazy growth mode.” Clients now represent 35,000 apartment homes.
- The best way to describe it is that it’s truly an operations platform – not one driven by a back-end accounting system.
- Its focus is guest cards, applications, texting and emailing prospects, centralizing work orders, and more. Walker & Dunlop invested in Fortress six months ago, saying, “this is a huge opportunity in the industry.”
- It solves clients’ biggest pain points: Training onboarding and support; transparency for all employees; and modern access to data through easy-to-use, centralized, automated functions that deliver real-time, actionable data.
- 100 percent of its users say it’s “easy”; 88 percent say they would recommend it over top brands; and 79 percent say Fortress saved them an hour or two hours per week versus big brands.
- Soon-to-be product updates to include in-system revenue management and reputation management functionality.
Flamingo
- Residents don’t want to have to deal with a dozen or more apps to live at a community.
- It’s one app for the full resident journey; whether to pay rent, reserve amenities and much more.
- So many processes at the site level today are menial and are performed manually at the site level; staff are tired of doing them every single day.
- The app is being used at more than 1,000 communities, helping those site teams have more time to drive resident engagement and provide service.
- Flamingo launched at start of pandemic at the Atlas Oakland (CA) community. Given the paradigm shift that COVID-19 created, Atlas needed one app to solve most functions during that time and now that strategy has carried to today.
- It integrates with Butterfly, Yardi, Parcel Pending and KeyMo, among other software, driving automation and self-service options.
Replays are $49 each or $399 for all of them.
They are complimentary for AIM attendees for the thirty days following AIM.
Click here for the slides.