AIM 2024: Harmonizing Your Tech Stack & Resident Experience

Harmonizing Your Tech Stack & Resident Experience

It’s key for all levels of onsite employees to be on board in the process from the start.

If you don’t realize that your tech stacks have issues, you probably aren’t looking close enough.

Those “words for wisdom” opened a session that included Dustin Lacey, Mark-Taylor, Inc., VP of Marketing & Technology; Paul Edgeman, Thrive Communities, SVP of Marketing; and Ben Steward, Revyse, Co-Founder and CRO, moderated by Trevor Park, Digible, VP of Marketing.

Creating the ideal tech stack for apartment operations should be a collective effort by those throughout the company, Lacey said.

“Bring them along from the start,” he said. “Let them know that the company wants to hear your voice. After all, those employees are the ones who will be using the technology.”

Before the pandemic, apartment companies didn’t truly have the influence of a chief innovation officer (CIO), Edgeman said. “You had decisions being made within various silos in the company.”

Lacey said companies have to avoid wasted motion during the vetting process by not having a logical process. “Determine what you will be evaluating and how you are defining success,” he said. “Ask potential partners, ‘What is your value?’ and if it doesn’t match that of your company, then move on.”

The panel touched on how artificial intelligence is coming into play.

“If you had a lead nine months ago and it didn’t close, you can still act on it. It doesn’t cost you anything. You already ‘paid’ for it,” Lacy said.

AI helps you generate deal flow with these leads. AI is not an electronic leash. It’s there to make your staff’s lives easier, he said.

“Follow up with those people after nine months because if they signed a 12-month lease, that lease is probably going to be up for renewal soon and they might not like where they’re living.”

Once supplier partner agreements are in place, Steward said contract management churn can become a real concern in the industry.

“Should we even tell them the contract is up for renewal?” Steward said, speaking rhetorically for service companies. “The industry is tipping the contract management process in the operators’ favor.”

Supplier-partners are thinking, “Can I up-sell them more? Or: Are they even going to maintain the contract.”

Management companies are thinking, “Maybe there’s something better out there? PropTech is evolving. My growth expectations have changed. Sources of capital have changed.”

More Interesting Points:

• “You can kill everything with a poor technology rollout strategy,” Lacey said. “Keep in mind that invariably the software will break. Bringing in new technology will strike the fear in your folks.”
• “It can take two years of them working on the same new technology before it becomes second nature to them,” Lacey said.
• Thrive Communities has a “One Review, One Tree” program where it plants a tree for every resident online review post (positive or negative). It has planted 2,350 trees in the Seattle area. “It’s a way of showing that landlords are a little less awful,” Edgeman joked.