When to Build Your Own Multifamily Resident Portal

Jason Schedler:
All right. I say we go ahead and get started. So build versus buy, when to construct your own multi-family resident portal.

Go ahead to the next slide. Why are we having this conversation? So, to me, it seems like this has been a question in multifamily since the adoption of online payments on the internet. And when I think about my experience, it feels to me like the question comes up more and more over the years, not less. It might have to do with the fact that there's more accessible technology and resource availability of people who can build this kind of stuff. I think it might have something more to do with the desire to control what the experience is for the resident and how technology is leveraged there. At any rate, we're gonna get into that conversation.

And as we do, our goal is to give you some insight and some framing to the many considerations that you'll have to go through in this process. In addition, I think we're gonna come out with some really great takeaways and lessons learned from Stephanie and Andrew that they've experienced and encountered that you can maybe anticipate on your journey. So let's jump into introductions oh, agenda first. So we'll go through introduction of our panelists. Thanks guys so much for joining. And then we'll get into a couple more slides and we'll get into the discussion. And roughly, you know, it's gonna be a flowing conversation, but roughly the questions will be kind of framed in this order of how did you make the decision and what was the evaluation that you used moving into development and execution and finally into rolling out and maintenance and lessons learned. And then hopefully we'll have some time at the end for some Q&A. So now we'll do introductions. Andrew, why don't you go ahead and give us an introduction to yourself.

Andrew Min:
Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here. My name's Andrew Min. I'm the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Digital Initiatives at RXR. For those who don't know, RXR, we're about a 20 billion real estate private equity group, wholly, vertically integrated. So owner, property manager, investment manager. And II believe last time I saw we were the fifth largest owner of real estate in the New York City area. Within RXR, I oversee all of our digital initiatives including this exact question of whether when to build and when to buy and lead both our partnerships with various prop techs and other service providers on, on the partner side. And then also run an in-house technology team of software engineers, data scientists, designers, and product managers. It's great to deal with everyone.

Jason Schedler:
Thanks, Andrew. And Stephanie, how about you?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Thank you. I am vice president for innovation at Venterra, and we own and develop properties across the southeastern United States. We have about 25,000 units. And our founders were in the software industry before they got into real estate. So it only made sense that we, how we naturally led into building getting into building software for the real estate industry.

Jason Schedler:
Awesome. And then I'm new to Zego, so joining in December, but my name's Jason Schedler. I'm the VP of Product here. I have been in the PropTech space for over 20 years. I've worked at MRI software for most of my career doing consulting sales and most of my career was spent there doing product management over multifamily including launching Resident Connect and Prospect Connect. Years ago I also worked as a senior developer for Equity Residential. So I've had some experience with the property management side of things. Yeah, and that's me. So thanks guys so much for joining. As we get into this conversation I think it makes sense to kind of frame up what we mean when we talk about a resident portal. And so simply put, I'm just kind of dividing it into two distinct components, but I will give you guys a chance to talk about how you view it assuming there's a difference there.

I think Gravity for a portal, it kind of started with and, and revolved around payments, not to make it about us but, you know, payments are the one thing that it's like the most frequent interaction, the exchange of payment. It kind of starts there, but then that quickly became, you know, not the focus and resident engagement turns into like the more important, even though payments is like P zero, the engagement side of it is how you really add value through the portal. So how your residents interact with the building and staff, thinking about you know, service requests I've seen, you know, roommate matching kind of stuff in the student housing side of things. Smart home controls listed here, package lockers, amenity reservation, rentable items accounting for your pets, messaging. I mean, the list of stuff on the resident engagement side can be really, really long. And so part of this conversation is gonna be, as we get into this, which of those features do you think are the, the critical ones, or at least the ones to start with?

As we talked through the questions you know, we were planning this and we kind of thought about this from a high level. And we divided up what the conversation might look like into four big chunks. One of those is naturally when you take on a project, you wanna start with what you want the outcome to be. And then what's the budget for that? And does the budget change as the goals kind of change? Second, what's the upfront cost and effort and maybe thinking about, you know, time to market as part of those costs as an important factor, especially given the choice of building or buying. One might get you there a lot quicker than the other three. And I think, you know, every, every company that takes on a software endeavor that isn't a software shop goes through this question of, are we a software shop or can we be one?

Or can we, can we do that and does that take away from what we do best? And is there a cost to that? And then third is, you know, you don't just launch software or technology, there's always an ongoing element of you know, keeping it safe and adding new features and keeping up with what the market is doing. And so what's that ongoing risk and cost look like? So this frames up real nice and all of our efforts to frame up things and make plans seem really straightforward. But as we all know, then you, then you start working on stuff and it's never this straightforward. But with that, let's get into the, to the chat part of it. So I guess I'll start with and either of you feel free to answer. What are your thoughts on how we framed up the definition of resonant Portal? Portal?

Andrew Min:
Yeah Jason, I'm happy to kick it off. So I think for us, it's similar. I think we think about it in a very similar way at RXR, right? I think I would break resident engagement into two slightly different B buckets. One bucket is your operational or almost transactional interactions with the building, right? Payments is definitely one, those work orders, right? Like, something that I expect to have from my building, right? You could call it table stakes. And I think you're absolutely right. When people first download our app, they're downloading it because they wanna pay their rent through the app because it's way more convenient than paying through a check. But I, I also agree with you that in order to stay engaged and keep using the app, because by the way you can set up autopay you need to create a compelling reason to keep using the app.

And I think that's where the customer experience comes in and the engagement piece. And that's where I would say things that kind of become more of a differentiated customer experience rather than just, these are table stakes that I expect every building to offer, right? And so whether that's kind of building a digital relationship with concierge through a messaging platform, seeing tailored events that are kind of marketed and kind of even segmented for specific user groups. Smart home and smart access, as you mentioned, a lot of service providers like cleaning, dog walking, and so on. This is how we've actually tracked our data usage, these are actually the features people use on a regular basis. Because again, once you download the payments at port, once you set up the payments portion, you just set up auto pay, but people actually stay engaged in our portfolio, we have about an 85% engagement rate on a monthly basis. And it's because people are constantly using these kinds of next level hospitality features because that's what they're ultimately looking for out of an engagement app.

Jason Schedler:
Great answer. Stephanie, what are your thoughts?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I didn't see like marketplace. I would say maybe add that we do the marketplace functionality also. We have the notion of prospect portal in with ours as well. It's not mixed into the same data obviously, but we do manage a prospect portal and offer a prospect portal as well.

Jason Schedler:
I'm gonna throw since you're talking, or I'll ask you first, Stephanie, when you look at engagement, what has been the feature beyond like the sort of like obvious ones like payments or service requests? What's the feature that you think has driven engagement at the highest level? Like the single thing that you did that tended to drive up engagement.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
For us? Yeah, it's going to be just our communications and polls. I can't say confidently that we've invested in the engagement features as much as some of the off the shelf solutions have. Like I said, we have a marketplace but we don't have the extensive engagement functionality as others do.

Jason Schedler:
Okay. And then what about you, Andrew? What, you know, you guys have built a lot. What are some of the features that you put in that you feel like drove, you'd said you have 85% engagement month over month. What do you think contributes most of that?

Andrew Min:
No, it's a good question. You know, and I'd actually say I, I'd flip the question a little bit because for us, we really try to be user backed, right? And so our view is if you start by saying what features do you want to build, or what features do we think would be cool, you end up building what a bunch of engineers think are really interesting, which technologically becomes really cool. And there are a lot of features that sometimes residents don't actually end up using. And so we actually start from kind of a top-down strategy. So arcs are in our multifamily strategy, not even our tech, just our multifamily strategy. We attract knowledge economy workers who want urban quality housing in kind of underdeveloped areas. So think urban suburban downtowns like Stanford or New Rochelle around New York think deep elum around Dallas, right?

And so, so what those expectations, what, what those types of workers bring with them are expectations for five star living, right? They're paying five star rent, so they expect five star hospitality. And so then the question is, okay, so how do you offer that level of hospitality and service? And if you look at comps from retail or hotels like the Ritz Carlton, right? What you discover is that it is two things. One is customer experience in general, not just in real estate. Again, retail, hospitality, e-commerce, people expect to be able to book a car with their phone, right? They expect to book a hotel with their phone, and they get really confused when they have to interact with their building, you know, using pen and paper. So one is just digital expectations have changed to the point where it's table stakes and customer experience.

But then the other thing is that data becomes really important to help understand what your customers want sometimes even before they realize what they doing, right? And so I think that's a really important framework because there are digital features that people use a lot, right? So one, one for example, that a lot of people will use are our events feature, right? But the reason that people use our events feature is because we're building really tailored events for them, right? And part of how we build tailored events for them is we pull insights out of both our app, but out of a lot of other sources about our resident, and then build profiles and segments of a resident and then say, okay, these are the types of events that are really gonna resonate. And then we increase our exposure to those events, not just by putting posters and, and digital signage in the lobbies, but also by pushing it to the app.

But if you've had bad events, no one would use it, right? Or similarly, we have a messaging feature and our, me, you know, one of the things we do in our messaging feature is we wish residents happy birthday and residents, you know, find that's amazing, right? Like when you remember it's someone's birthday, they feel really personalized and special, right? And they build this relationship with the concierge, right? It's not RXR wishing you a happy birthday, it's the actual RXR concierge Eddie who, you know, because you see Eddie at the front desk every day wishing you a happy birthday. But Eddie can't possibly remember every single person's birthday in the building. And so we push it to them through a crm or, or another example is if there's a bad maintenance request, we actually flag it, like, we'll say this maintenance request should have been closed three days ago using our algorithm.

It hasn't been Eddie, figure out what's going on. And then message the resident and proactively say, Hey, I noticed that there was an issue with this maintenance request. I'm really sorry about that. Here's where it stands and here's the solution to it. Right? And like, those things really matter to residents because, you know, if you either acknowledge, you know, pain or a mistake, or you create a moment of surprise and delight by wishing them happy birthday, those things really stick with them. But that's not like you couldn't do that without a messaging feature. Yeah, it's right. But if you had a message feature without that, you know, it wouldn't matter.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. So like, if I paraphrase what you're saying it's, and I think this is really important, and hopefully we'll get back into this a little bit later, but it's, there's this other element which is, it's the people and the content. So you could have, you know, a great messaging system, but if you're not sending messages or you have the events feature, but if you don't have someone thinking about what events people are gonna want, then just you may as well not have it. Right? so the content and the people and the work that they do and how they know the residents is gonna matter as much as the, the feature at the end of the day. I'm gonna take a step back Stephanie, and for you wanna get into like, you guys made your decision kind of early. Talk a little bit about that and then how did you sort of frame up the whole decision making process? You know, how did you structure that and, and put guides around it?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
The decision to, to build

Jason Schedler:
Mm-Hmm.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
So because we, our founders came from software before they got into real estate, it was a fairly natural decision to want to build our own proprietary p m s which they did. And so then when the decision to make to build a portal was to be made, it also was pretty natural to say that we should build a port. Of course, you know, developers are builders by nature. Like they just wanna, they wanna build everything. It's what they come to work to do. They just wanna build everything. You ask 'em if they can, they can build anything. The question is if they should be building it. But when we sit down to really think through if we should be building something, it really is around is it going to make a difference? Can we make it differentiating?

Is there something out there already that is doing what we want out of this solution? ‘Cause if so, there's no reason we should build it. Or if we do build this thing what are we going to, what's the opportunity cost? What are we not going to be able to do with our, with our technology, with our technology resources, because we're spending time on, on this solution. And that all has to pan out in, in numbers and time and just, just makes sense. So for us, it's about what kind of customization are we wanting in it? Is it gonna give us a competitive advantage about integrating with other systems? And that's a big one for us because we built, we built our own PMs, right? So it makes it a lot, makes very much sense there. And then scalability obviously is a big one. So the portal for us is a, you know, it's an extension of your PMs to a large extent. So it made sense for us to build it for those reasons.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. Do you mind if I ask like, just ballpark, what was the timeframe of, all right, we're gonna do this portal thing to the decision of we're gonna build it ourselves? Cause it sounds like it was somewhat of a foregone conclusion for you, but did you put a lot of thought into it, or did you just kind of know you were gonna go that direction?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
I would say we pretty much knew we would have to build the portal. This was years ago that the initial web-based portal we built, you know, years ago we recently launched an app version of it a native app. You know, again, we went through kind of some of the decision process. And even still today we talk about are we gonna build certain functionality into our porter or are we going to buy off the show? It's really not even a build by decision, right? It's more of a are we gonna build something or are we going to integrate? Because you still have to use, yeah, technology resources to integrate with something that you get off the shelf. So

Jason Schedler:
That's an important point that you're making, you know, we kind of, the way we frame up the webinar is builder or buy, but it's, it's kind of like you're always gonna do a little bit of both in the process. Yeah. But do you wanna own that collection of things that you buy or do you want to, you know, build around it? And how much of it do you wanna build? So I'm gonna ask you another question and I'll come back to Andrew on, on sort of the, the same thing. But so for you, Stephanie, like what were you, as you set out to build now I've been in product management for a long time, so my habit is always like stack rank everything. What are we gonna do first? Even if we can build, you know, multiple things at the same time, you, you kind of wanna stack rank it and figure out how much you can release. What did your early stack ranking top three, four things look like?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Oh, in the very beginning it was, it was just, you know, the fundamentals of a portal. We had to have payments contact us, people have to be able to get in touch with management and maintenance. So those were the, had to have, the fundamental things.

Jason Schedler:
Okay. so Andrew, we, we chatted last week. Your answer was interesting one, on how you decided to go to the direction of building. Would you mind sharing for the group how you got there?

Andrew Min:
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe I'll even integrate kind of the requirements piece as well because they kind of came together for us. So what we said at the beginning again, was we said, we wanna build the best in class resident experience for anyone, right? And, then we said, okay, based on our research and competitive benchmarking from other industries, technology should be a big piece of that. So then we said, okay, so what, what should those features be? And we did about, we visited every single property we owned, we talked to every staff member there. We talked to many of the residents there. We probably did about 60 resident interviews, you know, 60 real estate user interviews. We built a whole slew of personas, journey maps, you know, surface pain points, surface opportunities to the light. And then we also said, all right, we should look beyond ourselves.

And so we did a scan of probably a hundred different startups in real estate tech in PropTech, trying to understand where venture dollars are flowing, which isn't necessarily determinative, but gives you an idea of where smart people and venture think that innovation should be happening. And then we said, okay, but real estate sometimes is slow moving, so we should also look at other industries that we think our analogous does. So we looked at what Starbucks was doing for customer experience. We looked at what Disney was doing for customer experience, and then we took it all together. We prioritized it through a bunch of different workshops and kind of the classic design thinking strategies. And we came up with a short list of both requirements on the software side where we said, okay, we expect that, you know, a digital customer experience has these components.

And then we also said the other thing that was really important that I alluded to earlier is that data is really important here too, right? You want to create an iterative cycle where you understand resident personas again, so that you can make a better digital experience, but also so you can just make a better holistic resident experience. And then we said, okay, so, and, and actually our ongoing assumption was that we'd partner and, and on the office side, in the office portfolio, we do partner with a third party provider. So we ran a bunch of experiments. We used three or four different app providers in our portfolio at different buildings, and we weren't satisfied with any of them. And there were a bunch of reasons for that. One was a lot of the features were just not there. The UI wasn't there.

The second was they, there was very limited data reporting. And I think some of that was intentional, right? I think a lot of it, a lot of these prop techs think that they're creating a moat by keeping all the data away from the owner and then having the owner rely on them for analytics. But we didn't want that. We have an in-house data science team. We wanted to be able to process all this raw data, combine it with our market data, combine it with our operational data, and actually build resident models. And then the third one was, and, and we think, and, and I think this is one of the core pieces that structurally led us to build it ourselves, is that there wasn't really high quality integration with our onsite team. So, for example, there was one provider that had a digital concierge, actually had an in-person concierge too.

But it was a really weird experience for the resident because if they had an in-person question or needed some in-person help with unpacking groceries, they would ask the property staff, but then if they wanted help with cleaning or some of these other services provided by the app, they would go to the app and the app concierge would help. And it was like a totally disjointed process, right? And we said, that's not a best in class resident experience. And so for us, we said, I think that's one of the big disconnects because a lot of these prop techs are run by people that have never owned buildings before. They, they don't really, and frankly, venture dollars don't flow to services businesses. They don't really have an incentive or necessarily even the knowledge to build a fully integrated resident experience the way we'd want to.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah, this came up in our conversation earlier too which hopefully we can get into a little bit more as well, which is the, the sort of an intermingling of the physical and digital experience. And it's easy to get in this trap of like building a digital experience and only thinking about the digital experience and not thinking about like where the touchpoints are from a human perspective. So going back to Stephanie feel free to expand on that, you know, in person versus digital, but also then wanted to start getting into for you guys, what did your launch look like? And what kind of time constraints did you put around feature sets? You know, what, what were you comfortable rolling out first and did you put time constraints, et cetera?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Well when we just recently launched we launched our app. So we launched an app for the app store. And for this particular launch, we didn't really have a time constraint. What we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure we got it right. We wanted to make sure that what, what we were going to launch, we were, we were proud of. So we already had a, you know, a version that was, you know, responsive mobile, and it was functioning and it was sufficient. So we were in no need to, you know, force something out or you know, just put something out that we weren't happy with. So we just continued to iterate on what we were building until we were till all stakeholders said, yes, this is what we want to move forward within the confines of, you know, we've, we've gotta get it out at some point.

So once we met the specific functionality requirements that we had agreed on as far as the requirement scope, and we were happy with how it was functioning then, we rolled it out onto a couple of properties, tested that with users, watched how they were working through the app. We saw some issues with logins. We went with, we went with passwordless logins. So there were some issues with that on both sides. So we had some technical bills. We also had some confused, the user honestly was so new in general to consumers that we had just, we confused our, our user base. So it just took a while to get people converted. But what was interesting is that when we did do a full launch of that app I say full launch, we actually soft launched. So we didn't do, we purposely did not do a full launch. And we still organically got to 80% of our interactions happening on the app versus on the web browser within a year. So it just goes to show that when people are in long-term relationships with a brand or any kind of a technology, that they're more willing to download an app for that experience.

Jason Schedler:
That's,I love that result because that kind of answers a question that people tend to ask a lot, which is around you know, what will people really adopt? Do they really want a browser app or do they really want a mobile app? Or do they want both? And what are the different, you know, age demographics prefer to do so, if I can back up a step for you guys, it sounds like you launched a browser app first and then you followed on with a mobile app.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Yep.

Jason Schedler:
And d does the mobile app is it a completely different thing or is it a responsive adaptive kind of thing that as you know, based on your,

Stephanie Gonzalez:
The only feature that the mobile app had that the browser version did not when we launched was notifications.

Jason Schedler:
And so you found, I just wanna reiterate cause I find it fascinating. So when you launched or soft launched your app, you took 80% of the browser app engagement and, and moved it over to the mobile app. So just to make sure I have it right, so then your other 20% stayed browser, that's like a really great experiment. I'm not sure you meant to do it, but really, really fascinating. We, we

Stephanie Gonzalez:
We’re shocked as well.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
We designed and purposely, we purposely designed for a better experience in mobile from the UI end user experience perspective.

Jason Schedler:
So

Stephanie Gonzalez:
All the personality is in our browser version except for notifications.

Jason Schedler:
So you, you feel like maybe you got to leapfrog your, your browser app user experience a little bit with the app experience. So you got some benefits of you know, going second with that. Yeah, I could ask questions about this all day, but did you learn anything I can't help myself, like from an age demographic perspective, are there different demographics that are more willing to use the app versus the browser? Or did you find it to be sort of hard to interpret?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
So the typical ones are like 20 to 45, or I'm sorry, 30 to 45, are more, are more likely to download the app younger than 30. We found just as much hesitation as the older than 45. But it doesn't mean that they don't convert eventually.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah, yeah. So over time you'll get there. So let's pivot over to Andrew. What was your philosophy on, you know, browser first, app first?

Andrew Min:
Yeah, no, it's a good question. So we again, started with, started with users, right? And I think discovered a couple things. One is a lot of the features that they wanted out of a digital experience, you, you had to build an app, a native app. So smart home is a really good example of that, right? It's really, I mean, you can build a web version to unlock your door and control your thermometer and your heating and so on, right? It's really challenging . And so we said we, we didn't wanna do that. But then the other thing was actually people told us we preferred the app. And actually it's interesting because when you have an app downloaded, it's on your home screen, right? If you have a mobile web, you may or may not bookmark it, and if you don't bookmark it, you may forget about it.

And so it was actually surprising to us. We expected we'd start with a bi web and then build an app if, if at all. And the overwhelming response from our residents was, we actually want an app. So we built the app. And it was actually interesting ‘cause the first place we launched at was a, a demographic that the building was clearly our oldest demographic. It, the profile is, you know, empty nesters that are downsizing. And that building today still is one of the highest adopted engaged apps in our portfolio. And, and, and it's actually interesting because if you look at there, there's a lot of like, and, and, and by the way, I'm sure it depends on, on the region and and so on, but in our demographics, at least, even if you do research and you look at use of social media or use of YouTube, like all these things that you ordinarily don't attribute to older demographics, they're actually on Facebook, they're actually on YouTube, right?

Like, to some extent they're more than 30 year olds are. And so we actually, to our surprise, found that they were actually pretty excited about using an app and, and felt pretty com confident, confident they could use. And, you know, they're certainly some, some that weren't. But, you know, our adoption engagement, they at those properties are, are pretty, pretty smacked out in the middle of everything, everything else. So I think those were, the kind of main two reasons. One was that you kind of have to build it to build the full scope of what we were doing. But then the other one was just that our users told us that they wanted, I will say on the staff side, we did the opposite and we have only built a web version. And part of that is a lot of the property teams don't want their staff to have phones because, you know, for a variety of obvious reasons. And so there, it was actually important that it wasn't an app because we didn't want to require someone to have a phone. And so that is only a web portal that only works on the desktop and is actually intentionally not responsive.

Jason Schedler:
That makes sense. All right. That is all that is super fascinating to me. I think, you know, what I learned is that when my parents get an iPhone, I'll sell my Apple stock because they peaked. But that's specific to my parents. But so let's get into the like, sort of, and I know Andrew, you, you have to drop soon. So I'll start with you on this one. What is your, so you guys have both went through this process, you both decided to build now you've got this product, for lack of a better word, that's out there, this engagement tool, and you're collecting payments, like what does your ongoing maintenance look like? And you know, how, how do you approach the, there's always new things you can do. And so how do you approach that, that question of what are we gonna invest in next and how much and how fast do we want to invest in it?

Andrew Min:
Yeah, no, it's a good question. So I think all in, we're spending about two and a half million a year on, on kind of ongoing product development. And, and a big reason for that is if we just cut down to main, like maintaining the existing product it would be a fraction of that. But our view is that technology continues to evolve, right? And so if your digital customer experience is continuing to evolve so to, and, and their expectations, right? Because other industries are continuing to evolve, your, your, your product needs to evolve too. So, so we continue to spend, you know, a pretty substantial chunk of money on it you know, to your, but, but it's a great point, right? And I think there's, I think we start with a, a theory, a theory that our theory of change is that if you can delight a resident, they're more likely to stay.

And if they stay and you have high retention rates at the same or even higher rent levels, your retained resident is more valuable than a new resident, partially because you know their collection history. Partially because you don't have to turn the unit, you don't have to market the unit. And so we do a couple of things in the service. That one is we do a lot of analytics around proving out that value. So proving the value of, of a retained resident. The second thing is we do a lot of analytics around and, and spend a lot of our product development time on understanding drivers of retention and you, you know, pulled from the app and then using it to kind of inform our product, our, our development teams and our asset management teams. So for example, we pull all the messages, we get about 30% of residents use on a regular basis.

We run natural language processing models on top of those to calculate sentiment, and then it generates a rolling sentiment score for each building. And then we can use that to identify what drives sentiment at the building. Is it, you know, is it down this week because there is a leak? And then we find out about the leak before anyone else. Is it up this week because of this event? Because we hired any new staff member? And so we actually start quantifying the value of that, and then we run that into another machine learning model where we actually predict the prob probability of someone renewing. Right now our model with 85% accuracy can predict whether or not someone's gonna renew. And that again, helps you understand the value of all these different programs and interventions, or some of which are digital, some rn. So we spend a lot of our product development time on building both those models and then starting to roll those out into the workflows of our asset managers and our property managers.

So all of those kind of get built into asset management software and property management software that we built as well on the resident facing side. First of all, a lot of what we're doing is trying to automate and, and push back a lot of those insights to our residents. So, you know, the happy birthday messages are a good example to work orders is a good example. Other things that we're focused on is trying to understand the holistic resident lifecycle. So the newest product we just re we we're just about to launch is an onboarding product where even before you move into the building, we can help make sure that you put down your security deposit, you have renter's insurance, pet pet screening, right? It doesn't have to be paper anymore. And by the way, if you don't have one, we can recommend one, and it's all integrated.

And then we also kind of will push through you know, other, other services that you might be using off the shelf. So, for example, we know that everyone in our building in certain buildings use a parking operator. So you can actually, we're building out a feature where you can actually call the parking operator and they'll bring the car around rather than having to call down at the front desk. So kind of finding those opportunities to integrate with what our residents are already using at the building and then pulling in into one, increase the amount that the residents use it to begin with, which gives us more data, but then also to delight our residents further.

Jason Schedler:
Awesome. And then before you go, I wanna, first of all, thank you so much for joining this love, love hearing your story. And before you drop, what was, just real quick, what was your biggest lesson learned in the process? Yeah, that's a real quick one to answer.

Andrew Min:
Yeah. Real…

Jason Schedler:
I'm forcing you to.

Andrew Min:
Real softball one at the end. Yeah, no, it's, it's a good question. I think one thing for us is constantly iterating and making, being honest with ourselves about where we stand relative to the field. So every year we do a full competitive tear down. We do pitches from vendors, and we say, should we keep doing this? And we can't, the answer can't just be, RF is ahead of the curve. We have to continue to have a structural reason. And so far, at least our answer is, there are things about the integrated resident experience we don't think a star can replicate. And, and we've, we've been honest with ourselves and actually said, should we, should we stop? So that, that's I think, the biggest one because if, if you don't, you end up over-investing in a product that just kind of falls behind everyone else.

And we really wanted to make sure we avoided that. And then the other one is, I think, constantly iterating, right? Like we, there's always a risk and software saying, I don't wanna release it until it's perfect. And of course, you gotta balance it with, these are real residents that are paying a lot of rent to live in our buildings. And so if you release a bad product to them, it's a bad idea. But even when we first released our product we picked a small handful of residents and we said, this is gonna be super buggy but we want you to beta test it. And we kind of bought their, got their buy-in. And it was actually cool because when we actually, so it was buggy when we worked through it with them, but they were totally fine doing that. And they did weekly focus groups and, you know, we'd buy them small perks, thank yous.

And it was cool because when we launched it, those residents were going out to their neighbors and saying, I helped build this. You should download it. It's amazing, right? And so not like it's easy to kind of sit there and say, I know exactly what I need to build, and we all have really good ideas about what we build, and probably 80% right? But I'm missing 20%, I think a lot of times is because you don't actually just talk to the residents. And I think we've been really surprised by just how excited our residents are to be a part of it and help develop it and and yeah, and, and, and just how much value you've gotten from keeping them in the entire loop.

Jason Schedler:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Andrew. So Stephanie, let's go back, kind of same thing for you, what is your ongoing sort of maintenance look like? Do you also do that sort of reevaluation? Like, are we gonna, you know, do we want to keep doing this? Or is there something available on market? And then how do you prioritize what you're gonna do next?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
We, every year we have the same type of conversation. We have a value matrix. So we take pretty much any type of functionality that we want to put that we'd like to build into the portal. And we run it through three filters value to the business, value to the employee, and then value to the resident. And then those are scored individually. And then those scores are total and we look at where the most value is going to be had to help make our decisions and help frame those conversations.

Jason Schedler:
And then how about for you, what were the sort of challenges, unexpected challenges or biggest lessons learned? Or even, you know, what fascinated you that you found out that you didn't expect?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
I think, I think what I would say most recently, what has been fascinating is the conversations around centralization. Maybe that is what is the most surprising thing that we're talking about recently. And, you know, we have been, we do have a lot of nuanced and specialization and what we would call our special sauce in our payment options and our communication methods and some of the self-service things that we did very early on. We really focused on the fundamentals, like I said, and making sure they were very, very easy from a UI perspective, very easy nose to vacate. Just everything's just very easy from a fundamental perspective where we, where we maybe should have focused a little bit more now knowing where centralization is going in the multifamily industry, is that engagement piece. I think that as, as the multifamily industry does begin to centralize and people you pull in, if you are pulling people offsite and you have less eyes on your properties, then it would make sense that you might want to be collecting more of that information through things that you are building so that you understand, you know, your, your resident more.

There is one significant difference between you know, Andrew's product and, and our product, which is, he, he manages mostly towers, and we're garden style. So it is a little bit different but it's probably more challenging for the garden style operator in understanding where their resident is at all times through that resident journey than in a tower or high rise situation. Sure.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah, it's an important point. You know, I've been doing product management in this space for since 2010, so I, yeah, I just continually learned that there's not one answer , you know, it's like I remember when I first started into product management that the idea was that things were gonna centralize and some did and some didn't. And then do you think the pandemic, you know, kind of forced that conversation again, so those who maybe were on the verge of going that direction finally, you know, made the commitment to go that direction.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
I think it certainly forced us into the experimentation, right? Because we were all forced to, you know, close our doors even mm-hmm. at one point. So we, you know, we, we, we experimented with, with self-guided tours and we had to communicate with our residents using the technologies that we had, good, bad or, or indifferent. And, you know, you, you learned a lot by doing that. We learned what we had available through self-service and we learned what we didn't. I mean yeah, as an industry, as individual operators you, you understood very quickly where your gaps were. And I'm sure everybody is trying to fill those now, especially if you are wanting to go towards more of a self-service model. You're either have to build 'em and provide them, or you're going to have to buy and license those options.

Jason Schedler:
Makes total sense. How do you feel about doing some q and a with the, with the last few minutes? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So we'll open up for questions. In the meantime while we're waiting for them, I would ask you, I meant to ask you earlier, you did a soft launch with your mobile app. How did you figure out you know, what was your launch plan and, and how did you figure that out?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Did we figure out how to launch it?

Jason Schedler:
Yeah, who was your, who did you target for the soft launch of the mobile app? What was your, what was your decision making around that? Or am I misunderstanding the idea of the soft launch?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Maybe we really just communicated that there was now an app available to compliment the browser version. And we, you know, we didn't make a big to-do about it and we didn't force people to it.

Jason Schedler:
I follow, okay.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
People just organically moved to it.

Jason Schedler:
Okay. So you just kind of, you got great engagement out of that. Even not promoting it a ton. So congrats on that. Yeah, looks like I do have a few questions. So I'm just gonna read these on the fly. How would you suggest budgeting for this? How does the cost of ongoing maintenance compare to the cost of initial rollout?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Gosh, you know, after I've heard Andrew's maintenance spend, I don't even know that I am qualified to speak to ours. I'm questioning the numbers I got cause I'm not on the technology team. And I came into this webinar a bit on the tail end of it, but I, you know, I was told I felt pretty good about what we spent to build it. Cause I was in those conversations. So we would've spent about 350 to build a portal on the front end. Another 100 and 150 to build the app. On the maintenance side, we are able to repurpose all of our code. So you know, the maintenance side, we're, we're repurposing code, so it's not the two and a half million that Andrew threw out, I can tell you that.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah, so does it stay pretty flat? Like do you, do you kind of just, you do the maintenance you do with the team, you have then maybe over time decide if that's the right amount of stuff to do?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Yes.

Jason Schedler:
Okay. I, second question I have is how did residents and onsite staff react when the portal was first introduced? And I think the question means your, the initial, you know, browser app, like what was the, first of all, what year was it and then what was the reaction to it? Yeah,

Stephanie Gonzalez:
I should have said that. I should have said that early on. So the very first portal that we had was launched back in 2006 or so, and then we did a pretty sophisticated update and release, which was responsive in 2017. That one, you know, got a lot of hoop law and cheers from our internal, our employees because it had a lot of backend support as well, and backend automation and a lot of self-service, self-service baked into it. And then of course the app does as well. So,

Jason Schedler:
So backend, and this would've been good to bring up earlier because, you know, the mobile first thing wasn't a thing when you launched your browser app. And so you did what a lot of companies did was you had your browser based app and then you said, okay, we have to adapt to this world, but we don't want to completely re-engineer this thing for an app. And so you went responsive and then I'm assuming the app came after the responsive investments went in, but did you have any strange reactions back in 2006 like that you didn't expect on, on the launch of all that?

Stephanie Gonzalez:
No, I wouldn't say strange. I think that we underestimate really the value that, you know, consumers and renters will put on this technology given, you know, given that they're going to, they're establishing long-term relationships with us. They do really want a, you know, a seamless experience. And that I think the challenge ahead of us now will be, you know, more concerned about privacy and data privacy. So I think what we're looking to currently, you know, ensure confidence there is just make sure that we're transparent with, with our residents and, and we have a prospect portal, like I said, with how we're handling their data upfront. The more we're transparent about that and making them confident there. Cause you don't want them to not download or not use or choose not to use your technology because of, you know, concerns there. So yeah, I think, I think that's gonna be the challenge going forward.

Jason Schedler:
And that's a, a topic that, you know, warrants a whole session to get into security hoped we'd get to be able to touch on it, but it is a, a really big and important topic. And in fact, I, I think for some things that drives the buy versus build conversation on its own, like, like for payments or, you know, things like that

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Payments and even the smart home technology we don't ingest our smart home technology. So we're, we integrate with smart rent but we do not ingest the behavior data that Smart Rent has. So it was interesting to hear Andrew speak about that on his side. He's obviously ingesting that and using it in data and making decisions based off of analyzing that data, which is really interesting to me from an experienced professional, just understanding, you know, how that informs the future experience for sure.

Jason Schedler:
Mm-Hmm. Yeah, that's another one where it's a whole decision. Do we want, how involved do we want to get? I'm gonna get to this last question just to make sure I get it. So during development did you ever consider canceling the project and go the buy route instead of building? Yeah, it never was a thing. And I think I, I kind of knew you'd say that because you guys are really tech first. I think Andrew would say the same, although he said he, they, they try to take a really objective approach to evaluating, you know, if they're gonna stay the course year over year. I think he

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Might consider cannibalizing certain parts, but even you know, hearing him speak about how passionate they are about the customer experience, it would be really hard to be that passionate about owning that and that being a competitive advantage and not needing to build a certain aspect of the portal. Maybe not all of it, but you'd have to build some components of it, if that's your, if that's your competitive advantage.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. Or at least the flexibility to, to make it into what you expected to be. I agree. Yep. let's go into there's a couple takeaways that we'll see how, how well we did, we kind of prepared after our earlier conversations and how we thought this would go. So one was, and this kind of came up more in my conversations with Andrew, but be sure to consider how the digital and physical worlds interact. And that's just, you know, people don't just, you know, work digitally and they don't only go into the office, they have to be able to do both, and you can't have scenarios where the staff don't have a, you know, visibility into what's happening in the digital world. So that, and, you know, there are some processes that start digital, go to physical, go back to digital, like the whole, you know, prospecting phase of, of renting.

You're gonna get maybe an electronic guest card and then you're gonna give someone a physical tour and then they're gonna go back and fill out an application. They kind of have to be able to hop back and forth. Second one that we sort of anticipated was allocating major resources and budget for ongoing maintenance. And I think that maybe it didn't come up as much in this call, but I've been around the notion of building your own tech. And I think it's often underestimated even in, even from a software perspective, it's easy to underestimate how much something's gonna cost or how much time it's gonna take to make it right. The third one, oh,

Stephanie Gonzalez:
And the maintenance part of it. Go ahead. I think I would, I would say at least for Ventera, we were committed to getting it right, the build, it's the maintenance that we underestimated and, you know, and how, how much we would want to iterate on every single year. And I think it's, it's more, it's more important now. It's more valuable now with the engagement and experience that has come into the industry. So that's only going to be that that spend is only gonna get bigger.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. the third one you know, Andrew talked, I think in our previous conversations, they, they kind of went, at least he framed it this way earlier, that it really had more to do with data that led them down the build. They wanted to be able to leverage data to understand their resident engagement. But thinking about, and you, you said this as well, you know, thinking about the data that you can collect when you're building each feature and making sure that you can actually harvest that and, and use it. We think about that at Zego with Mobile Doorman. Having a resident engagement score that will help, you know, our, our clients predict when a resident is more likely to renew. But there's tons of data and I don't know if you wanna, if there's other areas that we didn't get into where you, you leverage data from your, your portal experience, but

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Oh, there's, oh, there's, you could do a whole nother show on the valuable data and, and think about the data and the disparate systems, especially in our industry. You know, I mentioned smart rent, but every operator has those disparate systems that if you bring that data in, it can, it can change the insights that you get from the data that you collect from your portal. So I, it's, you just cannot be scrubbing the data enough to understand what the next most valuable thing you should be investing in will be.

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. I think there was one first

Stephanie Gonzalez:
And foremost, one of the, one of the, one of the funniest things that happened to us was one of the learning points that we learn the hard way was we would go to build a feature. We would not have the data, the bi people at the, at the requirements table. Making sure that we were collecting the right things, that we were going to be tracking or collecting the right things so that operations could build the right reporting and have what they needed. This is early, early in the, in the early years. So they, so we would come out of technology with this beautiful product but operations wasn't able, we couldn't run reporting off of it or anything because we forgot to collect what data would be needed. So we weren't, you know, we weren't collecting, we weren't tracking, we weren't logging those interactions. Yeah. And there was no recording on it. .

Jason Schedler:
Yeah. You almost need to think about what you want your reports to look like or what you want your data schema to look like before you build the feature so you can track those things go, you know, going forward. Exactly. There's one more thing that popped up today that occurred to me that's a great takeaway is like, you can do all the technology and capture all the data. And, but like, if you're not working on content and like engaging with residents, it won't, it's not gonna do anything. So you have to have smart content that relates to people. So another great takeaway. I'm gonna do our last little slide here, unless you have anything else that didn't come up that you wanna share. Okay. so it would be a miss for me if I didn't point out that SGO can be your portal gateway in terms of payments whether you buy or build, we can provide that payment solution for you. And you will be after attending, getting an email from Katie who's our inbound inquiry specialist, if you want to get more information. So Stephanie, thank you so much for participating in this. I learned a ton listening to both of you. Me too. It was a good time. So thanks, thanks for

Stephanie Gonzalez:
Having me. Appreciate it.

Jason Schedler:
All right. Take care.

Stephanie Gonzalez:
You too. Bye.

Jason Schedler:
Bye.