November 25, 2024 • 45 mins
Unlock the secrets to transforming the multifamily housing sector with us as we chat with Larry Gorman, the visionary president of LeaseHawk. Discover how innovations like self-guided tours and centralized leasing offices have not only revolutionized operational efficiency but also set a new standard for the industry. Larry's journey, from overcoming challenges in the hospitality sector to spearheading cloud-based solutions in multifamily housing, offers a wealth of insights and inspiration for anyone looking to optimize their property operations and drive profitability.
We explore the art of cultivating a culture where innovation thrives, highlighting the importance of viewing failure as an opportunity for growth rather than a setback. Through compelling case studies and metaphors, such as a child learning to walk, we illustrate how incremental experimentation can lead to groundbreaking solutions. By fostering an environment where small-scale tests are encouraged and collaboration with stakeholders is prioritized, we demonstrate how the multifamily sector can successfully embrace a mindset of continuous improvement and creativity.
As we journey through the rapidly evolving world of communication technologies, Larry sheds light on how tools like virtual assistants are reshaping leasing processes and addressing the challenges of vacant units. We dive into the transformative future of CRM systems powered by AI, emphasizing the potential to democratize business leverage and unlock employee potential. With Scottsdale as an emerging hub for connection and collaboration, listeners are guided on how to tap into LeaseHawk's resources for further exploration and innovation in the multifamily sector. Join us for an episode filled with insights that could redefine the way you view innovation and efficiency in housing.
About the Multifamily Innovation® Council:
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is the executive level membership organization that makes a difference in your bottom line, drives a better experience for your employees, and allows you an experience that keeps demand strong for your company. The council is uniquely positioned to focus on the intersection of Leadership, Technology, AI, and Innovation.
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is for Multifamily Business leaders who want to unlock value inside their organization so they can create better experiences and drive profitability inside their company.
To learn more or to join, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com.
For more information and to engage with leaders shaping the future of multifamily innovation, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com/.
Connect:
Multifamily Innovation® Council: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, welcome back.
So today on this episode I haveLarry Gorman, president of
LeaseHawk, and today we're goingto explore a lot of different
conversations around innovationbut communications and getting
fundamental about creating thatprofitability and efficiency and
demand generation, how youcommunicate and engage customers
and how you bring value tomultifamily operators.
(00:20):
Listen, there is a lot ofchoices out there in how you
think about communicating,engaging, analyzing information
that happens in calls on site,in maintenance operations and
that lead to business decisionsthat make the business better.
So today we're going to betalking all about those things
and more.
Larry Gorman is somebody that Ivalue highly.
(00:42):
When he speaks, we don't getthe opportunity to spend as much
time as we'd like.
He's part of the MultifamilyInnovation Council and he
contributes in those meetingsevery Friday in ways that we're
just so privileged to have.
So today I welcome you intothat conversation, larry.
Welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Glad to be here, Patrick.
Good seeing you.
I love what you've done withthis whole space.
It's very innovative.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, you know it's very innovative.
Yeah, it's one of those thingsand you know this, we didn't set
out to design that.
It was more like the listening,like what would be.
How do you increase the valueof the things that we need to do
in the frequency of how theworld's moving today?
And so I know you guys havebeen designing and building
products similar for many yearsin multifamily.
But take us back to who Larryis, because I know you've joined
(01:26):
LeaseHawk a few years ago, manyyears ago, and you've made some
incredible innovations thereand I know you have a great team
to pull all this off.
But take us through who you are, why you're at LeaseHawk,
because some of our listenershaven't yet enjoyed that
experience yet.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Oh, thank you for that, patrick.
Well, my background is purelyin technology.
My earlier days in my careerwas in the hospitality industry
and I was leading a team thatwas building out one of the
industry's early cloud-basedproperty management systems.
This was back before, wheneverything was on-premise for
the most part and the idea ofmoving things off-premise and
(01:59):
into the cloud was kind of scaryto some operators, losing
control of the data, having torely on a browser to access your
information instead of atrusted application.
And it was something that weled for this company and it was
very successful for us and itbecame a competitive advantage
in our industry, and so wedecided to carve that out and
make it its own commercialoffering that we would make
(02:20):
available to the entire industry.
So I did that for a number ofyears and then had an
opportunity to apply the lessonslearned from that experience in
the single family space, whereI was the head of technology for
one of the larger players insingle family, and a lot of the
things that we saw inhospitality that we had spent 10
years tackling were things thatwe were anticipating to see in
(02:42):
single family, and it equallyapplies to multifamily.
So one of the earlyanticipating to see in single
family, and it equally appliesto multifamily.
So one of the early innovationswe did in single family was
trying to solve the problem ofmaintaining the expected
operating margin.
So the challenge with singlefamily is every one of your
units you have to hop in the carand drive from house to house,
unit to unit in order to helpwith leasing, in order to help
(03:05):
with maintenance and with turnsand relative to the multifamily
operators.
That was a challenge, and so toget the efficiencies needed,
one you had to build tremendousscale, but you also had to build
really efficient workflow andprocess and you had to leverage
technology as much as possibleso that you could overcome what
(03:26):
we would call the windshieldproblem, and that was very
successful.
One of the things that we didearly on was move to 100%
self-guided tours so thatleasing agents didn't have to
show up at a house andcoordinate times with prospects
looking to tour home, because ifanybody was late whether the
leasing agent was late or theprospect was late it could throw
your whole day off.
It'd be like going to adoctor's appointment for a two
(03:49):
o'clock and not actually beingable to see him until three or
four because you start to backup your appointments if the
first one of the day falls short, and so moving to a self-guided
option where prospects could goon to a portal, register for a
tour, get the code to access thehouse and then provide their
own tour without relying on ahuman was a game changer, and it
(04:09):
was early in the industry.
Not many people were doing it.
And then having a centralizedregional leasing office was
another big deal.
It's obviously impractical forevery house to have its own
on-premise leasing office and,like in Phoenix, for example, we
had several thousand homes thatwere all being rented out of a
single leasing office.
Here and in every region in theUS had their own leasing
offices and those concepts thatworked really well in single
(04:31):
family, out of necessity, inorder to make it a viable
business model, they can easilybe applied to multifamily.
Family have on-site leasingoffices in every community.
Why can't you centralize that?
Why does multifamily like toreally prioritize the white
glove, human touch, instead ofthe self-service model that
single family was required touse?
(04:52):
Why are we not doing more onthe maintenance side in order to
avoid those emergencymaintenance tickets and then to
maybe consolidate multiplemaintenance items into a single
visit.
There's just a lot ofefficiencies from operating
single family space that couldequally apply to multifamily,
but it wasn't.
Because it wasn't necessary, itwas mother.
What's that saying aboutinvention?
Yeah, necessity is the motherof invention.
(05:14):
Well, single family to beviable, it had to figure out
some of these operationalefficiencies that multifamily
didn't need to be profitable.
But once single family provedthe model, then multifamily
operators I think we're gettingcurious.
I know that with our company,we hosted a couple of the larger
multifamily operators wherethey just picked our brain about
what we were doing, becausethey were exploring centralizing
their leasing operations.
(05:35):
This was 2016.
So people the industry now inmultifamily is really excited
about centralization.
But I was talking tomultifamily operators in 2016,
trying to learn from us andsingle family how we were doing
it, and so some of the thoughtleaders who are now take it for
granted that everything iscentralized in their world.
They were the thought leadersof multifamily.
They were setting the pace forother operators who weren't
(05:57):
seeing the need.
But everybody started seeing theneed in 2020 when we had COVID
and all of the sacred cows thatother industries might've been
challenging were in multifamilywere saying, no, this is how
things need to be done here.
This is the way it's alwaysbeen done.
They were forced to rethinkthings.
The leasing offices were closed.
(06:19):
People still needed to find aplace to live.
Your teams aren't coming towork, no one's answering the
phone.
How are you going to operate inthis new model?
And they were willing.
We, as an industry, werewilling to experiment, because
what other choice did we have?
Patrick and some of those ideasthat we thought we needed
temporarily resonated with thepublic.
We realize now the public wantsto be able to conduct business
(06:42):
on their own terms.
Why should I have to beconstrained by the hours that
the leasing office is open?
Why can't I do all of myexploration online?
Why can't I do a virtual tour,even submit an application and
sign a lease without evertalking to somebody?
Why can't I do that?
Other industries allow us to dothat.
And yet multifamily seemed tobe unique in thinking about
(07:02):
things in a very traditional way, without really looking around
to see what was possible, andCOVID changed a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, you know I want to get to the data because if
you're not there, this is whereI think Leeshock is really
interesting in terms of theanalytics and the communications
.
And how do you operate moreeffectively in communications if
you are in this type of a modelor even moving to that type of
a model?
But, looking back, youmentioned the single family.
I mean, in fact, it's harder insingle family than it is a
(07:31):
multifamily because you don'thave the concentration in
property.
You know, and I did this, I had400 single family homes across
many different states and Iremember we took a portfolio
approach to reinventing how wedelivered, maintenance and
leasing, but we were reallyfully occupied.
It wasn't a whole lot of demandneed for leasing, it was more of
the renewals, but we couldn'tphysically have an employee
(07:55):
in-guided or the code and thosetypes of things, which stands to
say that we would have moreadoption in multifamily for that
approach, because you know youhave one concentration property
that has 150, 300 units, 1500units, whatever that may be.
(08:16):
And do you think that's mindsetBecause there's a change going
from?
Well, we have white glove, nowwe have to do some like the
change management and then theexpectations of the process you
went to get it right.
Do you believe that multifamilyowners and operator have an
expectation on partners thatit's got to be perfect before
they try something?
And what did you learn inrolling all that out that
(08:39):
impacted that portfoliofinancially, I imagine,
tremendously.
Was it perfect?
How do you move through thatRight, and is that what's
keeping multifamily from goingmore in that direction?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Well, fear of the unknown is certainly it's.
That's part of the humancondition.
So we definitely, as humans,there's fear of change and there
is maybe a little bit of fearof doing the work.
So if no one's asking you totake this really big innovative
step that has high risk butpotentially high reward, then
why would you stick your neckout and take that risk?
Because if you fail, then yousuffer the consequences and if
(09:10):
you succeed, maybe you don'tearn any rewards.
So, having an incentivizationsystem where people are
incentivized to take risk andtry things, knowing that you're
not going to be perfect Someideas you may think look good on
paper, don't look good inexecution.
But for those companies thatare looking to try and encourage
their teams to be moreinnovative, start with what's
(09:32):
incentivizing them to beinnovative.
Usually, what I see are thenegative incentives.
Yes, I'll let you try thisproject, but it better work,
because if it doesn't, thenyou're gone and you don't get
back to that table, right, right?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, yeah, either you're fired or you get a bad
reputation, or and does theemployee have that fear too,
because they're single flow ofincome?
I don't want to take the risk.
How do you?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
move through that.
It starts with one.
It's setting the culture inplace that encourages and
motivates and incentivizesinnovation.
Try something, knowing thatit's going to fail how about
that?
But we're going to learn fromit, Maybe redefine what the word
failure means.
When my kid was really youngand it was an analogy I like to
use a lot with my teams was whenhe was going through that stage
(10:15):
, learning how to walk.
He wasn't perfect right out ofthe gate.
You know, you start withcrawling and you take that first
step to try and stand up andyou fall and you hit your head,
but you don't give up.
You keep trying.
But it's little steps,incrementally getting better,
learning and adjusting yourapproach.
And then one day the kid'swalking and next thing you know
he's playing baseball out in thebackyard.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
How did you create those fail safe environments
when you were rolling outsomething like that?
If you're doing missioncritical things, how did you
think through that and createthose observations that people
would then know themselves?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right.
So you start with the businessproblem to solve and you put
some very concrete quantitativemetrics around how you know if
any solution implement isactually going to move the
needle.
So one example might be withthe self-guided tours.
There's all these.
Well, what about this, whatabout this, what about that?
Well, this is not going to workbecause the logistics here and
what happens when someone getsin the house and you don't know
what they're going to do they'regoing to steal all the
(11:08):
appliances or they're going todo all these things.
And so automatically you startwith that culture of fear where
you're focusing on all thethings that are going to go
wrong and all the reasons why itcan't work.
But it's all based onspeculation, all based on the
unknown, because we haven'ttried it yet.
So you take a business problem.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
So there's a lot of interpretation of what might
happen versus the observation ofwhat did happen.
Sure, yeah so you've got to setup a test, set up a test.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
What you don't want to do is bet the farm on this
thing and say, okay, we're goingto, we're going to migrate all
80,000 homes to a self-guidedtour model and it's all going to
happen on December 1st and itbetter work or else we're out of
business.
That's obviously crazy.
But you take a maybe take aregion, or maybe take a single
house, or maybe take a clusterof houses within a sub-market
and you work with your vendorson what the hardware is going to
(11:55):
look like at these houses.
You don't have all thelogistics figured out.
You don't have your pricingmodel figured out.
Maybe your supplier doesn'thave everything figured out
either, because, frankly, in oursituation, our supplier was
figuring this out with us, andso you try it and you learn
about how do you install the hub, how do you install the smart
lock, how do you issue the keys?
(12:15):
Maybe the codes get in thehouse.
You're giving it to prospects,initially over the phone.
You know that's not how youwant it to be at scale, but at
least approve the model.
Sure, Give them the code andmaybe you join them at the house
to make sure that the codeworks.
There's no flaws in getting itand no, that's not what the
model is going to be eventually.
But this is all part of thelearning process.
And you discover the feedback,you find out what the experience
(12:35):
is like from the individualconsumers who you put through it
and as you gain more confidence, you let go of the reins a
little bit and then you maybeissue the codes over the phone
and you don't join them at thehouse and then you deal with the
problems that they have thereand you learn from it and you
make adjustments and you talk toyour supplier and and you start
to build excitement andconfidence.
You learn what works and whatdoesn't and ideas.
(12:57):
Then people can bring the tablethat no one had considered
before, because now that you seeit out in the field, you
discover certain things and youjust try it again.
It small solution, learn fromit, rinse and repeat the plan,
do check, act cycle.
You plan your work, you do thework, you check your results and
then you act on those results.
(13:18):
To do it all over again andpretty soon that snowball gets
bigger and bigger.
Next thing, you know it's anationwide rollout.
Now you've got your supplychain issues figured out and how
much of the smart hubs you haveat the leasing office versus
just in time.
How do you monetize it?
Maybe you start charging yourtenants, your residents, an
incremental fee because nowthey're enjoying the benefits of
(13:39):
the smart home technology inthe house during the residency.
Now you start looking atpartnerships with Amazon and
others, and I think this kind ofbuilds on its own, but none of
that is possible without takingthat first step to try it at a
house.
And if it was, you try it onceand it better work, or we're not
going to try it again.
That's the thing that kills allinnovation.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, it does.
And I'm trying to elevate theimportance in the professional,
like if you were in medical careand you knew something could
help the patient, you know youstart to question, like your due
diligence, to make that knownto the patient.
This is a better path forwardIn real estate and multifamily.
I mean, the ultimate end goalis to create wealth and to
(14:18):
protect it.
I mean that's why that vehicle,from an investment standpoint,
exists.
And then you have like, well,how do you go about doing that?
Well, you got to get the rightpeople together.
You got to understand thecustomer of the future, bring
tech and people together.
But the real estate operatorstoday anchor into the gravity of
the situation to get this right.
So my mission out there is toallow, like, these conversations
I'm having with you right nowis very innovative, very
(14:42):
technical.
Well, not even because they'revery successful.
So how do you get a company tochange or do something
differently when they're winningRight and they're winning
because they've focused on debtleverage, real estate
(15:03):
fundamentals, supply, demandfundamentals, like almost half
of the business.
Now, as companies move more andmore into technology companies,
the customers are expectingtechnology and engineers see
code as a system, whereas thebuilding is the system and, as
you're describing that, I'mthinking how do we get the
executives, the leasing agents,the operators, the maintenance,
(15:23):
the people doing the work, tosee that as the opportunity to
create that alpha, thatdifference between I'm this
manager, but when I work withthis group, they have this
innovative process.
They have this ability to failsafe.
They have the ability to, whensomething breaks, they fix it
quickly.
They have the ability to bringin a great partner work with
them.
All that stuff, and that, Ibelieve, is the found money, or
(15:47):
the found opportunity.
Knowing that, what do you sayto an executive that is building
that team to get the rightpeople around them to do the
things that you're talking about?
What kind of resources do theyneed to provide them?
What kind of fail runway dothey need to provide them?
If they were to hiring theleaders, building through people
(16:09):
, how would you?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
advise.
Wow, there's a lot to unpackthere.
Patrick, if you're looking atindividual contributors that you
need to assemble on your team,I would say first start with who
you've got.
You may actually have a lot oftalent that needs to be
unleashed within your own teams,but you are not giving them
permission to actually be partof the solution.
So, being more transparent withwhat your company is facing,
(16:30):
being more transparent with whatother industries are doing,
maybe with what your company isfacing, being more transparent
with what other industries aredoing, maybe, maybe learning
from them and applying thelessons that other industries
have learned the hard way.
You can benefit from all theirmistakes and apply it to your
specific situation, but startwith your own teams, and the
characteristics I'm looking forare folks that are naturally
curious, who have a passion forlearning.
A question I like to ask ininterviews is to ask them about
(16:53):
their how they learn and like.
What books are you readingright now?
Do you have any books open onKindle or on your nightstand at
home?
What is it, and do you likefiction or nonfiction?
How do you learn?
Do you learn by reading?
Do you learn by doing, or maybeeverything you needed to know
you learned in college and thewhole learning thing is behind
you now and now.
It's all about executing, andthose are obviously the kinds of
people that you would not wantto be part of an innovation team
(17:16):
.
But you also needcross-functional skills as well.
So, in a multifamily operatorenvironment, you got the
corporate office.
There's just a lot of differentfunctions that need to be part
of any innovation process thatyou're going to implement or any
innovation initiative thatyou're going to implement.
So make sure that you've gotthe buy-in from all the
different functional heads.
You've got executive leadershipon what you're trying, a bot in
(17:36):
on what you're trying to do, andyou've defined a problem and
you define what success lookslike, and that's the thing that
a lot of people miss out is whatdoes success look like and how
do I measure that and over whattime period?
You've got to time box thesethings, patrick, because these
innovation projects could lastforever and you never know like
what's the definition of when,when it ends?
How do I know we've won?
(17:57):
How do I know that thing's over?
When can I move the people onto another project?
And if you don't give people awin, then they start to get
demotivated, they start to loseinterest, the budget starts to
get a little tight and moneygets reallocated to other
projects and then eventuallythen it fizzles from not having
a well-defined definition.
But I'm kind of getting offcourse here in terms of the
(18:18):
question.
But in terms of attracting thepeople, I'd say look in your own
team, Look at other industriesthat have done what you're
trying to do and maybe go findout who's done it and see if you
can steal them and get theminterested in the multifamily
industry, because obviouslythere's a lot to do here and
there's a lot when it comes totechnology that we could be
doing that we're not and we'rejust now entering a next
(18:40):
disruption of technology withartificial intelligence and all
that it's going to do disruptmultifamily.
So anybody who's reallyinterested in having a
meaningful impact in theircareer to make a big difference
in helping people find a greatplace to live I mean this is a
pretty exciting place to be.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, and it gets me to the speed of all of this
happening so quickly in ordersof magnitude from the internet
re-envision, a lot of businesses, and it brings me to
communications and even in whatwe're doing with the council,
with you, every Friday and ourannual meetings and things like
that.
It's just the frequency and therepetitions and the touches
(19:17):
that we can add into theequation, otherwise we retreat
back to well, let's do it thisother way.
So let's go into communicationsnow.
Let's just look at all of thetouches.
I mean you've got people thattour in person and virtual.
You've got the centralizedstuff.
You've got phone you.
You got communications onlinevia chat.
You have email.
(19:37):
You have all these things goingon and you guys have built some
of the most impressive products.
I know you've supported some ofthe most robust companies in
the industry and you're nimbleenough to build with companies
on even smaller middle marketcompanies as well.
Talk to me about communicationsand where the opportunities are
in multifamily.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, love that.
Let's start with going back toCOVID, because that was really
underscored the importance ofthe work that LeaseHawk and
others in this space are doing.
When COVID happened, peoplestill needed to conduct business
, but it was harder tocommunicate in the traditional
ways, which would be over thephone or people sending emails
back and forth.
That was our forced necessity,yeah, yeah, so out of necessity,
(20:17):
when someone answers the phone,you spend all this money
marketing your amazing community.
You've got your prominentlydisplayed phone number and a
prospect looking for a place tolive and calls that number and
nobody's there to answer.
It's a wasted marketinginvestment.
It's a missed opportunity.
They're going to immediatelypick up the phone and call
somebody else and now it's goingto take you longer to fill that
(20:37):
vacant unit.
And so where LeaseHawk focusedearly days of COVID, we were
just coming out with a virtualleasing assistant, a voice-based
, chat-based, email-based,text-based assistant that could
take the human out of thatcommunication path.
So when somebody was looking tolease a new apartment home,
(20:59):
rather than having to have aconversation with a live person,
they could have a conversationwith a virtual assistant.
And that virtual assistant wasfocused on answering the basic
questions.
It was helping themself-qualify?
Do I meet the rentalrequirements?
Does this thing have theamenities I'm looking for?
What options are there in termsof the two bedroom versus the
three bedroom?
Where's the location relativeto the points of interest that
(21:19):
matter to me?
These are all high volume,relatively low value
interactions that a consumermight have, either on their own
hunting and pecking on thewebsite or by having a
conversation with the leasingagent.
But when you don't have aleasing agent in the office to
answer the phone either thatopen position hasn't been filled
or that person is out theregiving tours then the prospect
(21:40):
has no place to go other than togo find somebody else.
So LeaseHawk's focus early dayswas on the virtual leasing
assistant, and that's the.
Ace, is what we call our productand it will do all of what I
just said.
It will have the human-likevoice interactions with people
who are answering, who areengaging in those calls to
action.
To dial a phone number, if youprefer to text, ace will talk to
(22:01):
you over text and a lot oftimes people think they're
interacting with a human.
If you want to email back andforth, ace can do that as well,
and that takes care of all ofthe self-qualifying steps at the
top of the leasing funnel thatis helping the consumer
determine do I want to actuallyinvest in visiting this
community to tour an availableunit?
(22:22):
And that has worked really wellto automate the top of the
funnel, and I think that'sstarting to become table stakes,
like if you're a communitywho's not using a virtual agent
to help with that, you reallyneed to be looking at it,
whether it's Leesock or somebodyelse, because this is the high
volume, relatively low valuepart of the equation.
Now, once you start gettinginto the post-tour follow-up,
now the handoff starts to happento where you're getting into
(22:44):
lower volume, higher valueinteractions, where you might
want to have your leasing teambe front and center, because at
this point it's a real salesopportunity and so people are
people.
If you need to be sold onsomething, it's not a virtual
agent that's going to sell it toyou necessarily over a text
interaction.
It's going to be a well-trainedsales team who is showing off
(23:05):
all that this property has tooffer, some of which might not
be obvious to a consumer, and soyou have to have a well-trained
sales staff.
So leasing agents aresalespeople first and foremost,
and so you've got to train themlike you would any salesperson.
Overcome objections, sell thevalue, don't immediately jump
down to price.
All those things are where thehuman touch is important, and so
(23:26):
where LeaseHawk focused on thelast year or so is how can we
leverage AI to help thoseinteractions more effectively
than what we have been today?
And so it was a very interestingbinary choice our clients are
making.
If I want to leverage AI, doesthat mean that all my
interactions with my consumershave to be with a virtual agent?
If I like that and I want toget rid of the humans, that's a
(23:47):
really good cost savingsdecision I can make, but I might
be giving up a little bit onthe human experience.
On the other side, you've got acohort of operators that say my
property is really unique andit's worth this elevated price
point.
It's not always obvious.
I want my highly trained salesteam to be able to show off this
property.
I'm not going to use AI, and soit's always that binary choice
(24:08):
and either I'm going a hundredpercent automated, I'm trying to
get rid of my people, or mypeople are my most precious
commodity and I want toreinforce that, but I'm now
missing out on all the savingsand all of the analytics that
the AI folks were takingadvantage of.
So what LeaseHawk has done isjust look at all of the
interactions that the liveagents, the salespeople, are
having with their consumers andtrying to apply AI to those
(24:30):
interactions, to superchargethose interactions and to get
more out of the sales team.
So in a few months ago wedeployed our first version of
that product.
It's called Ace Insights.
Ace is the overarching umbrellawe have for our AI solutions
and this is Ace Insights thatlistens in on every phone
interaction that a live agenthas with a consumer, whether
(24:51):
that's a resident or it's aprospect looking for their next
home, or maybe it's a vendorthat needs to talk to somebody
on property.
Whatever, the reason is thatsomebody is having that phone
call, ace will analyze thatphone call to help the operator
understand who is this personcalling, why are they calling,
what questions are they asking,what challenges are they facing
(25:12):
and how is my employee doing onthe phone to be able to address
those challenges.
So, just as an example, most ofour clients today are focused
on how they can maximize thelead gen opportunities from the
phone channel.
They're still spending a lot ofmoney marketing leasing numbers
and folks are still callingthose numbers.
So it's a very important leadgen channel.
(25:32):
When a leasing agent answersthat phone, they have one shot
to convert that inbound callinto a tour or at least an
engaged prospect.
If they aren't doing a good jobon that call, then you're
wasting marketing dollars.
It's going to take you longerto lease that apartment unit.
So what our analytics can do isactually score that agent
against the the best practicesthat you've laid out.
(25:55):
So, for example, if somebodycalls and says, hey, I'm
interested in a two bedroom, howmuch is it?
Now an untrained leasing agentmay immediately say, well, my
two bedroom is $1,800.
And then the person says, okay,thanks.
And they hang up the phone.
Was it too expensive?
Was it spot on?
Why do they hang up?
Are they interested?
Are they going to call backlater?
All these things the leasingagent could have found out, but
(26:15):
didn't later.
All these things the leasingagent could have found out, but
didn't.
They immediately answered thequestion, immediately went down
to price and probably lost thatlead.
So our analytics is discoveringsituations where that happens.
Don't immediately answer onprice.
If somebody's asking how much atwo bedroom is, just start
asking questions.
Well, what are you looking forwhen you're looking to move in,
have you seen what our propertyhas to offer to all the benefits
of our community?
Because then when you thenshare the price later on in the
(26:37):
conversation or maybe when theycome in for a tour, they have
more context that you're sellingthe value.
You're not immediately goingdown to price.
And so if you've got, you know,if you've got 60 properties in
a portfolio and you're operatinga lot of communities in
multiple regions, how well thejob is your team doing?
How do you know?
The only metrics wetraditionally have are your
leasing metrics.
How many tours are theyscheduling, how many prospects
(26:59):
are they creating?
How many guest cards are theycreating in your CRM for
follow-up?
But you aren't really measuringthe quality of those
interactions.
So with ACE Insights, that'sexactly what we're doing.
We're measuring the quality ofevery one of those interactions
and giving every leasing agent ascorecard, like a grade, and
it's on a one to 100 scale andit's based on the report card
that every client that wepartner with to be able to
(27:20):
create on their own.
So their scorecard is their own, measured against their best
practices that they've defined.
So that's paying off reallywell for our clients who are
trying that out, and so that'swas rolled out just last month
and it's getting a lot of reallygood feedback and we're now
expanding it to include residentphone calls lot of really good
feedback, and we're nowexpanding it to include resident
phone calls.
And so we've known that sinceLeaseHawk has been focused on
(27:44):
lead gen, we've been settingaside all of the phone calls
coming in from the residentsthat need help, and now that AI
is listening in on every phonecall, we are getting a much
richer understanding of theresident experience and we are
uncovering some challenges thatour clients didn't even know
that they had.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
You know I'm going to tie this into some research I
became familiar with recentlyaround what.
MIT and Harvard did someresearch on many corporations
around the world I believe itwas around the world and you
know you look back at theIndustrial Revolution and
productivity and they weregetting between 18 and 20
percent lift in productivityover the employee's life cycle.
(28:17):
And we're talking about thetractors when you think about
how the world moved to old waysand it's not actually.
They're leaving money on thetable, leaving an opportunity on
(28:40):
the table.
And the key takeaway from this,professor, ceos are thinking
about it the wrong way and whilethey want to, they really want
going back to what you opened upwith, which was how do you
maintain the operating metrics,how do you continue to serve the
debt and serve the yields ofinvestors?
Right?
And so the CEOs are trying todo what they know and they're
(29:00):
like well, let's cut, let's useup.
And the employees know, herecomes tech, job cuts come.
Well, that's not necessarilytrue, because it actually
unleashes a whole new set ofreally great ways for employees
to skill up and, you know, makemore value in organizations.
But what you said it wascompelling in that, with ACE
Insights, you're talking aboutmaking the employee better.
(29:22):
So what this study was saying,the Harvard professor said, was.
He said CEOs need to look attheir employees like R&D.
When I asked you that question,you said you may already have
the talent.
You may not even recruit it, soit's unlocking potential
already within the organization,which is what great leaders do,
right?
Bad management companies arelike the plan is to spend more
(29:42):
money.
But if you can leverageresources you already have,
which is your employees, unlocktheir potential.
And then I'm thinking like evenpairing this with these
insights.
Now, this idea is I don't thinktruly people have a business
objective to cut a role or toeven centralize.
They just want to get theirmetrics.
They have to.
The constraints are upon them,all that stuff.
(30:03):
And so if they are thinkingabout this in an expansive or an
abundance mindset or in a howdo we get more productivity,
more sales, more revenue out ofwhat we already have?
They may not even be rethinkingthe model of who's on site and
all that stuff If they'rerenting faster, renting more and
they're getting these closingratios and those types of things
(30:25):
in place.
So it's almost like AceInsights is more of the
leadership stuff than even isthe tech itself.
It's like what can I do withthis information?
How can I impact theorganization and get the leasing
velocity up and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah it's about.
It's about not speculating asto what you need to focus your
time on.
It's knowing where you need tofocus your time and the more
quantitative analytics you haveaccess to.
That's more objective and lesssubjective than the more right
you're going to be.
So you could guess why yourlease renewal rates aren't
hitting the targeted number andyou could put in plans to see if
you're right.
(31:01):
But you may not know for sixmonths, nine months or 12 months
when the next cycle is up.
But if you knew in advance thatyou've got a point of friction
in your resident experience.
Every month I'm trying to payrent and I got this goofy portal
I have to log into and it'sreally confusing and because of
that I'm late half the time andI'm really frustrated and
whatever that may be, or it's anold property and I've got a lot
of maintenance issues and youneed to be really renovating and
(31:23):
investing in this.
Your people may not be tellingyou that, especially if you're a
more senior level person whohas to think holistically across
a lot of locations how much ofwhat's going on on property is
being surfaced up to help thesenior leadership team make
better decisions Right, and it'snot always easy.
Sometimes it's not intentional.
It's just that people are busy.
They're not tracking what'shappening, they're just trying
(31:44):
to solve the resident problemand then move on with their day.
Other people may be trying tocover up a little of the
challenges that they're having,hoping that they can fix it, and
sometimes you just don't.
Nobody knows, you're not payingattention to the patterns and
trends, and so, with tech andagain going back to Ace Insights
on all these interactions, it'sjust silently collecting all
that and analyzing it,summarizing it and identifying
(32:05):
the trends and patterns.
So you know.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, you know, in football analogy overused
analogies but that's Skybox.
You have a different view, youhave leadership at different
levels, but you do see thingsdifferently that you can't see,
you know, in a one propertytheme of recurring calls, things
like that.
You mentioned earlier abouttalking about ACE insights, the
(32:27):
best practices that the clientlaid out.
So this is really unique inthat they can customize this.
You're working with them to dothat.
Talk to us more about that.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Right, right.
So LeaseHawk has been in thecall analytics space for the
last 10 years and so we haveestablished some best practices
on how we say, based on thehundreds of millions of phone
calls we've been analyzing overthe last 12 years.
These are the 10 or 11 thingsthat you want to make sure your
people are doing and that's whatwe recommend, and we actually
publish an industry report cardbased on those best practices so
(32:55):
you can actually compare yourteam's results to the industry
benchmark, and it's all easilyaccessible in a nice compare and
contrast overlay in our in ourportal.
But if you have somethingunique about your property, uh
that you want to make sure thatyour team is including in their
sales pitch, frankly, then youcould add that to the best
practices questionnaire.
If you disagree with whatLeesock's best practices are and
(33:15):
you want to go your own route,that works as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I love that because it's like custom you know you're
not using what everybody else.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
You don't want your tech to constrain how you do
business.
It's supposed to be the otherway around.
Your tech is supposed to enableyou, not constrain you.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Yes, yes, so Ace Insights is that the new product
offering, or is there somethingmore?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
more Right?
Well, that's today.
It's.
It is called ACE insights.
It's focused on conversationalinsights across primarily the
phone channel right now, butworking on email and text so
that those are also very datarich ways that we can collect
data about the interactions thatthat consumers are having,
residents and prospects arehaving with leasing teams.
And, yeah, it's rolled out asof October and and we're getting
some great feedback and andit's delivering some early wins.
We had one client where we weredoing a review with this last
(34:00):
week and, not to get in too muchdetail, but the number one
reason why people were callingtheir centralized offices were
needing help to pay the rent.
And they knew that.
They knew they had somechallenges.
But what they didn't know was,if you take the next layer down,
peel off that onion a littlebit and say, well, why are they
having rental problems, problemspaying the rent?
And you dive into well, it'sthose that are late.
(34:23):
They need help with money,grammar, western union.
Well, why are they havingproblems with that?
And then why and why?
And you can dive right down tothe nut of like, what is the
root cause of this?
And it's like, okay, that's,that is fascinating.
I knew it was an issue.
I didn't realize it was thatbig of an issue and so now
that's I'm going to make that ahigher priority for my teams to
solve, and even even simplethings about the usability of
the resident portal.
(34:43):
Um, uh, ace insights was tocall out that, hey, when
someone's late on their rent,all these fields are disabled
and so they have no choice butto call you.
They, they, you're not givingthem another option, so you're
actually creating the need forthem to call.
You could modify your portalsomewhat, they could modify
their payment option right there.
And he goes yeah, I heardsomething about that, but again,
I didn't realize it wasgenerating this much frustration
(35:05):
.
Sure.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
You know we have weeks away from the multifamily
innovation and AI summit.
I know you're speaking both inthe sessions on stage and then
also you'll be doing aninnovation showcase, so we're
happy for you to do that andliterally show here.
We're talking about it.
You'll have the opportunity toshow people in that session so
if you're not already attendingthat, definitely you'll get to
(35:27):
meet Larry and experience thatshowcase.
We always enjoy those.
Those are fun and leading intothat session around change.
Where should we take the restof this?
We've talked a lot about someof the things that you've
already done the past history ofall the things that are
available to customers today.
They're shipped, they're readyto go.
You could take, you coulddeploy these in the portfolios
(35:47):
today.
Is there anything next comingfrom LeaseHawk that we can
reveal, or is there?
What are you thinking?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
about.
Oh yes, we're always thinkingand looking at the next thing,
but where we're focusing someenergy on right now is
reimagining the role of the CRMin operations.
Traditionally, the CRM is adata entry tool.
You type in information, you'recreating contacts, you're
tracking all the interactionsyou're having, you're keeping
track of tasks, maybe and nextsteps Very manual A lot of data
(36:15):
entry, always having to nag yourteams to make sure you update
the CRM, because if it's not inthe CRM it doesn't exist.
But they don't often do it.
And so, with AI now being aprimary user interface between
the consumer and your employees,you don't need to manually type
stuff in anymore.
The AI can make that as part ofthe workflow.
So now we see that entry pointof AI being the initiation of an
(36:38):
automated workflow modifyingdata in the CRM, creating a set
of standard tasks based onwhat's happening, customizing
tasks as needed and then, wherepossible, actually executing on
those tasks.
So it's all automated.
So the CRM is evolving awayfrom being a data entry tool and
into a centralized workflowautomation engine where the UI
(37:00):
or the need for your users tolog in, your employees to log in
, starts to be focused more on.
What are the analytics tellingme what are the KPIs telling me,
how do I need to adjust theengine in order to do a better
job of delivering on results?
It's the instrument panel ofyour car and the things it's
running.
That's where it's going andwe're putting a lot of thought
into that right now.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yeah, and you never see that in the commercials.
You see it toeing the boat oryou know, yeah, yeah, because AI
, it should disappear.
Technology kind of shoulddisappear.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's in the background, it's just kind of
there making sure things workingand you don't really think
about it anymore.
And AI is enabling all that now, like it's really quantum leap
enabling it.
It was all incremental the lastfew years and that's just the
thing I talk about with my teamis that AI is not the goal.
Anyone here who may belistening or watching this and
(37:48):
is thinking about their AIstrategy don't think about AI
being the goal.
It's just another tool, it'sanother way of achieving the
goal.
But you've got to define whatthe goal is, and it's
interesting, patrick, how hardit is sometimes for people to
actually describe what is itthey're trying to achieve in a
quantitative way.
And once you can figure thatout, then AI is just one of the
many tools that you have to getthere faster and to reimagine
(38:11):
new solutions.
And it is going to be unlockingtons of new solutions that just
are not feasible right now.
And that's really exciting fora company like Leesock that is
focused on AI how fast it'smoving, where it's going, how
quickly it's going to get there,when is it going to become
self-aware and it's going tobecome Skynet and start killing
all the humans.
I'll leave that for another day, but it's moving very fast.
(38:34):
All the promises of sciencefiction 10 years ago.
We're starting to see.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I think it's an opportunity for leaders to know
new ways to get to that yield,get to that operating metric
that, at the end of the day,this investment vehicle was
assembled for right.
Deliver that value to thecustomer, bring great people
together, bring that techtogether and make the business
better.
I mean keeping it simple.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, and you mentioned the innovation council
that we have, which is afascinating forum because it's
it's made up of people fromdifferent backgrounds.
They have different rolesserving real estate, some are
operators, some are providers,some are investors, marketing
people, leasing people right,it's all over, and collectively,
we're really challenging eachother to rethink the status quo,
(39:17):
and I love one of the forums wehad a few weeks ago where we
were talking about the impactthat AI is going to have, just
on role definition, and thetheme we landed on was just
acknowledging that there's afear of people losing their job
because of AI and, as such,they're naturally going to
resist it and by resisting it,they're actually harming their
(39:39):
own career.
And the takeaway we all landedon it's not something we
invented in that forum, but itjust really resonated with the
group was no one is going tolose their job to AI.
They're going to lose their jobto people who are using AI.
So if you're not the one usingAI, you are going to lose your
job, right, and if you are usingAI, it's going to unlock so
(40:01):
much productivity and power inwhat you're currently doing and
it's going to help you reimaginewhat your career looks like
going forward, and it shouldn'tbe about losing jobs.
It should be about unlockingthe potential of everybody to
contribute more.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, and unlocking that potential.
This is where I get mostexcited.
You know, historically it'sbeen the people that could
create leverage in a businesswas with loans and debt and
finance and these big, you knowsort of wall street kind of
moves.
And you know you need to havean MBA in finance and understand
analytics and be a certainpersonality type to you know.
Have those negotiations, bringthe attorneys together, bring
(40:36):
all the disciplines together.
But now, as you mentioned, thereare R&D and employees of all of
these companies, with AI beingthe equalizer and the leveling
of the playing field.
That everybody's at the samestage right now and we all get
to learn together and we'regoing to fix things together and
we're going to break thingstogether, right, and I think
that our goal with theMultifamily Innovation Council
(40:57):
is we've been bringing peopletogether for many years Now.
We want to bring the technologytogether.
You guys have obviously anamazing technology, so if we can
bring that into the businessesin a productive way, then all
the employees enjoy that.
They have the same leverage asmaybe one of the top executives
in the organization, becausetechnology is leveraged to the
business, just like some of theassumptions we made about debt
(41:19):
being leveraged to the business.
So listen, I've had a talk allday with you on this stuff.
And we will, because we're goingto be doing more events in more
places here in the innovationlab here, and I'd love to have
you back.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know you've got some people on your team that we
can contribute as well, andreally appreciate it If I could
just say, patrick, that the workyou're doing here, this
innovation lab, is reallyinspiring, because you and I we
talk a lot but I haven't been toyour.
I don't call it an office.
I don't know what to call thisthing now.
It's an innovation lab.
Yeah, it's a lab, and it justfeels like a lab.
There's a lot of stuffhappening here.
(41:52):
There's just a lot of kineticenergy.
I just feel when I walked intothis room for the first time and
you've got different sectionsthat are allocated toward
different types of things andand they certain and they can
foster different types ofcollaboration, but it just the
space that you've built.
This is inviting thecollaborative efforts of
multiple people and as you weregiving me the tour, the energy
(42:13):
level in the room was justgetting really jazzed and all
the ideas that you were talkingand I was able to maybe riff on
you with you a little bit ondifferent things.
So that's what this innovationlab I think is going to turn
into right and bringing peopletogether to reimagine the status
quo, to do something differentthat's going to have an impact
on the industry overall.
So I applaud you for yourleadership here and the creative
(42:37):
energy that you and your teamare bringing to this space.
It's just really cool.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, I think it's just a significance of build
with people and people willsupport what they help build.
And you know we've we've hadwhat?
200 meetings, I think, on theinnovation council.
It's just listening and knowingwhat's what's useful.
Right now.
It's confusion.
It's it's where I have to onlylearn inside a sales
conversation, ai technology.
Some of the stuff it's askilling up that's required and
(43:02):
some of these things are thingsyou just need to do.
It's like a lease up.
Until you do a lease up, youdon't really understand the
nuances of going through theurgency and lender walks and all
the inspections and all thesethings and you can learn about
it and read about it and go to aconference about it.
But until you do it and youbreak it and you mess it and you
see yourself fix it, you end upwith new observations, and
(43:25):
that's what the purpose of thelab is is getting the
opportunity for otherorganizations to benefit from
bringing those people togetherand giving them a playground to
and then, of course, learn fromexperts.
I hope you're on that stage inthere.
We a playground to and then, ofcourse, learn from experts.
I hope you're on that stage inthere.
We have a full venue eventcenter that you, you know you
can drop in and we get what wecall small event, big audience
and we get to the point and wemake business better.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
I love it.
These, these nuggets of ideasthat people can pick up from
attending these, these summitsand these forums.
It's a nugget of idea thatbecomes the launch pad towards
something even more amazing.
Yeah Well, the hat.
Without having that nugget tostart right, that never happens,
Right?
So, and the only way it happensis a numbers game.
You got to get people togethera lot and have these touch
points, get them connectedtogether, and sometimes the
(44:07):
connections don't work, butsometimes you get that one
person connected with that otherright person.
They have a quick chat and nextthing you know, boom.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, and you guys are in Scottsdale.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
So we're right down the road, yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
We'll be talking more about that stuff.
Yeah, it's very good, we'llinvite more opportunities in
Scottsdale.
Well, listen, this has beengreat.
Tell us a little bit about howpeople can learn about where to
get in touch with Leesock.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Leesockcom.
Funny enough, the internet'snot going away.
Patrick's yes, so leasehawkcom,or just google leasehawk, and
and we'll give you all theinformation, as you can find all
the information you need forfollow-up.
Yeah, we're excited to connectwith everybody at the upcoming
summit and looking forward tothose amazing conversations
awesome, great to have you onall right, likewise, thank you.
All right, welcome back.
So today on this episode I haveLarry Gorman, president of
LeaseHawk, and today we're goingto explore a lot of different
conversations around innovationbut communications and getting
fundamental about creating thatprofitability and efficiency and
demand generation, how youcommunicate and engage customers
and how you bring value tomultifamily operators.
(00:20):
Listen, there is a lot ofchoices out there in how you
think about communicating,engaging, analyzing information
that happens in calls on site,in maintenance operations and
that lead to business decisionsthat make the business better.
So today we're going to betalking all about those things
and more.
Larry Gorman is somebody that Ivalue highly.
(00:42):
When he speaks, we don't getthe opportunity to spend as much
time as we'd like.
He's part of the MultifamilyInnovation Council and he
contributes in those meetingsevery Friday in ways that we're
just so privileged to have.
So today I welcome you intothat conversation, larry.
Welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Glad to be here, Patrick.
Good seeing you.
I love what you've done withthis whole space.
It's very innovative.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, you know it's very innovative.
Yeah, it's one of those thingsand you know this, we didn't set
out to design that.
It was more like the listening,like what would be.
How do you increase the valueof the things that we need to do
in the frequency of how theworld's moving today?
And so I know you guys havebeen designing and building
products similar for many yearsin multifamily.
But take us back to who Larryis, because I know you've joined
(01:26):
LeaseHawk a few years ago, manyyears ago, and you've made some
incredible innovations thereand I know you have a great team
to pull all this off.
But take us through who you are, why you're at LeaseHawk,
because some of our listenershaven't yet enjoyed that
experience yet.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Oh, thank you for that, patrick.
Well, my background is purelyin technology.
My earlier days in my careerwas in the hospitality industry
and I was leading a team thatwas building out one of the
industry's early cloud-basedproperty management systems.
This was back before, wheneverything was on-premise for
the most part and the idea ofmoving things off-premise and
(01:59):
into the cloud was kind of scaryto some operators, losing
control of the data, having torely on a browser to access your
information instead of atrusted application.
And it was something that weled for this company and it was
very successful for us and itbecame a competitive advantage
in our industry, and so wedecided to carve that out and
make it its own commercialoffering that we would make
(02:20):
available to the entire industry.
So I did that for a number ofyears and then had an
opportunity to apply the lessonslearned from that experience in
the single family space, whereI was the head of technology for
one of the larger players insingle family, and a lot of the
things that we saw inhospitality that we had spent 10
years tackling were things thatwe were anticipating to see in
(02:42):
single family, and it equallyapplies to multifamily.
So one of the earlyanticipating to see in single
family, and it equally appliesto multifamily.
So one of the early innovationswe did in single family was
trying to solve the problem ofmaintaining the expected
operating margin.
So the challenge with singlefamily is every one of your
units you have to hop in the carand drive from house to house,
unit to unit in order to helpwith leasing, in order to help
(03:05):
with maintenance and with turnsand relative to the multifamily
operators.
That was a challenge, and so toget the efficiencies needed,
one you had to build tremendousscale, but you also had to build
really efficient workflow andprocess and you had to leverage
technology as much as possibleso that you could overcome what
(03:26):
we would call the windshieldproblem, and that was very
successful.
One of the things that we didearly on was move to 100%
self-guided tours so thatleasing agents didn't have to
show up at a house andcoordinate times with prospects
looking to tour home, because ifanybody was late whether the
leasing agent was late or theprospect was late it could throw
your whole day off.
It'd be like going to adoctor's appointment for a two
(03:49):
o'clock and not actually beingable to see him until three or
four because you start to backup your appointments if the
first one of the day falls short, and so moving to a self-guided
option where prospects could goon to a portal, register for a
tour, get the code to access thehouse and then provide their
own tour without relying on ahuman was a game changer, and it
(04:09):
was early in the industry.
Not many people were doing it.
And then having a centralizedregional leasing office was
another big deal.
It's obviously impractical forevery house to have its own
on-premise leasing office and,like in Phoenix, for example, we
had several thousand homes thatwere all being rented out of a
single leasing office.
Here and in every region in theUS had their own leasing
offices and those concepts thatworked really well in single
(04:31):
family, out of necessity, inorder to make it a viable
business model, they can easilybe applied to multifamily.
Family have on-site leasingoffices in every community.
Why can't you centralize that?
Why does multifamily like toreally prioritize the white
glove, human touch, instead ofthe self-service model that
single family was required touse?
(04:52):
Why are we not doing more onthe maintenance side in order to
avoid those emergencymaintenance tickets and then to
maybe consolidate multiplemaintenance items into a single
visit.
There's just a lot ofefficiencies from operating
single family space that couldequally apply to multifamily,
but it wasn't.
Because it wasn't necessary, itwas mother.
What's that saying aboutinvention?
Yeah, necessity is the motherof invention.
(05:14):
Well, single family to beviable, it had to figure out
some of these operationalefficiencies that multifamily
didn't need to be profitable.
But once single family provedthe model, then multifamily
operators I think we're gettingcurious.
I know that with our company,we hosted a couple of the larger
multifamily operators wherethey just picked our brain about
what we were doing, becausethey were exploring centralizing
their leasing operations.
(05:35):
This was 2016.
So people the industry now inmultifamily is really excited
about centralization.
But I was talking tomultifamily operators in 2016,
trying to learn from us andsingle family how we were doing
it, and so some of the thoughtleaders who are now take it for
granted that everything iscentralized in their world.
They were the thought leadersof multifamily.
They were setting the pace forother operators who weren't
(05:57):
seeing the need.
But everybody started seeing theneed in 2020 when we had COVID
and all of the sacred cows thatother industries might've been
challenging were in multifamilywere saying, no, this is how
things need to be done here.
This is the way it's alwaysbeen done.
They were forced to rethinkthings.
The leasing offices were closed.
(06:19):
People still needed to find aplace to live.
Your teams aren't coming towork, no one's answering the
phone.
How are you going to operate inthis new model?
And they were willing.
We, as an industry, werewilling to experiment, because
what other choice did we have?
Patrick and some of those ideasthat we thought we needed
temporarily resonated with thepublic.
We realize now the public wantsto be able to conduct business
(06:42):
on their own terms.
Why should I have to beconstrained by the hours that
the leasing office is open?
Why can't I do all of myexploration online?
Why can't I do a virtual tour,even submit an application and
sign a lease without evertalking to somebody?
Why can't I do that?
Other industries allow us to dothat.
And yet multifamily seemed tobe unique in thinking about
(07:02):
things in a very traditional way, without really looking around
to see what was possible, andCOVID changed a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, you know I want to get to the data because if
you're not there, this is whereI think Leeshock is really
interesting in terms of theanalytics and the communications
.
And how do you operate moreeffectively in communications if
you are in this type of a modelor even moving to that type of
a model?
But, looking back, youmentioned the single family.
I mean, in fact, it's harder insingle family than it is a
(07:31):
multifamily because you don'thave the concentration in
property.
You know, and I did this, I had400 single family homes across
many different states and Iremember we took a portfolio
approach to reinventing how wedelivered, maintenance and
leasing, but we were reallyfully occupied.
It wasn't a whole lot of demandneed for leasing, it was more of
the renewals, but we couldn'tphysically have an employee
(07:55):
in-guided or the code and thosetypes of things, which stands to
say that we would have moreadoption in multifamily for that
approach, because you know youhave one concentration property
that has 150, 300 units, 1500units, whatever that may be.
(08:16):
And do you think that's mindsetBecause there's a change going
from?
Well, we have white glove, nowwe have to do some like the
change management and then theexpectations of the process you
went to get it right.
Do you believe that multifamilyowners and operator have an
expectation on partners thatit's got to be perfect before
they try something?
And what did you learn inrolling all that out that
(08:39):
impacted that portfoliofinancially, I imagine,
tremendously.
Was it perfect?
How do you move through thatRight, and is that what's
keeping multifamily from goingmore in that direction?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Well, fear of the unknown is certainly it's.
That's part of the humancondition.
So we definitely, as humans,there's fear of change and there
is maybe a little bit of fearof doing the work.
So if no one's asking you totake this really big innovative
step that has high risk butpotentially high reward, then
why would you stick your neckout and take that risk?
Because if you fail, then yousuffer the consequences and if
(09:10):
you succeed, maybe you don'tearn any rewards.
So, having an incentivizationsystem where people are
incentivized to take risk andtry things, knowing that you're
not going to be perfect Someideas you may think look good on
paper, don't look good inexecution.
But for those companies thatare looking to try and encourage
their teams to be moreinnovative, start with what's
(09:32):
incentivizing them to beinnovative.
Usually, what I see are thenegative incentives.
Yes, I'll let you try thisproject, but it better work,
because if it doesn't, thenyou're gone and you don't get
back to that table, right, right?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, yeah, either you're fired or you get a bad
reputation, or and does theemployee have that fear too,
because they're single flow ofincome?
I don't want to take the risk.
How do you?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
move through that.
It starts with one.
It's setting the culture inplace that encourages and
motivates and incentivizesinnovation.
Try something, knowing thatit's going to fail how about
that?
But we're going to learn fromit, Maybe redefine what the word
failure means.
When my kid was really youngand it was an analogy I like to
use a lot with my teams was whenhe was going through that stage
(10:15):
, learning how to walk.
He wasn't perfect right out ofthe gate.
You know, you start withcrawling and you take that first
step to try and stand up andyou fall and you hit your head,
but you don't give up.
You keep trying.
But it's little steps,incrementally getting better,
learning and adjusting yourapproach.
And then one day the kid'swalking and next thing you know
he's playing baseball out in thebackyard.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
How did you create those fail safe environments
when you were rolling outsomething like that?
If you're doing missioncritical things, how did you
think through that and createthose observations that people
would then know themselves?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right.
So you start with the businessproblem to solve and you put
some very concrete quantitativemetrics around how you know if
any solution implement isactually going to move the
needle.
So one example might be withthe self-guided tours.
There's all these.
Well, what about this, whatabout this, what about that?
Well, this is not going to workbecause the logistics here and
what happens when someone getsin the house and you don't know
what they're going to do they'regoing to steal all the
(11:08):
appliances or they're going todo all these things.
And so automatically you startwith that culture of fear where
you're focusing on all thethings that are going to go
wrong and all the reasons why itcan't work.
But it's all based onspeculation, all based on the
unknown, because we haven'ttried it yet.
So you take a business problem.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
So there's a lot of interpretation of what might
happen versus the observation ofwhat did happen.
Sure, yeah so you've got to setup a test, set up a test.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
What you don't want to do is bet the farm on this
thing and say, okay, we're goingto, we're going to migrate all
80,000 homes to a self-guidedtour model and it's all going to
happen on December 1st and itbetter work or else we're out of
business.
That's obviously crazy.
But you take a maybe take aregion, or maybe take a single
house, or maybe take a clusterof houses within a sub-market
and you work with your vendorson what the hardware is going to
(11:55):
look like at these houses.
You don't have all thelogistics figured out.
You don't have your pricingmodel figured out.
Maybe your supplier doesn'thave everything figured out
either, because, frankly, in oursituation, our supplier was
figuring this out with us, andso you try it and you learn
about how do you install the hub, how do you install the smart
lock, how do you issue the keys?
(12:15):
Maybe the codes get in thehouse.
You're giving it to prospects,initially over the phone.
You know that's not how youwant it to be at scale, but at
least approve the model.
Sure, Give them the code andmaybe you join them at the house
to make sure that the codeworks.
There's no flaws in getting itand no, that's not what the
model is going to be eventually.
But this is all part of thelearning process.
And you discover the feedback,you find out what the experience
(12:35):
is like from the individualconsumers who you put through it
and as you gain more confidence, you let go of the reins a
little bit and then you maybeissue the codes over the phone
and you don't join them at thehouse and then you deal with the
problems that they have thereand you learn from it and you
make adjustments and you talk toyour supplier and and you start
to build excitement andconfidence.
You learn what works and whatdoesn't and ideas.
(12:57):
Then people can bring the tablethat no one had considered
before, because now that you seeit out in the field, you
discover certain things and youjust try it again.
It small solution, learn fromit, rinse and repeat the plan,
do check, act cycle.
You plan your work, you do thework, you check your results and
then you act on those results.
(13:18):
To do it all over again andpretty soon that snowball gets
bigger and bigger.
Next thing, you know it's anationwide rollout.
Now you've got your supplychain issues figured out and how
much of the smart hubs you haveat the leasing office versus
just in time.
How do you monetize it?
Maybe you start charging yourtenants, your residents, an
incremental fee because nowthey're enjoying the benefits of
(13:39):
the smart home technology inthe house during the residency.
Now you start looking atpartnerships with Amazon and
others, and I think this kind ofbuilds on its own, but none of
that is possible without takingthat first step to try it at a
house.
And if it was, you try it onceand it better work, or we're not
going to try it again.
That's the thing that kills allinnovation.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, it does.
And I'm trying to elevate theimportance in the professional,
like if you were in medical careand you knew something could
help the patient, you know youstart to question, like your due
diligence, to make that knownto the patient.
This is a better path forwardIn real estate and multifamily.
I mean, the ultimate end goalis to create wealth and to
(14:18):
protect it.
I mean that's why that vehicle,from an investment standpoint,
exists.
And then you have like, well,how do you go about doing that?
Well, you got to get the rightpeople together.
You got to understand thecustomer of the future, bring
tech and people together.
But the real estate operatorstoday anchor into the gravity of
the situation to get this right.
So my mission out there is toallow, like, these conversations
I'm having with you right nowis very innovative, very
(14:42):
technical.
Well, not even because they'revery successful.
So how do you get a company tochange or do something
differently when they're winningRight and they're winning
because they've focused on debtleverage, real estate
(15:03):
fundamentals, supply, demandfundamentals, like almost half
of the business.
Now, as companies move more andmore into technology companies,
the customers are expectingtechnology and engineers see
code as a system, whereas thebuilding is the system and, as
you're describing that, I'mthinking how do we get the
executives, the leasing agents,the operators, the maintenance,
(15:23):
the people doing the work, tosee that as the opportunity to
create that alpha, thatdifference between I'm this
manager, but when I work withthis group, they have this
innovative process.
They have this ability to failsafe.
They have the ability to, whensomething breaks, they fix it
quickly.
They have the ability to bringin a great partner work with
them.
All that stuff, and that, Ibelieve, is the found money, or
(15:47):
the found opportunity.
Knowing that, what do you sayto an executive that is building
that team to get the rightpeople around them to do the
things that you're talking about?
What kind of resources do theyneed to provide them?
What kind of fail runway dothey need to provide them?
If they were to hiring theleaders, building through people
(16:09):
, how would you?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
advise.
Wow, there's a lot to unpackthere.
Patrick, if you're looking atindividual contributors that you
need to assemble on your team,I would say first start with who
you've got.
You may actually have a lot oftalent that needs to be
unleashed within your own teams,but you are not giving them
permission to actually be partof the solution.
So, being more transparent withwhat your company is facing,
(16:30):
being more transparent with whatother industries are doing,
maybe with what your company isfacing, being more transparent
with what other industries aredoing, maybe, maybe learning
from them and applying thelessons that other industries
have learned the hard way.
You can benefit from all theirmistakes and apply it to your
specific situation, but startwith your own teams, and the
characteristics I'm looking forare folks that are naturally
curious, who have a passion forlearning.
A question I like to ask ininterviews is to ask them about
(16:53):
their how they learn and like.
What books are you readingright now?
Do you have any books open onKindle or on your nightstand at
home?
What is it, and do you likefiction or nonfiction?
How do you learn?
Do you learn by reading?
Do you learn by doing, or maybeeverything you needed to know
you learned in college and thewhole learning thing is behind
you now and now.
It's all about executing, andthose are obviously the kinds of
people that you would not wantto be part of an innovation team
(17:16):
.
But you also needcross-functional skills as well.
So, in a multifamily operatorenvironment, you got the
corporate office.
There's just a lot of differentfunctions that need to be part
of any innovation process thatyou're going to implement or any
innovation initiative thatyou're going to implement.
So make sure that you've gotthe buy-in from all the
different functional heads.
You've got executive leadershipon what you're trying, a bot in
(17:36):
on what you're trying to do, andyou've defined a problem and
you define what success lookslike, and that's the thing that
a lot of people miss out is whatdoes success look like and how
do I measure that and over whattime period?
You've got to time box thesethings, patrick, because these
innovation projects could lastforever and you never know like
what's the definition of when,when it ends?
How do I know we've won?
(17:57):
How do I know that thing's over?
When can I move the people onto another project?
And if you don't give people awin, then they start to get
demotivated, they start to loseinterest, the budget starts to
get a little tight and moneygets reallocated to other
projects and then eventuallythen it fizzles from not having
a well-defined definition.
But I'm kind of getting offcourse here in terms of the
(18:18):
question.
But in terms of attracting thepeople, I'd say look in your own
team, Look at other industriesthat have done what you're
trying to do and maybe go findout who's done it and see if you
can steal them and get theminterested in the multifamily
industry, because obviouslythere's a lot to do here and
there's a lot when it comes totechnology that we could be
doing that we're not and we'rejust now entering a next
(18:40):
disruption of technology withartificial intelligence and all
that it's going to do disruptmultifamily.
So anybody who's reallyinterested in having a
meaningful impact in theircareer to make a big difference
in helping people find a greatplace to live I mean this is a
pretty exciting place to be.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, and it gets me to the speed of all of this
happening so quickly in ordersof magnitude from the internet
re-envision, a lot of businesses, and it brings me to
communications and even in whatwe're doing with the council,
with you, every Friday and ourannual meetings and things like
that.
It's just the frequency and therepetitions and the touches
(19:17):
that we can add into theequation, otherwise we retreat
back to well, let's do it thisother way.
So let's go into communicationsnow.
Let's just look at all of thetouches.
I mean you've got people thattour in person and virtual.
You've got the centralizedstuff.
You've got phone you.
You got communications onlinevia chat.
You have email.
(19:37):
You have all these things goingon and you guys have built some
of the most impressive products.
I know you've supported some ofthe most robust companies in
the industry and you're nimbleenough to build with companies
on even smaller middle marketcompanies as well.
Talk to me about communicationsand where the opportunities are
in multifamily.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, love that.
Let's start with going back toCOVID, because that was really
underscored the importance ofthe work that LeaseHawk and
others in this space are doing.
When COVID happened, peoplestill needed to conduct business
, but it was harder tocommunicate in the traditional
ways, which would be over thephone or people sending emails
back and forth.
That was our forced necessity,yeah, yeah, so out of necessity,
(20:17):
when someone answers the phone,you spend all this money
marketing your amazing community.
You've got your prominentlydisplayed phone number and a
prospect looking for a place tolive and calls that number and
nobody's there to answer.
It's a wasted marketinginvestment.
It's a missed opportunity.
They're going to immediatelypick up the phone and call
somebody else and now it's goingto take you longer to fill that
(20:37):
vacant unit.
And so where LeaseHawk focusedearly days of COVID, we were
just coming out with a virtualleasing assistant, a voice-based
, chat-based, email-based,text-based assistant that could
take the human out of thatcommunication path.
So when somebody was looking tolease a new apartment home,
(20:59):
rather than having to have aconversation with a live person,
they could have a conversationwith a virtual assistant.
And that virtual assistant wasfocused on answering the basic
questions.
It was helping themself-qualify?
Do I meet the rentalrequirements?
Does this thing have theamenities I'm looking for?
What options are there in termsof the two bedroom versus the
three bedroom?
Where's the location relativeto the points of interest that
(21:19):
matter to me?
These are all high volume,relatively low value
interactions that a consumermight have, either on their own
hunting and pecking on thewebsite or by having a
conversation with the leasingagent.
But when you don't have aleasing agent in the office to
answer the phone either thatopen position hasn't been filled
or that person is out theregiving tours then the prospect
(21:40):
has no place to go other than togo find somebody else.
So LeaseHawk's focus early dayswas on the virtual leasing
assistant, and that's the.
Ace, is what we call our productand it will do all of what I
just said.
It will have the human-likevoice interactions with people
who are answering, who areengaging in those calls to
action.
To dial a phone number, if youprefer to text, ace will talk to
(22:01):
you over text and a lot oftimes people think they're
interacting with a human.
If you want to email back andforth, ace can do that as well,
and that takes care of all ofthe self-qualifying steps at the
top of the leasing funnel thatis helping the consumer
determine do I want to actuallyinvest in visiting this
community to tour an availableunit?
(22:22):
And that has worked really wellto automate the top of the
funnel, and I think that'sstarting to become table stakes,
like if you're a communitywho's not using a virtual agent
to help with that, you reallyneed to be looking at it,
whether it's Leesock or somebodyelse, because this is the high
volume, relatively low valuepart of the equation.
Now, once you start gettinginto the post-tour follow-up,
now the handoff starts to happento where you're getting into
(22:44):
lower volume, higher valueinteractions, where you might
want to have your leasing teambe front and center, because at
this point it's a real salesopportunity and so people are
people.
If you need to be sold onsomething, it's not a virtual
agent that's going to sell it toyou necessarily over a text
interaction.
It's going to be a well-trainedsales team who is showing off
(23:05):
all that this property has tooffer, some of which might not
be obvious to a consumer, and soyou have to have a well-trained
sales staff.
So leasing agents aresalespeople first and foremost,
and so you've got to train themlike you would any salesperson.
Overcome objections, sell thevalue, don't immediately jump
down to price.
All those things are where thehuman touch is important, and so
(23:26):
where LeaseHawk focused on thelast year or so is how can we
leverage AI to help thoseinteractions more effectively
than what we have been today?
And so it was a very interestingbinary choice our clients are
making.
If I want to leverage AI, doesthat mean that all my
interactions with my consumershave to be with a virtual agent?
If I like that and I want toget rid of the humans, that's a
(23:47):
really good cost savingsdecision I can make, but I might
be giving up a little bit onthe human experience.
On the other side, you've got acohort of operators that say my
property is really unique andit's worth this elevated price
point.
It's not always obvious.
I want my highly trained salesteam to be able to show off this
property.
I'm not going to use AI, and soit's always that binary choice
(24:08):
and either I'm going a hundredpercent automated, I'm trying to
get rid of my people, or mypeople are my most precious
commodity and I want toreinforce that, but I'm now
missing out on all the savingsand all of the analytics that
the AI folks were takingadvantage of.
So what LeaseHawk has done isjust look at all of the
interactions that the liveagents, the salespeople, are
having with their consumers andtrying to apply AI to those
(24:30):
interactions, to superchargethose interactions and to get
more out of the sales team.
So in a few months ago wedeployed our first version of
that product.
It's called Ace Insights.
Ace is the overarching umbrellawe have for our AI solutions
and this is Ace Insights thatlistens in on every phone
interaction that a live agenthas with a consumer, whether
(24:51):
that's a resident or it's aprospect looking for their next
home, or maybe it's a vendorthat needs to talk to somebody
on property.
Whatever, the reason is thatsomebody is having that phone
call, ace will analyze thatphone call to help the operator
understand who is this personcalling, why are they calling,
what questions are they asking,what challenges are they facing
(25:12):
and how is my employee doing onthe phone to be able to address
those challenges.
So, just as an example, most ofour clients today are focused
on how they can maximize thelead gen opportunities from the
phone channel.
They're still spending a lot ofmoney marketing leasing numbers
and folks are still callingthose numbers.
So it's a very important leadgen channel.
(25:32):
When a leasing agent answersthat phone, they have one shot
to convert that inbound callinto a tour or at least an
engaged prospect.
If they aren't doing a good jobon that call, then you're
wasting marketing dollars.
It's going to take you longerto lease that apartment unit.
So what our analytics can do isactually score that agent
against the the best practicesthat you've laid out.
(25:55):
So, for example, if somebodycalls and says, hey, I'm
interested in a two bedroom, howmuch is it?
Now an untrained leasing agentmay immediately say, well, my
two bedroom is $1,800.
And then the person says, okay,thanks.
And they hang up the phone.
Was it too expensive?
Was it spot on?
Why do they hang up?
Are they interested?
Are they going to call backlater?
All these things the leasingagent could have found out, but
(26:15):
didn't later.
All these things the leasingagent could have found out, but
didn't.
They immediately answered thequestion, immediately went down
to price and probably lost thatlead.
So our analytics is discoveringsituations where that happens.
Don't immediately answer onprice.
If somebody's asking how much atwo bedroom is, just start
asking questions.
Well, what are you looking forwhen you're looking to move in,
have you seen what our propertyhas to offer to all the benefits
of our community?
Because then when you thenshare the price later on in the
(26:37):
conversation or maybe when theycome in for a tour, they have
more context that you're sellingthe value.
You're not immediately goingdown to price.
And so if you've got, you know,if you've got 60 properties in
a portfolio and you're operatinga lot of communities in
multiple regions, how well thejob is your team doing?
How do you know?
The only metrics wetraditionally have are your
leasing metrics.
How many tours are theyscheduling, how many prospects
(26:59):
are they creating?
How many guest cards are theycreating in your CRM for
follow-up?
But you aren't really measuringthe quality of those
interactions.
So with ACE Insights, that'sexactly what we're doing.
We're measuring the quality ofevery one of those interactions
and giving every leasing agent ascorecard, like a grade, and
it's on a one to 100 scale andit's based on the report card
that every client that wepartner with to be able to
(27:20):
create on their own.
So their scorecard is their own, measured against their best
practices that they've defined.
So that's paying off reallywell for our clients who are
trying that out, and so that'swas rolled out just last month
and it's getting a lot of reallygood feedback and we're now
expanding it to include residentphone calls lot of really good
feedback, and we're nowexpanding it to include resident
phone calls.
And so we've known that sinceLeaseHawk has been focused on
(27:44):
lead gen, we've been settingaside all of the phone calls
coming in from the residentsthat need help, and now that AI
is listening in on every phonecall, we are getting a much
richer understanding of theresident experience and we are
uncovering some challenges thatour clients didn't even know
that they had.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
You know I'm going to tie this into some research I
became familiar with recentlyaround what.
MIT and Harvard did someresearch on many corporations
around the world I believe itwas around the world and you
know you look back at theIndustrial Revolution and
productivity and they weregetting between 18 and 20
percent lift in productivityover the employee's life cycle.
(28:17):
And we're talking about thetractors when you think about
how the world moved to old waysand it's not actually.
They're leaving money on thetable, leaving an opportunity on
(28:40):
the table.
And the key takeaway from this,professor, ceos are thinking
about it the wrong way and whilethey want to, they really want
going back to what you opened upwith, which was how do you
maintain the operating metrics,how do you continue to serve the
debt and serve the yields ofinvestors?
Right?
And so the CEOs are trying todo what they know and they're
(29:00):
like well, let's cut, let's useup.
And the employees know, herecomes tech, job cuts come.
Well, that's not necessarilytrue, because it actually
unleashes a whole new set ofreally great ways for employees
to skill up and, you know, makemore value in organizations.
But what you said it wascompelling in that, with ACE
Insights, you're talking aboutmaking the employee better.
(29:22):
So what this study was saying,the Harvard professor said, was.
He said CEOs need to look attheir employees like R&D.
When I asked you that question,you said you may already have
the talent.
You may not even recruit it, soit's unlocking potential
already within the organization,which is what great leaders do,
right?
Bad management companies arelike the plan is to spend more
(29:42):
money.
But if you can leverageresources you already have,
which is your employees, unlocktheir potential.
And then I'm thinking like evenpairing this with these
insights.
Now, this idea is I don't thinktruly people have a business
objective to cut a role or toeven centralize.
They just want to get theirmetrics.
They have to.
The constraints are upon them,all that stuff.
(30:03):
And so if they are thinkingabout this in an expansive or an
abundance mindset or in a howdo we get more productivity,
more sales, more revenue out ofwhat we already have?
They may not even be rethinkingthe model of who's on site and
all that stuff If they'rerenting faster, renting more and
they're getting these closingratios and those types of things
(30:25):
in place.
So it's almost like AceInsights is more of the
leadership stuff than even isthe tech itself.
It's like what can I do withthis information?
How can I impact theorganization and get the leasing
velocity up and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah it's about.
It's about not speculating asto what you need to focus your
time on.
It's knowing where you need tofocus your time and the more
quantitative analytics you haveaccess to.
That's more objective and lesssubjective than the more right
you're going to be.
So you could guess why yourlease renewal rates aren't
hitting the targeted number andyou could put in plans to see if
you're right.
(31:01):
But you may not know for sixmonths, nine months or 12 months
when the next cycle is up.
But if you knew in advance thatyou've got a point of friction
in your resident experience.
Every month I'm trying to payrent and I got this goofy portal
I have to log into and it'sreally confusing and because of
that I'm late half the time andI'm really frustrated and
whatever that may be, or it's anold property and I've got a lot
of maintenance issues and youneed to be really renovating and
(31:23):
investing in this.
Your people may not be tellingyou that, especially if you're a
more senior level person whohas to think holistically across
a lot of locations how much ofwhat's going on on property is
being surfaced up to help thesenior leadership team make
better decisions Right, and it'snot always easy.
Sometimes it's not intentional.
It's just that people are busy.
They're not tracking what'shappening, they're just trying
(31:44):
to solve the resident problemand then move on with their day.
Other people may be trying tocover up a little of the
challenges that they're having,hoping that they can fix it, and
sometimes you just don't.
Nobody knows, you're not payingattention to the patterns and
trends, and so, with tech andagain going back to Ace Insights
on all these interactions, it'sjust silently collecting all
that and analyzing it,summarizing it and identifying
(32:05):
the trends and patterns.
So you know.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, you know, in football analogy overused
analogies but that's Skybox.
You have a different view, youhave leadership at different
levels, but you do see thingsdifferently that you can't see,
you know, in a one propertytheme of recurring calls, things
like that.
You mentioned earlier abouttalking about ACE insights, the
(32:27):
best practices that the clientlaid out.
So this is really unique inthat they can customize this.
You're working with them to dothat.
Talk to us more about that.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Right, right.
So LeaseHawk has been in thecall analytics space for the
last 10 years and so we haveestablished some best practices
on how we say, based on thehundreds of millions of phone
calls we've been analyzing overthe last 12 years.
These are the 10 or 11 thingsthat you want to make sure your
people are doing and that's whatwe recommend, and we actually
publish an industry report cardbased on those best practices so
(32:55):
you can actually compare yourteam's results to the industry
benchmark, and it's all easilyaccessible in a nice compare and
contrast overlay in our in ourportal.
But if you have somethingunique about your property, uh
that you want to make sure thatyour team is including in their
sales pitch, frankly, then youcould add that to the best
practices questionnaire.
If you disagree with whatLeesock's best practices are and
(33:15):
you want to go your own route,that works as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I love that because it's like custom you know you're
not using what everybody else.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
You don't want your tech to constrain how you do
business.
It's supposed to be the otherway around.
Your tech is supposed to enableyou, not constrain you.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Yes, yes, so Ace Insights is that the new product
offering, or is there somethingmore?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
more Right?
Well, that's today.
It's.
It is called ACE insights.
It's focused on conversationalinsights across primarily the
phone channel right now, butworking on email and text so
that those are also very datarich ways that we can collect
data about the interactions thatthat consumers are having,
residents and prospects arehaving with leasing teams.
And, yeah, it's rolled out asof October and and we're getting
some great feedback and andit's delivering some early wins.
We had one client where we weredoing a review with this last
(34:00):
week and, not to get in too muchdetail, but the number one
reason why people were callingtheir centralized offices were
needing help to pay the rent.
And they knew that.
They knew they had somechallenges.
But what they didn't know was,if you take the next layer down,
peel off that onion a littlebit and say, well, why are they
having rental problems, problemspaying the rent?
And you dive into well, it'sthose that are late.
(34:23):
They need help with money,grammar, western union.
Well, why are they havingproblems with that?
And then why and why?
And you can dive right down tothe nut of like, what is the
root cause of this?
And it's like, okay, that's,that is fascinating.
I knew it was an issue.
I didn't realize it was thatbig of an issue and so now
that's I'm going to make that ahigher priority for my teams to
solve, and even even simplethings about the usability of
the resident portal.
(34:43):
Um, uh, ace insights was tocall out that, hey, when
someone's late on their rent,all these fields are disabled
and so they have no choice butto call you.
They, they, you're not givingthem another option, so you're
actually creating the need forthem to call.
You could modify your portalsomewhat, they could modify
their payment option right there.
And he goes yeah, I heardsomething about that, but again,
I didn't realize it wasgenerating this much frustration
(35:05):
.
Sure.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
You know we have weeks away from the multifamily
innovation and AI summit.
I know you're speaking both inthe sessions on stage and then
also you'll be doing aninnovation showcase, so we're
happy for you to do that andliterally show here.
We're talking about it.
You'll have the opportunity toshow people in that session so
if you're not already attendingthat, definitely you'll get to
(35:27):
meet Larry and experience thatshowcase.
We always enjoy those.
Those are fun and leading intothat session around change.
Where should we take the restof this?
We've talked a lot about someof the things that you've
already done the past history ofall the things that are
available to customers today.
They're shipped, they're readyto go.
You could take, you coulddeploy these in the portfolios
(35:47):
today.
Is there anything next comingfrom LeaseHawk that we can
reveal, or is there?
What are you thinking?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
about.
Oh yes, we're always thinkingand looking at the next thing,
but where we're focusing someenergy on right now is
reimagining the role of the CRMin operations.
Traditionally, the CRM is adata entry tool.
You type in information, you'recreating contacts, you're
tracking all the interactionsyou're having, you're keeping
track of tasks, maybe and nextsteps Very manual A lot of data
(36:15):
entry, always having to nag yourteams to make sure you update
the CRM, because if it's not inthe CRM it doesn't exist.
But they don't often do it.
And so, with AI now being aprimary user interface between
the consumer and your employees,you don't need to manually type
stuff in anymore.
The AI can make that as part ofthe workflow.
So now we see that entry pointof AI being the initiation of an
(36:38):
automated workflow modifyingdata in the CRM, creating a set
of standard tasks based onwhat's happening, customizing
tasks as needed and then, wherepossible, actually executing on
those tasks.
So it's all automated.
So the CRM is evolving awayfrom being a data entry tool and
into a centralized workflowautomation engine where the UI
(37:00):
or the need for your users tolog in, your employees to log in
, starts to be focused more on.
What are the analytics tellingme what are the KPIs telling me,
how do I need to adjust theengine in order to do a better
job of delivering on results?
It's the instrument panel ofyour car and the things it's
running.
That's where it's going andwe're putting a lot of thought
into that right now.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yeah, and you never see that in the commercials.
You see it toeing the boat oryou know, yeah, yeah, because AI
, it should disappear.
Technology kind of shoulddisappear.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's in the background, it's just kind of
there making sure things workingand you don't really think
about it anymore.
And AI is enabling all that now, like it's really quantum leap
enabling it.
It was all incremental the lastfew years and that's just the
thing I talk about with my teamis that AI is not the goal.
Anyone here who may belistening or watching this and
(37:48):
is thinking about their AIstrategy don't think about AI
being the goal.
It's just another tool, it'sanother way of achieving the
goal.
But you've got to define whatthe goal is, and it's
interesting, patrick, how hardit is sometimes for people to
actually describe what is itthey're trying to achieve in a
quantitative way.
And once you can figure thatout, then AI is just one of the
many tools that you have to getthere faster and to reimagine
(38:11):
new solutions.
And it is going to be unlockingtons of new solutions that just
are not feasible right now.
And that's really exciting fora company like Leesock that is
focused on AI how fast it'smoving, where it's going, how
quickly it's going to get there,when is it going to become
self-aware and it's going tobecome Skynet and start killing
all the humans.
I'll leave that for another day, but it's moving very fast.
(38:34):
All the promises of sciencefiction 10 years ago.
We're starting to see.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I think it's an opportunity for leaders to know
new ways to get to that yield,get to that operating metric
that, at the end of the day,this investment vehicle was
assembled for right.
Deliver that value to thecustomer, bring great people
together, bring that techtogether and make the business
better.
I mean keeping it simple.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, and you mentioned the innovation council
that we have, which is afascinating forum because it's
it's made up of people fromdifferent backgrounds.
They have different rolesserving real estate, some are
operators, some are providers,some are investors, marketing
people, leasing people right,it's all over, and collectively,
we're really challenging eachother to rethink the status quo,
(39:17):
and I love one of the forums wehad a few weeks ago where we
were talking about the impactthat AI is going to have, just
on role definition, and thetheme we landed on was just
acknowledging that there's afear of people losing their job
because of AI and, as such,they're naturally going to
resist it and by resisting it,they're actually harming their
(39:39):
own career.
And the takeaway we all landedon it's not something we
invented in that forum, but itjust really resonated with the
group was no one is going tolose their job to AI.
They're going to lose their jobto people who are using AI.
So if you're not the one usingAI, you are going to lose your
job, right, and if you are usingAI, it's going to unlock so
(40:01):
much productivity and power inwhat you're currently doing and
it's going to help you reimaginewhat your career looks like
going forward, and it shouldn'tbe about losing jobs.
It should be about unlockingthe potential of everybody to
contribute more.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, and unlocking that potential.
This is where I get mostexcited.
You know, historically it'sbeen the people that could
create leverage in a businesswas with loans and debt and
finance and these big, you knowsort of wall street kind of
moves.
And you know you need to havean MBA in finance and understand
analytics and be a certainpersonality type to you know.
Have those negotiations, bringthe attorneys together, bring
(40:36):
all the disciplines together.
But now, as you mentioned, thereare R&D and employees of all of
these companies, with AI beingthe equalizer and the leveling
of the playing field.
That everybody's at the samestage right now and we all get
to learn together and we'regoing to fix things together and
we're going to break thingstogether, right, and I think
that our goal with theMultifamily Innovation Council
(40:57):
is we've been bringing peopletogether for many years Now.
We want to bring the technologytogether.
You guys have obviously anamazing technology, so if we can
bring that into the businessesin a productive way, then all
the employees enjoy that.
They have the same leverage asmaybe one of the top executives
in the organization, becausetechnology is leveraged to the
business, just like some of theassumptions we made about debt
(41:19):
being leveraged to the business.
So listen, I've had a talk allday with you on this stuff.
And we will, because we're goingto be doing more events in more
places here in the innovationlab here, and I'd love to have
you back.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know you've got some people on your team that we
can contribute as well, andreally appreciate it If I could
just say, patrick, that the workyou're doing here, this
innovation lab, is reallyinspiring, because you and I we
talk a lot but I haven't been toyour.
I don't call it an office.
I don't know what to call thisthing now.
It's an innovation lab.
Yeah, it's a lab, and it justfeels like a lab.
There's a lot of stuffhappening here.
(41:52):
There's just a lot of kineticenergy.
I just feel when I walked intothis room for the first time and
you've got different sectionsthat are allocated toward
different types of things andand they certain and they can
foster different types ofcollaboration, but it just the
space that you've built.
This is inviting thecollaborative efforts of
multiple people and as you weregiving me the tour, the energy
(42:13):
level in the room was justgetting really jazzed and all
the ideas that you were talkingand I was able to maybe riff on
you with you a little bit ondifferent things.
So that's what this innovationlab I think is going to turn
into right and bringing peopletogether to reimagine the status
quo, to do something differentthat's going to have an impact
on the industry overall.
So I applaud you for yourleadership here and the creative
(42:37):
energy that you and your teamare bringing to this space.
It's just really cool.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, I think it's just a significance of build
with people and people willsupport what they help build.
And you know we've we've hadwhat?
200 meetings, I think, on theinnovation council.
It's just listening and knowingwhat's what's useful.
Right now.
It's confusion.
It's it's where I have to onlylearn inside a sales
conversation, ai technology.
Some of the stuff it's askilling up that's required and
(43:02):
some of these things are thingsyou just need to do.
It's like a lease up.
Until you do a lease up, youdon't really understand the
nuances of going through theurgency and lender walks and all
the inspections and all thesethings and you can learn about
it and read about it and go to aconference about it.
But until you do it and youbreak it and you mess it and you
see yourself fix it, you end upwith new observations, and
(43:25):
that's what the purpose of thelab is is getting the
opportunity for otherorganizations to benefit from
bringing those people togetherand giving them a playground to
and then, of course, learn fromexperts.
I hope you're on that stage inthere.
We a playground to and then, ofcourse, learn from experts.
I hope you're on that stage inthere.
We have a full venue eventcenter that you, you know you
can drop in and we get what wecall small event, big audience
and we get to the point and wemake business better.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
I love it.
These, these nuggets of ideasthat people can pick up from
attending these, these summitsand these forums.
It's a nugget of idea thatbecomes the launch pad towards
something even more amazing.
Yeah Well, the hat.
Without having that nugget tostart right, that never happens,
Right?
So, and the only way it happensis a numbers game.
You got to get people togethera lot and have these touch
points, get them connectedtogether, and sometimes the
(44:07):
connections don't work, butsometimes you get that one
person connected with that otherright person.
They have a quick chat and nextthing you know, boom.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, and you guys are in Scottsdale.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
So we're right down the road, yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
We'll be talking more about that stuff.
Yeah, it's very good, we'llinvite more opportunities in
Scottsdale.
Well, listen, this has beengreat.
Tell us a little bit about howpeople can learn about where to
get in touch with Leesock.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Leesockcom.
Funny enough, the internet'snot going away.
Patrick's yes, so leasehawkcom,or just google leasehawk, and
and we'll give you all theinformation, as you can find all
the information you need forfollow-up.
Yeah, we're excited to connectwith everybody at the upcoming
summit and looking forward tothose amazing conversations
awesome, great to have you onall right, likewise, thank you.
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