We did an in-depth study that observed the tasks that a property management team works on throughout each day. It was determined that on average over 100 hours are spent monthly dealing with packages and deliveries, 20 hours dealing with expected visitors, and an additional 10 hours dealing with resident issue communications. This translates to over 150 hours of your team’s time spent on just these three items.
By implementing a resident experience management platform that increases efficiency of these tasks, it was determined these same tasks take just over 25 hours to complete. That translates into a substantial savings of time and money every single month, and catapults the satisfaction rate residents have in interacting with team members - no longer is everything a painful and time consuming manual interaction.
Let’s share an example. This is radioCITY Condos. This metropolitan condo association went from frustrating, inefficient processes and struggling with communication to being a digitally powered community with happier residents and property management team, saving the staff countless hours of work each month.
Brad, one of the condo's directors, recognized that a lack of technology was creating serious problems not only for the board but for residents and management. Relying on binders and paper to keep track of essential operational documents had created a mess, lack of easy reporting options, and inconvenienced everyone.
radioCITY is a vibrant, high-end community with modern amenities that were under-utilized because residents found it difficult to understand what was available and when. They tried mentioning amenities in their newsletter and other communication but it didn’t stick. Giving online access to availability and booking revolutionized how residents participated in booking amenities and also created additional revenue opportunities for the condo association.
Using qualitative evidence, we can determine that helping the management team increased the efficiency of these tasks translates to a savings of over 120 hours each month - that’s over 1,500 hours every year.
Counterparts is a property management company that used to use Microsoft Office to manage resident and community information.
Steve Hydeen, Director of Concierge Services, points out that this was highly inefficient, slow, and created challenges in delivering superior service to their residents. He says, “we were relying very heavily, almost fully, on Microsoft Office.” While Microsoft is one of the most popular software platforms in offices, it was not built for the needs and challenges of property management.
Counterparts ran into problems as they tried to keep up with their residents, and they were having issues getting back to their clients quickly. Residents would move out, and other people would move in without their knowledge because the system took too long to update. According to Steve, it was difficult getting “everyone on the same page and keeping contacts accurate.”
Steve knew there had to be a better way than being purely Microsoft Office-based: “we recognized that they were not long-term solutions.” He worked with other software companies in the past, but none of them performed as well as he had hoped. He considered building their own software to handle their needs but decided that it wouldn’t be the most effective use of their time since it would take too much expense and time to try to develop something.
Steve now uses Concierge Plus to streamline their desk services, resident communications, and internal systems for better community support.
It has dramatically improved Counterparts’ efficiency even with the large number of units his company manages. Steve stated that the company has been able to streamline their software with Concierge Plus: “what we gained is a renewed sense of efficiency because it has allowed us to start eliminating other software.” Their concierge desk has improved both communication and efficiency in the frontline with the platform.
Communication has also improved since implementing Concierge Plus. “It allows us to engage with residents, to provide newsletters, and reach out to everyone or specific individuals very quickly and easily,” says Steve.
Also, customer service was a significant advantage for Steve. Although he has not needed to reach out to customer support often, when he does, he found that “everyone I’ve spoken to is very affirming and supportive. There’s a quick response and almost an extended appreciation for reaching out for support, so I’ve appreciated that immensely.”
For those that don’t know me: 20 years ago I purchased my first condo. I went to the condo’s annual meeting and started to listen to frustrated owners. The thought occurred to me: there must be a better way to run our association.
I looked everywhere for technology that could help, but found nothing. I decided to take matters into my own hands and build a set of online tools to create efficiencies at our front desk.
Everyone loved it! Immediately I solved communications challenges that had existed for years.
Pretty quickly other building managers started asking if they could use these tools.
So, I decided to dedicate resources to building the first and best resident experience management platform. Today we work with thousands of condos and HOAs, and recommended by dozens of property management companies.
And as a result, you can get your team saving over 100 hours of their time each month and have happier residents. Then, call your boss because you’ll finally be able to book a vacation.
One option is leveraging a variety of off-the-shelf tools like a spreadsheet, Constant Contact or other emailing software, Dropbox or Google Drive to share files, social media, and you may need to get a WordPress site or a web designer to build and maintain the public portal for residents.
However, you’ll need to set up each of these platforms separately and clearly identify what each one does.
Remember that these are not designed for the operation of a condo association, so you’ll need to do a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to push a square peg into a round hole.
You won’t be able to address everything: things like having resident information synchronized across platforms and remembering to check all of these platforms for different notifications as needed.
You might have also heard about free or “freemium” platforms. The reality is that Property Management software that is free of cost doesn’t have all of the features and functionalities that you need to provide enough benefits to your team or community. Often there are limited software updates or new features with 'freemium' products. And you won’t be a top priority for customer support - you should expect to figure everything out for yourself.
Free software platforms also often make money by displaying ads to their platform which you have no control over and usually disturbs the user experience. Furthermore, free software vendors may sell their users data to third parties.
And after all of that, remember that a company can't stay in business for very long offering a free solution so many free or freemium companies aren't around very long meaning you will need to deal with sudden outages, researching new solutions, and re-training your staff and residents.
Or, you can use Concierge Plus and have us map out your tasks and processes 10x faster, train your staff quickly, educate your residents, and get your team executing those tasks saving over 100 hours each month!
radioCITY Condos is a complex of two high-rise towers and townhomes in a downtown/urban setting. The residents that live there are for the most part busy individuals with careers and tons of things to fill up their days and nights. They take advantage of online shopping and delivery services, many of them have outside housekeeping staff, and they have busy social lives with local and out-of-town friends.Despite being a high-end building, everything was being done manually. When announcements needed to be circulated, including for important notices about elevator issues or water shutdowns, it was done manually. The property manager had to literally print 400+ copies of the announcement and get someone to go door-to-door to place them. Residents who were working weren’t aware in a timely way. Residents who were traveling weren’t notified at all because there was a piece of paper sitting on their door handle. Then there’s the cost. Printing and manually delivering notices cost thousands of Dollars per year and wasted environmental resources.
Sound familiar?
Concierge Plus was up and running within a couple of weeks. All of a sudden everyone was receiving announcements by their choice of email, text message, or phone call. Distributing important information became easy again. With one click the property manager can see exactly who received the announcement, and who didn’t that may need to be followed-up with.
radioCITY has multiple amenities that residents can take advantage of: a party room, meeting room, TV room, games room, guest suites, and service elevators. All of the bookings for these amenities were managed in a binder. For obvious reasons, that binder could only be in one location: the front desk of the tower that housed most of the amenities. When residents from the townhouses or the other tower wanted to even check availability they had to trek outside and to the other building. Since most of them weren’t common visitors to that tower, there were many cases where the front desk staff didn’t even recognize them. A terrible and frustrating experience for everyone.
As soon as Concierge Plus was implemented, booking all of these amenities online became a reality. There was no more accidental double-booking. When required, payments were accepted online – no more checks to write (no more checks to deposit!). Residents could now see when a service elevator was available as they were trying to book a delivery. They could easily share with their friends that were planning to visit when guests suites were available. Planning holiday parties and other events in the party room became much easier from the convenience of any phone, tablet, or computer that the resident had.
One of the property management companies we work with is called Counterparts. They manage about 800 units of condos. Counterparts was leveraging technology but primarily using Microsoft Office to keep track of what was happening in their buildings. Excel spreadsheets for resident information, email for service requests, etc.Some of the challenges they were faced with included that there was no workflow, no permissions, no oversight of any of this. Excel spreadsheets with resident information could easily be accidentally changed, permanently losing important details that had to be retrieved from residents again.
Concierge Plus came in and within a similar, few week period we took their existing data and migrated it to our platform. Instantly life became easier at each of their properties. They gained a renewed sense of efficiency because it allowed them to replace multiple pieces of software with one that was designed for this environment.
By implementing a digital property management platform, you will exceed your tech-savvy resident's expectations.
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