Introduction to the Multifamily Ai Podacst

Welcome to the Multifamily AI podcast. I'm putting this podcast together for you and we're going to center it on the transformation and the profitability that can be unlocked inside a business workflow for multifamily companies. There's a lot of things happening right now in AI and organizations and this is going to fundamentally change the way that we do business. So this podcast is not going to take a technical focus. We will have a technical understanding of certain elements of AI, of course, through conversations and trainings and even interviews, but what I wanna do is I wanna bring you the conversations and the tactics, the capabilities and the tools that's gonna help you bring AI into the multifamily company. Now this is the business unit that we need to make sure maintains profitability efficiencies. We wanna get leverage, the same way that we get leverage from debt and equity in our real estate fundamentals. If you're a multifamily owner and operator investor, I'm gonna unlock some opportunities that you can see as potential upsides for those leverage points, using technology. Now this podcast is for multifamily investors. It's for owners, operators and those that are executives that are in charge and leading the ways for their companies, putting people together. You're putting deals together and you are looking at where things are going and multifamily, and you're also looking at creative ways to innovate in the business so that our only path to income is not just a rent increase but it's finding innovation inside the business, or other efficiencies In some cases, because we have to.

Now multifamily, if I back it up a little bit, if you think about it for a minute, sometimes you gotta ask why are we doing all this stuff? It is about creating wealth, and for some it may be about protecting wealth, transfer of wealth. Fundamentally, though, the way that most of us grew up in creating that wealth for multifamily is different than how it will be created in the future, and a lot of our leadership fundamentals are based off of what we know. We got a job, we got promoted, made enough money, made our first investment, told everybody to do what we knew what was to do, and that's all changing because of the customer, the opportunities and the technology that's out there today. So, if you're an investor, this is definitely for you. If you're an operator, this is for sure for you to how to build a healthy organization, and so, as investors and even leaders, our job is to have a vision and to look forward, see where things are going and then make good decisions about those things and if we do that right, we have a higher potential of creating future cash flows or maybe sustaining certain market conditions. When we know about those things and maybe you're in inside a company leading portfolios our world is changing.

We no longer can just understand the transactional elements of the business the debt, the equity, the fundamentals of P&L management. It's not enough. What we need is bilinguals, and what I mean by that is the language of what you know, your expertise, your unique, deep expertise about what's magical about local real estate markets and your properties and your portfolios and your companies, but also the language of technology. We need to understand how the world works, what the customer expects, what's possible with certain decisions, how long certain decisions take, and when we know technology, it's easy to understand it. If you hired a CFO, chief financial officer, as an executive or an investor leading your business, would you want that CFO to understand finance? So it's the same thing. If you're leading a real estate investment business and you don't have a deep understanding of technology, what the possibilities are, where the leverage is, what the customer expects and where the world's going, you're at a disadvantage and I would suspect that you will be moving out of those roles faster because you're not able to make good decisions or swift decisions or decisions that improve the business and make it an experience that people want to be part of. Our companies are moving to more of technology companies and you may not like that or know that, but the reality is the customer is driving a lot of those conversations and technology moves extremely fast, but companies move more slowly.

Now I say that because I learned that at MIT when I finished my certificate, studying under Dr George Westerman. This was for applied generative AI and digital transformation in the business, and Dr Westerman said he's like it really stood out to me. He said technology can be programmed and it will generally do what you tell it to do, but people, they need to be persuaded. So this sort of answers our questions like we're slow to adopt. We haven't moved behind all of those things. It's because there's no leadership there that's bilingual, that knows not only the technology but the real estate. You have to know the real estate. That's our domain experience, but you can't rely on only one.

Now. This is not something you push off to the IT team or the administration team. This is something that a leader needs to know, because a leader needs to make good decisions. It's hard work, right, and what I learned at MIT was it's not even about the tech, really. It's about the readiness of the organization and moving people through change and clarifying ideas and saying no to certain things and yes to others, learning how to get through failure and pivots, and being agile and knowing that there are ways to create fail-safe environments and there are ways to try things without it risking damaging things. Right, there's a cost to failure in the financial markets and it's devastating. Right, there is also devastating costs in technology. So where do you take those risks? Where do you start all those things we're going to explore in this podcast, but what I really know, and what I know to be true for me, is it's hard work. It takes time. Anything you rush never really works out well. Right, and there are all sorts of things that we need to understand to move people through this, right. This is all new for so many people. Now, in this podcast, what we're going to do is we're going to dive deep into applied AI in the multifamily business. This is our framework, and we'll talk about the digitally transformed business. We're going to share the framework around driving towards high leadership capability and high digital capability, so I'm pulling right out of my MIT program.

Now just a little bit about me. Over the last 25 years, I've dedicated my career, my life, everything to leading national multifamily companies. Now, 15 of those years, I was hands on running real estate companies, just blending my money eyes and real estate eyes just to understand the financial acumen of real estate fundamentals, my expertise around expanding operations, developing, starting management companies and ultimately doing that to enhance the returns for people. I learned that through people, those things happen. In 2014, I launched an venture multifamily leadership. It's a media company and we're bridging the gap between owners, operators and the technology I guess, partners or providers, and we do that through a lot of different things. We've got summits, podcasts. We have produced the multifamily innovation summit. We run the best places to work multifamily program. We have an awards program around multifamily innovation called the multifamily innovation awards. We have a studio in Scottsdale, arizona, and my most exciting part of all this is I chair the multifamily innovation council Now, as chairman, I'm focused on bringing together the right people that are tackling the industry's biggest challenges and really looking at what are those amazing opportunities that are going to make us more profitable, not for the sake of doing a new thing, but because when we did the new thing, if it was a technology or a process, that the ultimate impact of that was, it made the business better.

Not because we just had this cool thing. We're trying to keep up with the company next to us, but ultimately, when the technology is brought into the organization and it does something that makes a difference employee experience goes up, cost savings right or growth, and the bottom line gets better it's all about that profitable multifamily company. That's sort of the philosophy that we have Now. My philosophy is a lot of people are trying to figure out how to do great multifamily investments and my theory is if you want a great multifamily investment, you need to have a great multifamily business that oversees it. There's a lot there, right, if you're a real estate leader, investor, and you're having conversations with your sponsor, your partners, your providers, ceos of those companies, and they're not bilingual, they don't understand technology you may want to think the leaders of tomorrow are going to move people through change and clarity and efficiency and test the assumptions about what is possible.

Now being involved and being around these conversations I mean just in the last year, I've had over almost 2,000 conversations in our Innovation Council meetings. We do this every Friday and when we meet, it gives me access to challenges, opportunities, and it gives me access to the priorities of some of the best companies in the business and through that process, over the last two years, we've developed technology. It really is a solution designed to be a platform for multifamily companies and we're going to revolutionize, I think, how work gets done. It's exciting. I think it's going to open up a whole new line of jobs and we have a whole team that's dedicated around the world and here to make that possible for companies. I believe that there will be more fractional innovation that's happening outside companies because there's not one individual inside the company that can keep up and take care and build platforms for companies. With the way that innovation is going to unlock, we're going to show you all sorts of ways of how to use AI and automation inside the company and use technology as leverage, the same way that you use debt and equity in the capital markets to provide leverage in your business. I'm going to show you, as a real estate investor or owner and operator, how you can use technology to gain that same differentiating competitive advantage on the show.

This was an opening episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We've got some really great ones coming up. Make sure you subscribe rate review as you go down this process. This is not about the hype. This is about truly what's going to make a difference in your organization and what is going to tie it back to how I can make it work for me, my teams and the customers we serve and the investors that support us. We'll see you guys in the next episode.