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/council.
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/council/
Multifamily Innovation® & AI Summit: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/
Speaker 1: All right, welcome back.
00:00:01
So today on this episode I have Larry Gorman, president of
00:00:05
LeaseHawk, and today we're going to explore a lot of different
00:00:08
conversations around innovation but communications and getting
00:00:12
fundamental about creating that profitability and efficiency and
00:00:15
demand generation, how you communicate and engage customers
00:00:18
and how you bring value to multifamily operators.
00:00:20
Listen, there is a lot of choices out there in how you
00:00:24
think about communicating, engaging, analyzing information
00:00:29
that happens in calls on site, in maintenance operations and
00:00:33
that lead to business decisions that make the business better.
00:00:36
So today we're going to be talking all about those things
00:00:39
and more.
00:00:39
Larry Gorman is somebody that I value highly.
00:00:42
When he speaks, we don't get the opportunity to spend as much
00:00:45
time as we'd like.
00:00:45
He's part of the Multifamily Innovation Council and he
00:00:48
contributes in those meetings every Friday in ways that we're
00:00:52
just so privileged to have.
00:00:53
So today I welcome you into that conversation, larry.
00:00:55
Welcome in.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Glad to be here, Patrick.
00:00:57
Good seeing you.
00:00:57
I love what you've done with this whole space.
00:01:00
It's very innovative.
00:01:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know it's very innovative.
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Yeah, it's one of those things and you know this, we didn't set
00:01:05
out to design that.
00:01:06
It was more like the listening, like what would be.
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How do you increase the value of the things that we need to do
00:01:13
in the frequency of how the world's moving today?
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And so I know you guys have been designing and building
00:01:17
products similar for many years in multifamily.
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But take us back to who Larry is, because I know you've joined
00:01:26
LeaseHawk a few years ago, many years ago, and you've made some
00:01:27
incredible innovations there and I know you have a great team
00:01:30
to pull all this off.
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But take us through who you are , why you're at LeaseHawk,
00:01:35
because some of our listeners haven't yet enjoyed that
00:01:38
experience yet.
00:01:38
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for that, patrick.
00:01:39
Well, my background is purely in technology.
00:01:42
My earlier days in my career was in the hospitality industry
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and I was leading a team that was building out one of the
00:01:49
industry's early cloud-based property management systems.
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This was back before, when everything was on-premise for
00:01:56
the most part and the idea of moving things off-premise and
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into the cloud was kind of scary to some operators, losing
00:02:02
control of the data, having to rely on a browser to access your
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information instead of a trusted application.
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And it was something that we led for this company and it was
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very successful for us and it became a competitive advantage
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in our industry, and so we decided to carve that out and
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make it its own commercial offering that we would make
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available to the entire industry .
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So I did that for a number of years and then had an
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opportunity to apply the lessons learned from that experience in
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the single family space, where I was the head of technology for
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one of the larger players in single family, and a lot of the
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things that we saw in hospitality that we had spent 10
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years tackling were things that we were anticipating to see in
00:02:42
single family, and it equally applies to multifamily.
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So one of the early anticipating to see in single
00:02:44
family, and it equally applies to multifamily.
00:02:46
So one of the early innovations we did in single family was
00:02:49
trying to solve the problem of maintaining the expected
00:02:52
operating margin.
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So the challenge with single family is every one of your
00:02:56
units you have to hop in the car and drive from house to house,
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unit to unit in order to help with leasing, in order to help
00:03:05
with maintenance and with turns and relative to the multifamily
00:03:09
operators.
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That was a challenge, and so to get the efficiencies needed,
00:03:14
one you had to build tremendous scale, but you also had to build
00:03:17
really efficient workflow and process and you had to leverage
00:03:21
technology as much as possible so that you could overcome what
00:03:26
we would call the windshield problem, and that was very
00:03:29
successful.
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One of the things that we did early on was move to 100%
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self-guided tours so that leasing agents didn't have to
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show up at a house and coordinate times with prospects
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looking to tour home, because if anybody was late whether the
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leasing agent was late or the prospect was late it could throw
00:03:45
your whole day off.
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It'd be like going to a doctor's appointment for a two
00:03:49
o'clock and not actually being able to see him until three or
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four because you start to back up your appointments if the
00:03:53
first one of the day falls short , and so moving to a self-guided
00:03:56
option where prospects could go on to a portal, register for a
00:04:02
tour, get the code to access the house and then provide their
00:04:05
own tour without relying on a human was a game changer, and it
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was early in the industry.
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Not many people were doing it.
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And then having a centralized regional leasing office was
00:04:14
another big deal.
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It's obviously impractical for every house to have its own
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on-premise leasing office and, like in Phoenix, for example, we
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had several thousand homes that were all being rented out of a
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single leasing office.
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Here and in every region in the US had their own leasing
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offices and those concepts that worked really well in single
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family, out of necessity, in order to make it a viable
00:04:34
business model, they can easily be applied to multifamily.
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Family have on-site leasing offices in every community.
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Why can't you centralize that?
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Why does multifamily like to really prioritize the white
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glove, human touch, instead of the self-service model that
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single family was required to use?
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Why are we not doing more on the maintenance side in order to
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avoid those emergency maintenance tickets and then to
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maybe consolidate multiple maintenance items into a single
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visit.
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There's just a lot of efficiencies from operating
00:05:05
single family space that could equally apply to multifamily,
00:05:07
but it wasn't.
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Because it wasn't necessary, it was mother.
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What's that saying about invention?
00:05:12
Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention.
00:05:14
Well, single family to be viable, it had to figure out
00:05:18
some of these operational efficiencies that multifamily
00:05:21
didn't need to be profitable.
00:05:22
But once single family proved the model, then multifamily
00:05:25
operators I think we're getting curious.
00:05:26
I know that with our company, we hosted a couple of the larger
00:05:29
multifamily operators where they just picked our brain about
00:05:31
what we were doing, because they were exploring centralizing
00:05:34
their leasing operations.
00:05:35
This was 2016.
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So people the industry now in multifamily is really excited
00:05:40
about centralization.
00:05:41
But I was talking to multifamily operators in 2016,
00:05:45
trying to learn from us and single family how we were doing
00:05:47
it, and so some of the thought leaders who are now take it for
00:05:50
granted that everything is centralized in their world.
00:05:52
They were the thought leaders of multifamily.
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They were setting the pace for other operators who weren't
00:05:57
seeing the need.
00:05:58
But everybody started seeing the need in 2020 when we had COVID
00:06:03
and all of the sacred cows that other industries might've been
00:06:07
challenging were in multifamily were saying, no, this is how
00:06:11
things need to be done here.
00:06:12
This is the way it's always been done.
00:06:14
They were forced to rethink things.
00:06:16
The leasing offices were closed .
00:06:19
People still needed to find a place to live.
00:06:21
Your teams aren't coming to work, no one's answering the
00:06:24
phone.
00:06:24
How are you going to operate in this new model?
00:06:27
And they were willing.
00:06:29
We, as an industry, were willing to experiment, because
00:06:31
what other choice did we have?
00:06:32
Patrick and some of those ideas that we thought we needed
00:06:36
temporarily resonated with the public.
00:06:38
We realize now the public wants to be able to conduct business
00:06:42
on their own terms.
00:06:42
Why should I have to be constrained by the hours that
00:06:45
the leasing office is open?
00:06:47
Why can't I do all of my exploration online?
00:06:49
Why can't I do a virtual tour, even submit an application and
00:06:54
sign a lease without ever talking to somebody?
00:06:56
Why can't I do that?
00:06:57
Other industries allow us to do that.
00:06:59
And yet multifamily seemed to be unique in thinking about
00:07:02
things in a very traditional way , without really looking around
00:07:06
to see what was possible, and COVID changed a lot of that.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know I want to get to the data because if
00:07:13
you're not there, this is where I think Leeshock is really
00:07:15
interesting in terms of the analytics and the communications
00:07:18
.
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And how do you operate more effectively in communications if
00:07:22
you are in this type of a model or even moving to that type of
00:07:25
a model?
00:07:26
But, looking back, you mentioned the single family.
00:07:28
I mean, in fact, it's harder in single family than it is a
00:07:31
multifamily because you don't have the concentration in
00:07:34
property.
00:07:34
You know, and I did this, I had 400 single family homes across
00:07:39
many different states and I remember we took a portfolio
00:07:43
approach to reinventing how we delivered, maintenance and
00:07:46
leasing, but we were really fully occupied.
00:07:48
It wasn't a whole lot of demand need for leasing, it was more of
00:07:51
the renewals, but we couldn't physically have an employee
00:07:55
in-guided or the code and those types of things, which stands to
00:08:06
say that we would have more adoption in multifamily for that
00:08:09
approach, because you know you have one concentration property
00:08:12
that has 150, 300 units, 1500 units, whatever that may be.
00:08:16
And do you think that's mindset Because there's a change going
00:08:21
from?
00:08:21
Well, we have white glove, now we have to do some like the
00:08:25
change management and then the expectations of the process you
00:08:28
went to get it right.
00:08:29
Do you believe that multifamily owners and operator have an
00:08:32
expectation on partners that it's got to be perfect before
00:08:35
they try something?
00:08:36
And what did you learn in rolling all that out that
00:08:39
impacted that portfolio financially, I imagine,
00:08:42
tremendously.
00:08:43
Was it perfect?
00:08:44
How do you move through that Right, and is that what's
00:08:47
keeping multifamily from going more in that direction?
00:08:49
Speaker 2: Well, fear of the unknown is certainly it's.
00:08:51
That's part of the human condition.
00:08:53
So we definitely, as humans, there's fear of change and there
00:08:56
is maybe a little bit of fear of doing the work.
00:08:58
So if no one's asking you to take this really big innovative
00:09:02
step that has high risk but potentially high reward, then
00:09:05
why would you stick your neck out and take that risk?
00:09:07
Because if you fail, then you suffer the consequences and if
00:09:10
you succeed, maybe you don't earn any rewards.
00:09:12
So, having an incentivization system where people are
00:09:16
incentivized to take risk and try things, knowing that you're
00:09:20
not going to be perfect Some ideas you may think look good on
00:09:24
paper, don't look good in execution.
00:09:26
But for those companies that are looking to try and encourage
00:09:29
their teams to be more innovative, start with what's
00:09:32
incentivizing them to be innovative.
00:09:33
Usually, what I see are the negative incentives.
00:09:35
Yes, I'll let you try this project, but it better work,
00:09:38
because if it doesn't, then you're gone and you don't get
00:09:41
back to that table, right, right ?
00:09:42
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, either you're fired or you get a bad
00:09:44
reputation, or and does the employee have that fear too,
00:09:48
because they're single flow of income?
00:09:51
I don't want to take the risk.
00:09:52
How do you?
00:09:53
Speaker 2: move through that.
00:09:54
It starts with one.
00:09:56
It's setting the culture in place that encourages and
00:09:59
motivates and incentivizes innovation.
00:10:02
Try something, knowing that it's going to fail how about
00:10:05
that?
00:10:06
But we're going to learn from it, Maybe redefine what the word
00:10:08
failure means.
00:10:09
When my kid was really young and it was an analogy I like to
00:10:13
use a lot with my teams was when he was going through that stage
00:10:15
, learning how to walk.
00:10:16
He wasn't perfect right out of the gate.
00:10:18
You know, you start with crawling and you take that first
00:10:21
step to try and stand up and you fall and you hit your head,
00:10:23
but you don't give up.
00:10:24
You keep trying.
00:10:25
But it's little steps, incrementally getting better,
00:10:28
learning and adjusting your approach.
00:10:29
And then one day the kid's walking and next thing you know
00:10:32
he's playing baseball out in the backyard.
00:10:33
Speaker 1: How did you create those fail safe environments
00:10:37
when you were rolling out something like that?
00:10:38
If you're doing mission critical things, how did you
00:10:42
think through that and create those observations that people
00:10:45
would then know themselves?
00:10:47
Speaker 2: Right.
00:10:47
So you start with the business problem to solve and you put
00:10:50
some very concrete quantitative metrics around how you know if
00:10:55
any solution implement is actually going to move the
00:10:57
needle.
00:10:57
So one example might be with the self-guided tours.
00:11:00
There's all these.
00:11:00
Well, what about this, what about this, what about that?
00:11:02
Well, this is not going to work because the logistics here and
00:11:05
what happens when someone gets in the house and you don't know
00:11:07
what they're going to do they're going to steal all the
00:11:08
appliances or they're going to do all these things.
00:11:10
And so automatically you start with that culture of fear where
00:11:14
you're focusing on all the things that are going to go
00:11:16
wrong and all the reasons why it can't work.
00:11:18
But it's all based on speculation, all based on the
00:11:20
unknown, because we haven't tried it yet.
00:11:22
So you take a business problem.
00:11:23
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of interpretation of what might
00:11:26
happen versus the observation of what did happen.
00:11:29
Sure, yeah so you've got to set up a test, set up a test.
00:11:32
Speaker 2: What you don't want to do is bet the farm on this
00:11:34
thing and say, okay, we're going to, we're going to migrate all
00:11:37
80 homes to a self-guided tour model and it's all going to
00:11:40
happen on December 1st and it better work or else we're out of
00:11:43
business.
00:11:43
That's obviously crazy.
00:11:45
But you take a maybe take a region, or maybe take a single
00:11:49
house, or maybe take a cluster of houses within a sub-market
00:11:52
and you work with your vendors on what the hardware is going to
00:11:55
look like at these houses.
00:11:56
You don't have all the logistics figured out.
00:11:58
You don't have your pricing model figured out.
00:11:59
Maybe your supplier doesn't have everything figured out
00:12:02
either, because, frankly, in our situation, our supplier was
00:12:05
figuring this out with us, and so you try it and you learn
00:12:09
about how do you install the hub , how do you install the smart
00:12:13
lock, how do you issue the keys?
00:12:15
Maybe the codes get in the house.
00:12:16
You're giving it to prospects, initially over the phone.
00:12:19
You know that's not how you want it to be at scale, but at
00:12:21
least approve the model.
00:12:22
Sure, Give them the code and maybe you join them at the house
00:12:25
to make sure that the code works.
00:12:27
There's no flaws in getting it and no, that's not what the
00:12:32
model is going to be eventually.
00:12:33
But this is all part of the learning process.
00:12:34
And you discover the feedback, you find out what the experience
00:12:35
is like from the individual consumers who you put through it
00:12:39
and as you gain more confidence , you let go of the reins a
00:12:42
little bit and then you maybe issue the codes over the phone
00:12:44
and you don't join them at the house and then you deal with the
00:12:47
problems that they have there and you learn from it and you
00:12:49
make adjustments and you talk to your supplier and and you start
00:12:52
to build excitement and confidence.
00:12:54
You learn what works and what doesn't and ideas.
00:12:57
Then people can bring the table that no one had considered
00:12:59
before, because now that you see it out in the field, you
00:13:02
discover certain things and you just try it again.
00:13:05
It small solution, learn from it, rinse and repeat the plan,
00:13:12
do check, act cycle.
00:13:13
You plan your work, you do the work, you check your results and
00:13:17
then you act on those results.
00:13:18
To do it all over again and pretty soon that snowball gets
00:13:21
bigger and bigger.
00:13:22
Next thing, you know it's a nationwide rollout.
00:13:24
Now you've got your supply chain issues figured out and how
00:13:27
much of the smart hubs you have at the leasing office versus
00:13:31
just in time.
00:13:32
How do you monetize it?
00:13:33
Maybe you start charging your tenants, your residents, an
00:13:37
incremental fee because now they're enjoying the benefits of
00:13:39
the smart home technology in the house during the residency.
00:13:42
Now you start looking at partnerships with Amazon and
00:13:44
others, and I think this kind of builds on its own, but none of
00:13:48
that is possible without taking that first step to try it at a
00:13:52
house.
00:13:52
And if it was, you try it once and it better work, or we're not
00:13:56
going to try it again.
00:13:56
That's the thing that kills all innovation.
00:13:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does.
00:13:59
And I'm trying to elevate the importance in the professional,
00:14:02
like if you were in medical care and you knew something could
00:14:05
help the patient, you know you start to question, like your due
00:14:09
diligence, to make that known to the patient.
00:14:12
This is a better path forward In real estate and multifamily.
00:14:15
I mean, the ultimate end goal is to create wealth and to
00:14:18
protect it.
00:14:19
I mean that's why that vehicle, from an investment standpoint,
00:14:22
exists.
00:14:22
And then you have like, well, how do you go about doing that?
00:14:24
Well, you got to get the right people together.
00:14:25
You got to understand the customer of the future, bring
00:14:27
tech and people together.
00:14:28
But the real estate operators today anchor into the gravity of
00:14:33
the situation to get this right .
00:14:34
So my mission out there is to allow, like, these conversations
00:14:38
I'm having with you right now is very innovative, very
00:14:42
technical.
00:14:42
Well, not even because they're very successful.
00:14:45
So how do you get a company to change or do something
00:14:47
differently when they're winning Right and they're winning
00:14:59
because they've focused on debt leverage, real estate
00:15:03
fundamentals, supply, demand fundamentals, like almost half
00:15:06
of the business.
00:15:07
Now, as companies move more and more into technology companies,
00:15:10
the customers are expecting technology and engineers see
00:15:13
code as a system, whereas the building is the system and, as
00:15:17
you're describing that, I'm thinking how do we get the
00:15:20
executives, the leasing agents, the operators, the maintenance,
00:15:23
the people doing the work, to see that as the opportunity to
00:15:28
create that alpha, that difference between I'm this
00:15:30
manager, but when I work with this group, they have this
00:15:33
innovative process.
00:15:34
They have this ability to fail safe.
00:15:36
They have the ability to, when something breaks, they fix it
00:15:39
quickly.
00:15:39
They have the ability to bring in a great partner work with
00:15:42
them.
00:15:42
All that stuff, and that, I believe, is the found money, or
00:15:47
the found opportunity.
00:15:48
Knowing that, what do you say to an executive that is building
00:15:54
that team to get the right people around them to do the
00:15:58
things that you're talking about ?
00:15:59
What kind of resources do they need to provide them?
00:16:02
What kind of fail runway do they need to provide them?
00:16:05
If they were to hiring the leaders, building through people
00:16:09
, how would you?
00:16:09
Speaker 2: advise.
00:16:10
Wow, there's a lot to unpack there.
00:16:11
Patrick, if you're looking at individual contributors that you
00:16:14
need to assemble on your team, I would say first start with who
00:16:17
you've got.
00:16:18
You may actually have a lot of talent that needs to be
00:16:21
unleashed within your own teams, but you are not giving them
00:16:24
permission to actually be part of the solution.
00:16:26
So, being more transparent with what your company is facing,
00:16:30
being more transparent with what other industries are doing,
00:16:33
maybe with what your company is facing, being more transparent
00:16:34
with what other industries are doing, maybe, maybe learning
00:16:35
from them and applying the lessons that other industries
00:16:37
have learned the hard way.
00:16:38
You can benefit from all their mistakes and apply it to your
00:16:41
specific situation, but start with your own teams, and the
00:16:44
characteristics I'm looking for are folks that are naturally
00:16:47
curious, who have a passion for learning.
00:16:49
A question I like to ask in interviews is to ask them about
00:16:53
their how they learn and like.
00:16:54
What books are you reading right now?
00:16:55
Do you have any books open on Kindle or on your nightstand at
00:16:59
home?
00:16:59
What is it, and do you like fiction or nonfiction?
00:17:02
How do you learn?
00:17:02
Do you learn by reading?
00:17:03
Do you learn by doing, or maybe everything you needed to know
00:17:06
you learned in college and the whole learning thing is behind
00:17:09
you now and now.
00:17:09
It's all about executing, and those are obviously the kinds of
00:17:12
people that you would not want to be part of an innovation team
00:17:16
.
00:17:16
But you also need cross-functional skills as well.
00:17:18
So, in a multifamily operator environment, you got the
00:17:22
corporate office.
00:17:23
There's just a lot of different functions that need to be part
00:17:26
of any innovation process that you're going to implement or any
00:17:29
innovation initiative that you're going to implement.
00:17:31
So make sure that you've got the buy-in from all the
00:17:33
different functional heads.
00:17:34
You've got executive leadership on what you're trying, a bot in
00:17:36
on what you're trying to do, and you've defined a problem and
00:17:39
you define what success looks like, and that's the thing that
00:17:42
a lot of people miss out is what does success look like and how
00:17:45
do I measure that and over what time period?
00:17:47
You've got to time box these things, patrick, because these
00:17:50
innovation projects could last forever and you never know like
00:17:54
what's the definition of when, when it ends?
00:17:56
How do I know we've won?
00:17:57
How do I know that thing's over ?
00:17:58
When can I move the people on to another project?
00:18:00
And if you don't give people a win, then they start to get
00:18:04
demotivated, they start to lose interest, the budget starts to
00:18:07
get a little tight and money gets reallocated to other
00:18:09
projects and then eventually then it fizzles from not having
00:18:13
a well-defined definition.
00:18:15
But I'm kind of getting off course here in terms of the
00:18:18
question.
00:18:18
But in terms of attracting the people, I'd say look in your own
00:18:22
team, Look at other industries that have done what you're
00:18:24
trying to do and maybe go find out who's done it and see if you
00:18:31
can steal them and get them interested in the multifamily
00:18:32
industry, because obviously there's a lot to do here and
00:18:35
there's a lot when it comes to technology that we could be
00:18:37
doing that we're not and we're just now entering a next
00:18:40
disruption of technology with artificial intelligence and all
00:18:44
that it's going to do disrupt multifamily.
00:18:46
So anybody who's really interested in having a
00:18:48
meaningful impact in their career to make a big difference
00:18:52
in helping people find a great place to live I mean this is a
00:18:55
pretty exciting place to be.
00:18:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it gets me to the speed of all of this
00:18:59
happening so quickly in orders of magnitude from the internet
00:19:04
re-envision, a lot of businesses , and it brings me to
00:19:07
communications and even in what we're doing with the council,
00:19:10
with you, every Friday and our annual meetings and things like
00:19:13
that.
00:19:13
It's just the frequency and the repetitions and the touches
00:19:17
that we can add into the equation, otherwise we retreat
00:19:21
back to well, let's do it this other way.
00:19:23
So let's go into communications now.
00:19:25
Let's just look at all of the touches.
00:19:28
I mean you've got people that tour in person and virtual.
00:19:31
You've got the centralized stuff.
00:19:32
You've got phone you.
00:19:33
You got communications online via chat.
00:19:36
You have email.
00:19:37
You have all these things going on and you guys have built some
00:19:40
of the most impressive products .
00:19:41
I know you've supported some of the most robust companies in
00:19:44
the industry and you're nimble enough to build with companies
00:19:48
on even smaller middle market companies as well.
00:19:50
Talk to me about communications and where the opportunities are
00:19:53
in multifamily.
00:19:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, love that.
00:19:55
Let's start with going back to COVID, because that was really
00:19:58
underscored the importance of the work that LeaseHawk and
00:20:02
others in this space are doing.
00:20:03
When COVID happened, people still needed to conduct business
00:20:07
, but it was harder to communicate in the traditional
00:20:10
ways, which would be over the phone or people sending emails
00:20:13
back and forth.
00:20:13
That was our forced necessity, yeah, yeah, so out of necessity,
00:20:17
when someone answers the phone, you spend all this money
00:20:20
marketing your amazing community .
00:20:22
You've got your prominently displayed phone number and a
00:20:25
prospect looking for a place to live and calls that number and
00:20:28
nobody's there to answer.
00:20:28
It's a wasted marketing investment.
00:20:30
It's a missed opportunity.
00:20:31
They're going to immediately pick up the phone and call
00:20:34
somebody else and now it's going to take you longer to fill that
00:20:37
vacant unit.
00:20:38
And so where LeaseHawk focused early days of COVID, we were
00:20:41
just coming out with a virtual leasing assistant, a voice-based
00:20:44
, chat-based, email-based, text-based assistant that could
00:20:47
take the human out of that communication path.
00:20:50
So when somebody was looking to lease a new apartment home,
00:20:59
rather than having to have a conversation with a live person,
00:21:00
they could have a conversation with a virtual assistant.
00:21:02
And that virtual assistant was focused on answering the basic
00:21:04
questions.
00:21:04
It was helping them self-qualify?
00:21:06
Do I meet the rental requirements?
00:21:09
Does this thing have the amenities I'm looking for?
00:21:12
What options are there in terms of the two bedroom versus the
00:21:15
three bedroom?
00:21:16
Where's the location relative to the points of interest that
00:21:19
matter to me?
00:21:19
These are all high volume, relatively low value
00:21:24
interactions that a consumer might have, either on their own
00:21:28
hunting and pecking on the website or by having a
00:21:30
conversation with the leasing agent.
00:21:32
But when you don't have a leasing agent in the office to
00:21:34
answer the phone either that open position hasn't been filled
00:21:37
or that person is out there giving tours then the prospect
00:21:40
has no place to go other than to go find somebody else.
00:21:43
So LeaseHawk's focus early days was on the virtual leasing
00:21:46
assistant, and that's the.
00:21:47
Ace, is what we call our product and it will do all of what I
00:21:51
just said.
00:21:51
It will have the human-like voice interactions with people
00:21:55
who are answering, who are engaging in those calls to
00:21:57
action.
00:21:58
To dial a phone number, if you prefer to text, ace will talk to
00:22:01
you over text and a lot of times people think they're
00:22:03
interacting with a human.
00:22:05
If you want to email back and forth, ace can do that as well,
00:22:09
and that takes care of all of the self-qualifying steps at the
00:22:12
top of the leasing funnel that is helping the consumer
00:22:15
determine do I want to actually invest in visiting this
00:22:20
community to tour an available unit?
00:22:22
And that has worked really well to automate the top of the
00:22:24
funnel, and I think that's starting to become table stakes,
00:22:27
like if you're a community who's not using a virtual agent
00:22:30
to help with that, you really need to be looking at it,
00:22:32
whether it's Leesock or somebody else, because this is the high
00:22:36
volume, relatively low value part of the equation.
00:22:38
Now, once you start getting into the post-tour follow-up,
00:22:41
now the handoff starts to happen to where you're getting into
00:22:44
lower volume, higher value interactions, where you might
00:22:47
want to have your leasing team be front and center, because at
00:22:50
this point it's a real sales opportunity and so people are
00:22:53
people.
00:22:53
If you need to be sold on something, it's not a virtual
00:22:56
agent that's going to sell it to you necessarily over a text
00:22:59
interaction.
00:23:00
It's going to be a well-trained sales team who is showing off
00:23:05
all that this property has to offer, some of which might not
00:23:09
be obvious to a consumer, and so you have to have a well-trained
00:23:12
sales staff.
00:23:13
So leasing agents are salespeople first and foremost,
00:23:16
and so you've got to train them like you would any salesperson.
00:23:18
Overcome objections, sell the value, don't immediately jump
00:23:22
down to price.
00:23:22
All those things are where the human touch is important, and so
00:23:26
where LeaseHawk focused on the last year or so is how can we
00:23:30
leverage AI to help those interactions more effectively
00:23:33
than what we have been today?
00:23:34
And so it was a very interesting binary choice our clients are
00:23:37
making.
00:23:38
If I want to leverage AI, does that mean that all my
00:23:41
interactions with my consumers have to be with a virtual agent?
00:23:44
If I like that and I want to get rid of the humans, that's a
00:23:47
really good cost savings decision I can make, but I might
00:23:50
be giving up a little bit on the human experience.
00:23:52
On the other side, you've got a cohort of operators that say my
00:23:56
property is really unique and it's worth this elevated price
00:23:59
point.
00:23:59
It's not always obvious.
00:24:01
I want my highly trained sales team to be able to show off this
00:24:05
property.
00:24:05
I'm not going to use AI, and so it's always that binary choice
00:24:08
and either I'm going a hundred percent automated, I'm trying to
00:24:10
get rid of my people, or my people are my most precious
00:24:13
commodity and I want to reinforce that, but I'm now
00:24:16
missing out on all the savings and all of the analytics that
00:24:19
the AI folks were taking advantage of.
00:24:21
So what LeaseHawk has done is just look at all of the
00:24:24
interactions that the live agents, the salespeople, are
00:24:27
having with their consumers and trying to apply AI to those
00:24:30
interactions, to supercharge those interactions and to get
00:24:34
more out of the sales team.
00:24:36
So in a few months ago we deployed our first version of
00:24:39
that product.
00:24:40
It's called Ace Insights.
00:24:41
Ace is the overarching umbrella we have for our AI solutions
00:24:44
and this is Ace Insights that listens in on every phone
00:24:47
interaction that a live agent has with a consumer, whether
00:24:51
that's a resident or it's a prospect looking for their next
00:24:54
home, or maybe it's a vendor that needs to talk to somebody
00:24:57
on property.
00:24:58
Whatever, the reason is that somebody is having that phone
00:25:00
call, ace will analyze that phone call to help the operator
00:25:04
understand who is this person calling, why are they calling,
00:25:08
what questions are they asking, what challenges are they facing
00:25:12
and how is my employee doing on the phone to be able to address
00:25:16
those challenges.
00:25:17
So, just as an example, most of our clients today are focused
00:25:21
on how they can maximize the lead gen opportunities from the
00:25:24
phone channel.
00:25:25
They're still spending a lot of money marketing leasing numbers
00:25:28
and folks are still calling those numbers.
00:25:30
So it's a very important lead gen channel.
00:25:32
When a leasing agent answers that phone, they have one shot
00:25:35
to convert that inbound call into a tour or at least an
00:25:39
engaged prospect.
00:25:40
If they aren't doing a good job on that call, then you're
00:25:43
wasting marketing dollars.
00:25:44
It's going to take you longer to lease that apartment unit.
00:25:47
So what our analytics can do is actually score that agent
00:25:51
against the the best practices that you've laid out.
00:25:55
So, for example, if somebody calls and says, hey, I'm
00:25:58
interested in a two bedroom, how much is it?
00:26:00
Now an untrained leasing agent may immediately say, well, my
00:26:03
two bedroom is $1.
00:26:05
And then the person says, okay, thanks.
00:26:06
And they hang up the phone.
00:26:07
Was it too expensive?
00:26:08
Was it spot on?
00:26:10
Why do they hang up?
00:26:11
Are they interested?
00:26:11
Are they going to call back later?
00:26:12
All these things the leasing agent could have found out, but
00:26:15
didn't later.
00:26:16
All these things the leasing agent could have found out, but
00:26:17
didn't.
00:26:18
They immediately answered the question, immediately went down
00:26:19
to price and probably lost that lead.
00:26:20
So our analytics is discovering situations where that happens.
00:26:24
Don't immediately answer on price.
00:26:25
If somebody's asking how much a two bedroom is, just start
00:26:28
asking questions.
00:26:28
Well, what are you looking for when you're looking to move in,
00:26:31
have you seen what our property has to offer to all the benefits
00:26:34
of our community?
00:26:34
Because then when you then share the price later on in the
00:26:37
conversation or maybe when they come in for a tour, they have
00:26:40
more context that you're selling the value.
00:26:41
You're not immediately going down to price.
00:26:43
And so if you've got, you know, if you've got 60 properties in
00:26:46
a portfolio and you're operating a lot of communities in
00:26:48
multiple regions, how well the job is your team doing?
00:26:52
How do you know?
00:26:52
The only metrics we traditionally have are your
00:26:55
leasing metrics.
00:26:56
How many tours are they scheduling, how many prospects
00:26:59
are they creating?
00:26:59
How many guest cards are they creating in your CRM for
00:27:01
follow-up?
00:27:02
But you aren't really measuring the quality of those
00:27:03
interactions.
00:27:04
So with ACE Insights, that's exactly what we're doing.
00:27:06
We're measuring the quality of every one of those interactions
00:27:10
and giving every leasing agent a scorecard, like a grade, and
00:27:14
it's on a one to 100 scale and it's based on the report card
00:27:18
that every client that we partner with to be able to
00:27:20
create on their own.
00:27:20
So their scorecard is their own , measured against their best
00:27:23
practices that they've defined.
00:27:25
So that's paying off really well for our clients who are
00:27:28
trying that out, and so that's was rolled out just last month
00:27:31
and it's getting a lot of really good feedback and we're now
00:27:34
expanding it to include resident phone calls lot of really good
00:27:37
feedback, and we're now expanding it to include resident
00:27:39
phone calls.
00:27:39
And so we've known that since LeaseHawk has been focused on
00:27:44
lead gen, we've been setting aside all of the phone calls
00:27:45
coming in from the residents that need help, and now that AI
00:27:46
is listening in on every phone call, we are getting a much
00:27:49
richer understanding of the resident experience and we are
00:27:53
uncovering some challenges that our clients didn't even know
00:27:56
that they had.
00:27:56
Speaker 1: You know I'm going to tie this into some research I
00:27:59
became familiar with recently around what.
00:28:03
MIT and Harvard did some research on many corporations
00:28:07
around the world I believe it was around the world and you
00:28:09
know you look back at the Industrial Revolution and
00:28:12
productivity and they were getting between 18 and 20
00:28:14
percent lift in productivity over the employee's life cycle.
00:28:17
And we're talking about the tractors when you think about
00:28:20
how the world moved to old ways and it's not actually.
00:28:22
They're leaving money on the table, leaving an opportunity on
00:28:40
the table.
00:28:40
And the key takeaway from this, professor, ceos are thinking
00:28:45
about it the wrong way and while they want to, they really want
00:28:49
going back to what you opened up with, which was how do you
00:28:51
maintain the operating metrics, how do you continue to serve the
00:28:56
debt and serve the yields of investors?
00:28:58
Right?
00:28:58
And so the CEOs are trying to do what they know and they're
00:29:00
like well, let's cut, let's use up.
00:29:02
And the employees know, here comes tech, job cuts come.
00:29:05
Well, that's not necessarily true, because it actually
00:29:09
unleashes a whole new set of really great ways for employees
00:29:13
to skill up and, you know, make more value in organizations.
00:29:16
But what you said it was compelling in that, with ACE
00:29:19
Insights, you're talking about making the employee better.
00:29:22
So what this study was saying, the Harvard professor said, was.
00:29:25
He said CEOs need to look at their employees like R&D.
00:29:29
When I asked you that question, you said you may already have
00:29:31
the talent.
00:29:32
You may not even recruit it, so it's unlocking potential
00:29:35
already within the organization, which is what great leaders do,
00:29:38
right?
00:29:39
Bad management companies are like the plan is to spend more
00:29:42
money.
00:29:42
But if you can leverage resources you already have,
00:29:45
which is your employees, unlock their potential.
00:29:47
And then I'm thinking like even pairing this with these
00:29:50
insights.
00:29:51
Now, this idea is I don't think truly people have a business
00:29:55
objective to cut a role or to even centralize.
00:29:59
They just want to get their metrics.
00:30:00
They have to.
00:30:01
The constraints are upon them, all that stuff.
00:30:03
And so if they are thinking about this in an expansive or an
00:30:08
abundance mindset or in a how do we get more productivity,
00:30:12
more sales, more revenue out of what we already have?
00:30:16
They may not even be rethinking the model of who's on site and
00:30:19
all that stuff If they're renting faster, renting more and
00:30:22
they're getting these closing ratios and those types of things
00:30:25
in place.
00:30:25
So it's almost like Ace Insights is more of the
00:30:30
leadership stuff than even is the tech itself.
00:30:33
It's like what can I do with this information?
00:30:36
How can I impact the organization and get the leasing
00:30:39
velocity up and all that stuff.
00:30:41
Speaker 2: Yeah it's about.
00:30:42
It's about not speculating as to what you need to focus your
00:30:44
time on.
00:30:45
It's knowing where you need to focus your time and the more
00:30:48
quantitative analytics you have access to.
00:30:50
That's more objective and less subjective than the more right
00:30:53
you're going to be.
00:30:54
So you could guess why your lease renewal rates aren't
00:30:58
hitting the targeted number and you could put in plans to see if
00:31:01
you're right.
00:31:01
But you may not know for six months, nine months or 12 months
00:31:04
when the next cycle is up.
00:31:05
But if you knew in advance that you've got a point of friction
00:31:08
in your resident experience.
00:31:10
Every month I'm trying to pay rent and I got this goofy portal
00:31:12
I have to log into and it's really confusing and because of
00:31:15
that I'm late half the time and I'm really frustrated and
00:31:18
whatever that may be, or it's an old property and I've got a lot
00:31:20
of maintenance issues and you need to be really renovating and
00:31:23
investing in this.
00:31:24
Your people may not be telling you that, especially if you're a
00:31:27
more senior level person who has to think holistically across
00:31:30
a lot of locations how much of what's going on on property is
00:31:34
being surfaced up to help the senior leadership team make
00:31:37
better decisions Right, and it's not always easy.
00:31:40
Sometimes it's not intentional.
00:31:41
It's just that people are busy.
00:31:42
They're not tracking what's happening, they're just trying
00:31:44
to solve the resident problem and then move on with their day.
00:31:46
Other people may be trying to cover up a little of the
00:31:49
challenges that they're having, hoping that they can fix it, and
00:31:52
sometimes you just don't.
00:31:53
Nobody knows, you're not paying attention to the patterns and
00:31:55
trends, and so, with tech and again going back to Ace Insights
00:31:58
on all these interactions, it's just silently collecting all
00:32:02
that and analyzing it, summarizing it and identifying
00:32:05
the trends and patterns.
00:32:06
So you know.
00:32:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, in football analogy overused
00:32:09
analogies but that's Skybox.
00:32:11
You have a different view, you have leadership at different
00:32:22
levels, but you do see things differently that you can't see,
00:32:24
you know, in a one property theme of recurring calls, things
00:32:25
like that.
00:32:25
You mentioned earlier about talking about ACE insights, the
00:32:27
best practices that the client laid out.
00:32:27
So this is really unique in that they can customize this.
00:32:31
You're working with them to do that.
00:32:32
Talk to us more about that.
00:32:33
Speaker 2: Right, right.
00:32:34
So LeaseHawk has been in the call analytics space for the
00:32:36
last 10 years and so we have established some best practices
00:32:40
on how we say, based on the hundreds of millions of phone
00:32:43
calls we've been analyzing over the last 12 years.
00:32:44
These are the 10 or 11 things that you want to make sure your
00:32:48
people are doing and that's what we recommend, and we actually
00:32:51
publish an industry report card based on those best practices so
00:32:55
you can actually compare your team's results to the industry
00:32:58
benchmark, and it's all easily accessible in a nice compare and
00:33:01
contrast overlay in our in our portal.
00:33:02
But if you have something unique about your property, uh
00:33:06
that you want to make sure that your team is including in their
00:33:08
sales pitch, frankly, then you could add that to the best
00:33:11
practices questionnaire.
00:33:12
If you disagree with what Leesock's best practices are and
00:33:15
you want to go your own route, that works as well.
00:33:17
Yeah, yeah.
00:33:18
Speaker 1: I love that because it's like custom you know you're
00:33:20
not using what everybody else.
00:33:22
Speaker 2: You don't want your tech to constrain how you do
00:33:24
business.
00:33:24
It's supposed to be the other way around.
00:33:25
Your tech is supposed to enable you, not constrain you.
00:33:28
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, so Ace Insights is that the new product
00:33:31
offering, or is there something more?
00:33:38
Speaker 2: more Right?
00:33:38
Well, that's today.
00:33:38
It's.
00:33:38
It is called ACE insights.
00:33:39
It's focused on conversational insights across primarily the
00:33:40
phone channel right now, but working on email and text so
00:33:43
that those are also very data rich ways that we can collect
00:33:46
data about the interactions that that consumers are having,
00:33:48
residents and prospects are having with leasing teams.
00:33:50
And, yeah, it's rolled out as of October and and we're getting
00:33:54
some great feedback and and it's delivering some early wins.
00:33:57
We had one client where we were doing a review with this last
00:34:00
week and, not to get in too much detail, but the number one
00:34:05
reason why people were calling their centralized offices were
00:34:08
needing help to pay the rent.
00:34:10
And they knew that.
00:34:11
They knew they had some challenges.
00:34:12
But what they didn't know was, if you take the next layer down,
00:34:15
peel off that onion a little bit and say, well, why are they
00:34:17
having rental problems, problems paying the rent?
00:34:19
And you dive into well, it's those that are late.
00:34:23
They need help with money, grammar, western union.
00:34:24
Well, why are they having problems with that?
00:34:25
And then why and why?
00:34:27
And you can dive right down to the nut of like, what is the
00:34:30
root cause of this?
00:34:30
And it's like, okay, that's, that is fascinating.
00:34:33
I knew it was an issue.
00:34:34
I didn't realize it was that big of an issue and so now
00:34:37
that's I'm going to make that a higher priority for my teams to
00:34:39
solve, and even even simple things about the usability of
00:34:42
the resident portal.
00:34:43
Um, uh, ace insights was to call out that, hey, when
00:34:46
someone's late on their rent, all these fields are disabled
00:34:49
and so they have no choice but to call you.
00:34:51
They, they, you're not giving them another option, so you're
00:34:54
actually creating the need for them to call.
00:34:56
You could modify your portal somewhat, they could modify
00:34:59
their payment option right there .
00:35:00
And he goes yeah, I heard something about that, but again,
00:35:02
I didn't realize it was generating this much frustration
00:35:05
.
00:35:05
Sure.
00:35:07
Speaker 1: You know we have weeks away from the multifamily
00:35:09
innovation and AI summit.
00:35:11
I know you're speaking both in the sessions on stage and then
00:35:14
also you'll be doing an innovation showcase, so we're
00:35:17
happy for you to do that and literally show here.
00:35:20
We're talking about it.
00:35:21
You'll have the opportunity to show people in that session so
00:35:25
if you're not already attending that, definitely you'll get to
00:35:27
meet Larry and experience that showcase.
00:35:29
We always enjoy those.
00:35:30
Those are fun and leading into that session around change.
00:35:33
Where should we take the rest of this?
00:35:36
We've talked a lot about some of the things that you've
00:35:39
already done the past history of all the things that are
00:35:42
available to customers today.
00:35:43
They're shipped, they're ready to go.
00:35:44
You could take, you could deploy these in the portfolios
00:35:47
today.
00:35:47
Is there anything next coming from LeaseHawk that we can
00:35:51
reveal, or is there?
00:35:52
What are you thinking?
00:35:53
Speaker 2: about.
00:35:53
Oh yes, we're always thinking and looking at the next thing,
00:35:56
but where we're focusing some energy on right now is
00:35:59
reimagining the role of the CRM in operations.
00:36:02
Traditionally, the CRM is a data entry tool.
00:36:05
You type in information, you're creating contacts, you're
00:36:08
tracking all the interactions you're having, you're keeping
00:36:11
track of tasks, maybe and next steps Very manual A lot of data
00:36:15
entry, always having to nag your teams to make sure you update
00:36:19
the CRM, because if it's not in the CRM it doesn't exist.
00:36:21
But they don't often do it.
00:36:23
And so, with AI now being a primary user interface between
00:36:28
the consumer and your employees, you don't need to manually type
00:36:32
stuff in anymore.
00:36:32
The AI can make that as part of the workflow.
00:36:34
So now we see that entry point of AI being the initiation of an
00:36:38
automated workflow modifying data in the CRM, creating a set
00:36:43
of standard tasks based on what's happening, customizing
00:36:46
tasks as needed and then, where possible, actually executing on
00:36:49
those tasks.
00:36:49
So it's all automated.
00:36:50
So the CRM is evolving away from being a data entry tool and
00:36:54
into a centralized workflow automation engine where the UI
00:37:00
or the need for your users to log in, your employees to log in
00:37:02
, starts to be focused more on.
00:37:04
What are the analytics telling me what are the KPIs telling me,
00:37:08
how do I need to adjust the engine in order to do a better
00:37:11
job of delivering on results?
00:37:12
It's the instrument panel of your car and the things it's
00:37:15
running.
00:37:15
That's where it's going and we're putting a lot of thought
00:37:19
into that right now.
00:37:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you never see that in the commercials.
00:37:21
You see it toeing the boat or you know, yeah, yeah, because AI
00:37:25
, it should disappear.
00:37:26
Technology kind of should disappear.
00:37:28
Speaker 2: It's in the background, it's just kind of
00:37:30
there making sure things working and you don't really think
00:37:32
about it anymore.
00:37:33
And AI is enabling all that now , like it's really quantum leap
00:37:37
enabling it.
00:37:38
It was all incremental the last few years and that's just the
00:37:41
thing I talk about with my team is that AI is not the goal.
00:37:45
Anyone here who may be listening or watching this and
00:37:48
is thinking about their AI strategy don't think about AI
00:37:51
being the goal.
00:37:52
It's just another tool, it's another way of achieving the
00:37:55
goal.
00:37:55
But you've got to define what the goal is, and it's
00:37:57
interesting, patrick, how hard it is sometimes for people to
00:38:00
actually describe what is it they're trying to achieve in a
00:38:03
quantitative way.
00:38:03
And once you can figure that out, then AI is just one of the
00:38:08
many tools that you have to get there faster and to reimagine
00:38:11
new solutions.
00:38:12
And it is going to be unlocking tons of new solutions that just
00:38:16
are not feasible right now.
00:38:17
And that's really exciting for a company like Leesock that is
00:38:20
focused on AI how fast it's moving, where it's going, how
00:38:25
quickly it's going to get there, when is it going to become
00:38:27
self-aware and it's going to become Skynet and start killing
00:38:30
all the humans.
00:38:30
I'll leave that for another day , but it's moving very fast.
00:38:34
All the promises of science fiction 10 years ago.
00:38:36
We're starting to see.
00:38:38
Speaker 1: I think it's an opportunity for leaders to know
00:38:41
new ways to get to that yield, get to that operating metric
00:38:45
that, at the end of the day, this investment vehicle was
00:38:47
assembled for right.
00:38:48
Deliver that value to the customer, bring great people
00:38:51
together, bring that tech together and make the business
00:38:54
better.
00:38:54
I mean keeping it simple.
00:38:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you mentioned the innovation council
00:38:57
that we have, which is a fascinating forum because it's
00:39:00
it's made up of people from different backgrounds.
00:39:02
They have different roles serving real estate, some are
00:39:05
operators, some are providers, some are investors, marketing
00:39:09
people, leasing people right, it's all over, and collectively,
00:39:13
we're really challenging each other to rethink the status quo,
00:39:17
and I love one of the forums we had a few weeks ago where we
00:39:21
were talking about the impact that AI is going to have, just
00:39:25
on role definition, and the theme we landed on was just
00:39:30
acknowledging that there's a fear of people losing their job
00:39:33
because of AI and, as such, they're naturally going to
00:39:36
resist it and by resisting it, they're actually harming their
00:39:39
own career.
00:39:41
And the takeaway we all landed on it's not something we
00:39:44
invented in that forum, but it just really resonated with the
00:39:46
group was no one is going to lose their job to AI.
00:39:50
They're going to lose their job to people who are using AI.
00:39:53
So if you're not the one using AI, you are going to lose your
00:39:57
job, right, and if you are using AI, it's going to unlock so
00:40:01
much productivity and power in what you're currently doing and
00:40:04
it's going to help you reimagine what your career looks like
00:40:07
going forward, and it shouldn't be about losing jobs.
00:40:10
It should be about unlocking the potential of everybody to
00:40:13
contribute more.
00:40:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, and unlocking that potential.
00:40:16
This is where I get most excited.
00:40:17
You know, historically it's been the people that could
00:40:19
create leverage in a business was with loans and debt and
00:40:22
finance and these big, you know sort of wall street kind of
00:40:26
moves.
00:40:27
And you know you need to have an MBA in finance and understand
00:40:30
analytics and be a certain personality type to you know.
00:40:33
Have those negotiations, bring the attorneys together, bring
00:40:36
all the disciplines together.
00:40:40
But now, as you mentioned, there are R&D and employees of all of
00:40:42
these companies, with AI being the equalizer and the leveling
00:40:45
of the playing field.
00:40:46
That everybody's at the same stage right now and we all get
00:40:49
to learn together and we're going to fix things together and
00:40:52
we're going to break things together, right, and I think
00:40:54
that our goal with the Multifamily Innovation Council
00:40:57
is we've been bringing people together for many years Now.
00:40:59
We want to bring the technology together.
00:41:01
You guys have obviously an amazing technology, so if we can
00:41:04
bring that into the businesses in a productive way, then all
00:41:08
the employees enjoy that.
00:41:09
They have the same leverage as maybe one of the top executives
00:41:12
in the organization, because technology is leveraged to the
00:41:15
business, just like some of the assumptions we made about debt
00:41:19
being leveraged to the business.
00:41:20
So listen, I've had a talk all day with you on this stuff.
00:41:24
And we will, because we're going to be doing more events in more
00:41:27
places here in the innovation lab here, and I'd love to have
00:41:31
you back.
00:41:32
Speaker 2: I know you've got some people on your team that we
00:41:34
can contribute as well, and really appreciate it If I could
00:41:38
just say, patrick, that the work you're doing here, this
00:41:40
innovation lab, is really inspiring, because you and I we
00:41:43
talk a lot but I haven't been to your.
00:41:45
I don't call it an office.
00:41:46
I don't know what to call this thing now.
00:41:47
It's an innovation lab.
00:41:48
Yeah, it's a lab, and it just feels like a lab.
00:41:51
There's a lot of stuff happening here.
00:41:52
There's just a lot of kinetic energy.
00:41:54
I just feel when I walked into this room for the first time and
00:41:57
you've got different sections that are allocated toward
00:42:00
different types of things and and they certain and they can
00:42:03
foster different types of collaboration, but it just the
00:42:06
space that you've built.
00:42:07
This is inviting the collaborative efforts of
00:42:10
multiple people and as you were giving me the tour, the energy
00:42:13
level in the room was just getting really jazzed and all
00:42:17
the ideas that you were talking and I was able to maybe riff on
00:42:20
you with you a little bit on different things.
00:42:22
So that's what this innovation lab I think is going to turn
00:42:24
into right and bringing people together to reimagine the status
00:42:29
quo, to do something different that's going to have an impact
00:42:32
on the industry overall.
00:42:33
So I applaud you for your leadership here and the creative
00:42:37
energy that you and your team are bringing to this space.
00:42:39
It's just really cool.
00:42:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's just a significance of build
00:42:42
with people and people will support what they help build.
00:42:45
And you know we've we've had what?
00:42:47
200 meetings, I think, on the innovation council.
00:42:50
It's just listening and knowing what's what's useful.
00:42:52
Right now.
00:42:53
It's confusion.
00:42:54
It's it's where I have to only learn inside a sales
00:42:57
conversation, ai technology.
00:42:59
Some of the stuff it's a skilling up that's required and
00:43:02
some of these things are things you just need to do.
00:43:05
It's like a lease up.
00:43:06
Until you do a lease up, you don't really understand the
00:43:09
nuances of going through the urgency and lender walks and all
00:43:12
the inspections and all these things and you can learn about
00:43:16
it and read about it and go to a conference about it.
00:43:18
But until you do it and you break it and you mess it and you
00:43:22
see yourself fix it, you end up with new observations, and
00:43:25
that's what the purpose of the lab is is getting the
00:43:28
opportunity for other organizations to benefit from
00:43:30
bringing those people together and giving them a playground to
00:43:33
and then, of course, learn from experts.
00:43:35
I hope you're on that stage in there.
00:43:37
We a playground to and then, of course, learn from experts.
00:43:38
I hope you're on that stage in there.
00:43:39
We have a full venue event center that you, you know you
00:43:40
can drop in and we get what we call small event, big audience
00:43:44
and we get to the point and we make business better.
00:43:46
Speaker 2: I love it.
00:43:47
These, these nuggets of ideas that people can pick up from
00:43:49
attending these, these summits and these forums.
00:43:51
It's a nugget of idea that becomes the launch pad towards
00:43:54
something even more amazing.
00:43:55
Yeah Well, the hat.
00:43:56
Without having that nugget to start right, that never happens,
00:43:59
Right?
00:43:59
So, and the only way it happens is a numbers game.
00:44:02
You got to get people together a lot and have these touch
00:44:05
points, get them connected together, and sometimes the
00:44:07
connections don't work, but sometimes you get that one
00:44:10
person connected with that other right person.
00:44:12
They have a quick chat and next thing you know, boom.
00:44:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you guys are in Scottsdale.
00:44:17
Speaker 2: So we're right down the road, yeah.
00:44:19
Speaker 1: We'll be talking more about that stuff.
00:44:21
Yeah, it's very good, we'll invite more opportunities in
00:44:24
Scottsdale.
00:44:24
Well, listen, this has been great.
00:44:26
Tell us a little bit about how people can learn about where to
00:44:30
get in touch with Leesock.
00:44:32
Speaker 2: Leesockcom.
00:44:33
Funny enough, the internet's not going away.
00:44:35
Patrick's yes, so leasehawkcom, or just google leasehawk, and
00:44:38
and we'll give you all the information, as you can find all
00:44:40
the information you need for follow-up.
00:44:42
Yeah, we're excited to connect with everybody at the upcoming
00:44:45
summit and looking forward to those amazing conversations
00:44:47
awesome, great to have you on all right, likewise, thank you.
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