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Well, welcome and thank you for tuning in to Multi-Family Matters, powered by the Multifamily Media Network

and the only broadcast radio show in the nation that’s solely dedicated to multifamily industry operations.

I’m your host Paul Marks coming to you exclusively from the Smart Department Data Studio.

And we have a great show with a wonderful guest who is extremely knowledgeable and right in the middle of today’s topic.

And today we’re discussing the topic of Get Better Results with Less Work.

Where automation makes sense in multifamily.

Joining me by phone is a leading supplier partner in the multifamily industry, the fantastic mohu saying,

the CEO of Balance Assets Solutions. Welcome, Mo.

Hey, Paul. How are you doing? Happy to be here.

Yeah, you know, you and I ran into each other at the NAA conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago.

And it’s always interesting to me to kind of attend the different educational sessions that they offer at all the conferences that are out there.

And I can tell you that over the last year or so, maybe longer,

automation, AI automation has really been at the forefront of a lot of the topics that are out there.

It’s a hot topic in multifamily. So what do you see from the operators you work with across the country and what are some of the most common.

A day to day tasks that seem to be dragging or being a drag on their time.

Yeah, great question, Paul. You know, one thing I’ll preface with is, you know, AI and automation is a tool, right?

It’s only as effective as how you utilize it. Think of it as kind of like a hammer in your tool chest, if you will.

Based on our extensive work with working with a lot of multifamily operators nationwide,

there’s we consistently see a few handful of kind of critical day to day tasks that are extremely very time consuming and have a drag on team.

And so, you know, I’m in meeting kind of their efficiency and honestly morale.

One good example is manual bank reconciliation. So this is the process of reconciling the items that are on your bank statement with what is in your accounting system.

And so, you know, I’m not sure if you’re interested in the time countless hours each week or maybe at the end of the month for days meticulously matching transactions.

And this process is very ripe for being very error prone and can be incredibly inefficient.

And this task is also coupled with, you know, things like chasing down invoices and understanding what payments are for that are showing up on the bank bank account statement.

And so, you know, data entry and things like approval workflows create like a significant bottleneck to link payments and potentially impacting vendor relationships.

But the bank reconciliation process is definitely very, very important for some larger operators. They may have hundreds of bank accounts in time.

And it’s very easy if they don’t have a good process internally to ensure that that gets done and it gets done timely.

And so, you know, the bank account is not properly accounted for.

A good example is, you know, it’s just working, talking to a customer earlier today as we were kind of going through an audit of their accounting system.

And, you know, they had cash that was showing up on the balance piece on the couple of their properties that were not associated with bank accounts.

And the bank accounts had never been reconciled either. And so it’s just, you know, from a forensic accounting perspective, it’s kind of funny money, if you will,

and very concerning because it’s essentially inflating the value or the cash that’s on the properties.

I was talking to bank reconciliation.

Another major drain that we see is the manual generation of owner reports that the must end.

Usually this involves collecting data from a bunch of different disparate systems formatting last minute correction.

And this can lead to late reporting and immense pressure on the accounting team.

Least renewal and the process of going through and trying to ensure and maximize the renewal rates.

It’s also a task that requires a lot of has no challenges and usually the results of inconsistent document tracking,

or method communication leads to this process being very inefficient.

And this particularly impacts resume satisfaction and also creates potential compliance risk.

And then you have affordable or a light sector of properties and stuff. There’s a whole compliance process that you need to kind of go through as well.

So these are a couple of handful of examples. You know, a lot of these tasks don’t kind of scale and, but they are essential.

You are growing as a business and they can get very overwhelming.

You know, the inefficiencies you described, I’ve got to think that most people today, you know, in operations know that they’re in efficiencies or they go unnoticed.

So what do you think is the most prevalent reason out there that are they are they going to notice that they’re in efficiencies there or are they just tolerating them until they figure something’s got to give.

You know, that’s a great question. And then I heard this quote from a private heard it from, but you know, the things that you don’t change are the things that you settle for.

You know, it’s a phenomenon that we observe me constantly and it boils down to a few core reasons.

Firstly, a lot of these inefficiencies fast often feel like it’s part of the job.

You know, teams have simply just adapted to the burden, assuming it’s the inevitable cost of doing business and multifamily.

They simply haven’t or don’t realize that there’s a better, more streamlined way of doing it.

Secondly, there’s a pervasive mindset that it’s functional enough to survive this state that way.

You know, we are all creatures of habit.

And operators are really usually deeply entrenched in the get it done type of mentality and constantly putting out fires that they lack the time or perspective to truly analyze step back and kind of improved processes.

Productive process reviews rarely happen until something breaks a critical deadline is missed and auto raises a flag or key staff is burnt out and this reactive approach really allows for a lot of inefficiencies to kind of faster.

And the cumulative effect. However, it is severe, it inevitably leads to burnout anyway across the team and chronically late reporting errors that can be fairly costly and the road is the bottom line is just overall operational confidence in general.

What are some real world examples that you know of regarding operators who pretty much hit the wall on these issues. And we’ve got about three and a half minutes left.

Sure. You know, I’ll share with you a couple examples. One is a renovation we’re working with out of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

And one challenge that they were having with their application process is that they were seeing close to a 30% cancellation rate associated with their applications like folks that you know, committed applications did not go all the way through the process to get to the least.

And 30% is fairly significant if you’re running, you’re running a fairly large portfolio is fine at close to about 9000 units.

And what we saw when we actually did a deep dive and we did like a call a a secret shopper exercise where we had a staff member actually go through and submit an application and go through that process.

And what we saw is just going through the actual online rental application required 26 pages as they were going through the application and a lot of that was fairly unnecessary.

You know, there’s a page, for example, that would show up to enter your pet information. Although on the previous page, if you if you flag, no, I don’t have any pets.

And I’m going to drop you to that page and enter your pet information. You know, there were a lot of disclaimers throughout the actual application workflow.

Quite honestly, I’m not completely necessary things like, hey, you need to have insurance with a minimum liability of a hundred thousand dollars, which is just pervasive in the industry and but unnecessary to continue to call out in each page.

So we’ve kind of optimized that process for them, decreased it from 25, 26 steps down to just nine steps. And with that, we were able to increase or decrease their cancellation rate by over like 22%.

And this increased the velocity of them turning over or getting the units rented out, which again, that is your bottom line because, you know, as long as a vacancy is sitting on the market on rented.

It’s not generating revenue. This is just one example. Another example, another client we were working with that was doing very manual kind of bank reconciliation.

There are options in these software products like in the already in that pulley that allow for you to be able to kind of streamline that that process and use bank speed functionality to easily be able to identify the transactions that are not in your accounting system that are hitting your bank account.

Now, and this was a client that we had to kind of coach and do some process improvement or change to push the accounting team to create all the transactions in real time.

You know, versus having kind of road transactions that are hitting the bank account and not being picked up until the bank at the time of the bank reconciliation.

So tweaking kind of processes and kind of changing the way that things are done definitely makes a huge impact and kind of streamlining and kind of increasing that operational efficiency.

Ultimately, you know, using automation and using tools like AI and these LOM products and whatnot are, you know, they’re not fruitful.

If you know, if you haven’t addressed kind of the low hanging fruit of just operationally streamlining the way things are done before you layer on anything that’s automating.

All right, well, we are going to break it here. We’re going to be back right after these messages.

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When we are back and you are listening to multifamily matters powered by the multifamily media network

and coming to you exclusively from the smart apartment data studio,

we are discussing the topic of get better results with less work

where automation makes sense in multifamily.

I’m Paul Marx. Joining me by phone is a leading supplier partner to the multifamily history,

the great Mo Hussein, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions.

I do want to remind our listeners if you would like to provide show topics, guess I did.

Suggestions. Just listen to the archived episode of multifamily matters.

Please go to our website at multifamilyradio.com.

So, I’m out with the first segment we talked about the operational bottleneck

and what the problem actually is with automation and getting people to understand automation.

Let’s talk a little bit about what to automate and what to avoid.

There’s a lot of buzz, obviously, as we talked about around automation.

Where should multifamily operators actually start?

Definitely a lot of buzz around automation and AI, generally speaking.

So, usually when we’re advising most family operators,

we strongly advocate taking a strategic high impact approach.

What we mean by that is focusing on and defining what successful outcomes are

and being able to do so by finding a handful of use cases

that are grounded in pain points with high value impact.

You want to automate areas where volume is high and the rules are very clear.

And the focusing on processes where that are very repetitive,

occur frequently and follow a predictable set of steps.

And furthermore, we also suggest like, you know, actually quantifying the drag

and the bottleneck associated with those outcomes and those use cases

to be able to categorize or prioritize which ones to kind of start off with.

Usually the best starting point we consistently recommend on areas where

taking a lot of manual time and things associated with workflows.

So it can be maintenance workflows like unit turns, lease turnover workflows,

standardizing, you know, invoice ingestion and pain or processing.

And, you know, these particular processes are not only low risk in terms of implementation,

but they’re also are able to typically deliver on a fast ROI.

And by targeting these areas for operators can kind of quickly demonstrate tangible

time savings and error reduction and building that internal buy-in and momentum

for broader automation initiative.

It’s about achieving, you know, these small early wins that reinforce the value

of strategic technology adoption.

Another thing that I’ll comment on is that, you know, you can’t automate

and can’t improve on something you’re not measuring, right?

And so it’s important to have an established baseline and documented, you know,

procedures of what you’re looking to automate.

There’s a difference between, you know, anecdotal feedback of pay, you know,

this particular task or set of actions that need to be taken or are very manual

and very annoying, but, you know, what is the quantified benefit if we can’t put

a figure to it to understand, you know, how important or critical

or prioritize that should be to be automated?

You know, there’s all kinds of processes out there that operators go through

and their teams can go through.

What do you think some of those processes are that should not be automated?

So automation does offer a lot of benefits, but it’s very critical to understand

its limitations.

You know, we often caution clients against automating processes that involve, you know,

significant human judgment require like nuanced context or deal with a level of

high emotion.

For instance, you know, resident communication when it comes to things like evictions,

things like chat box and automated text replies, it can potentially backfire

without oversight.

You know, while initial contact can be automated, anything requiring, you know,

a level of empathy or like problem solving or handling, you know,

resident grievances or demands, like human interaction.

To maintain satisfaction.

Similarly, you know, you know, maintenance ticket routing can be tricky.

You know, categorization or poor prioritization assignment often depend on like the ground

team for context and kind of standardizing that will allow for you to be able to take

a next level step of kind of automating that.

But generally speaking, any process where judgment exceptions or emotions are involved

should be handled with care.

And then it’s a strong candidate for the system.

And then ultimately a breakdown in trust,couriously underlying the very official

efficiency are looking to cheaper.

However, writing an envelope within uninsured mother’s cohes,

been destructemaker,

machine plugin.

This is a,

a Leanworth II she Tulician probably descendants background Luigi.

And, um,

because he’s looked at my attention of these nine cycle notes also what we think

you’re looking to achieve here.

Give some examples of some of the processes

that you believe should be automated.

Yeah, so things like talking to a property manager

in Texas the other day out of Houston,

and I managed just close to about 10,000 units.

And they shared this fact with us

that I wasn’t completely aware of,

but they saw a 30% increase in resident conversion

from applications or guest cards,

folks that have expressed interest

in one of their properties or units to lease.

They saw that a fix happen

when somebody reached out directly to that person via phone call

within five minutes of them submitting an inquiry.

And so things like that, like that initial outreach

is a great step and something that has tremendous value,

especially if it’s increasing the likelihood

in the conversion rate associated

with a guest card or prospect to a resident.

And so that’s a great example of one area

where automating or using chatbots

and some of these software products like already in Epilogue

had to built in within the product

to be able to kind of do so and automate that.

Yeah, we’ve got about four and a half minutes left

in this segment, but why don’t you give our listeners

some advice on if somebody wants to automate,

but they don’t know where to begin, what should they do?

Good question.

So for companies feeling overwhelmed

usually by the prospect of automation

this notion is being pushed, you see it

and the marketing jargon, the software companies

that are pushing it and just generally work tech is today.

My advice is be very consistent and practical.

Start small, don’t aim to overhaul everything at once.

Instead, choose just one bottleneck and solve it well

and document that success.

Identify a single painful manual process

that causes daily frustration

and document the amount of efficiency gained

as you’re automating that.

Crucially, get input from the team

using these processes every day.

They’re the frontline expert to understand the nuances

and potential pitfalls.

Another buy-in is very vital for successful automation

as you implement tracking that time savings

in error reduction, showing that value

and quantifying that impact in terms of hour saves

or mistakes avoided or reporting deadlines meant.

I guess data is essential for justifying that effort

and building internal momentum.

And once that initial targeted automation

works successfully, you can then expand gradually

with a clear plan leveraging your first success

as a blueprint for future efficiencies.

And ultimately, this iterative approach,

build confidence, minimize its risk

and ensure sustainable operational improvement.

How are you finding the companies are attacking this

when they’re pretty much starting from ground zero

and they want to automate?

Are they assigning the task to a team within their company?

Or is it one person doing it

or are they just piecing it together?

What’s the most common thing you see?

Yeah, good question.

Honestly, oftentimes what we see is the executives

and decision makers that these companies usually are hearing

marketing jargon or otherwise from different software companies

that they may be using today

or others that are pursuing to do business with them.

And oftentimes, there’s this assumption

or prevailing mindset that, hey, I just buy this software

AI, whatever that AI does, whether it’s automated communication

or invoice processing or what have you.

And we just purchased it and then it’s kind of solved

by operational bottleneck, whatever that process may be.

And the fact of the matter is,

is that it requires kind of first internal delegation

and ownership of it.

It’s not something that you can just implement,

give access to your internal staff

and expect for there to be widespread adoption

and value being derived from that investment

that’s being made.

And so this whole notion of automation,

it’s intertwined with just a consistent improvement

in operational efficiency.

And that’s something that organizations

should be taking seriously.

Because the amount of work that’s,

or the amount of time it takes for work to be done

and set a step in processes and procedures

that need to be followed need to be quantified

and kind of documented.

And so oftentimes what we see is folks

who are purchasing software products,

but they don’t have a document that sets steps.

And they don’t have a baseline of understanding

where things are today

or they may have a misconstrued understanding

or an assumption and anecdotal feedback

on how long it takes to do something,

but they truly don’t know the actual process.

And so what we always suggest is you need to start

to understand where you’re baseline, where you’re at today.

And then work on those small wins

and work together as an organization

to increase that operational efficiency

and the gate steps where that’s necessary

and leverage the software

moving the software they already have today

in order to be able to fully maximize that automation.

All right, well, we are going to be back

right after these messages.

You are listening to multifamily matters

because multifamily matters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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Zintra is designed for property and maintenance staff

who are overwhelmed and need a system that works

from the leasing office to on-the-go with the Zintra mobile

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MUSIC

We’re back and you are listening to multifamily matters

powered by the multifamily media network

and coming to you exclusively from the smart apartment

data studio.

And we’re discussing the topic of get better results with less

work where automation makes sense in multifamily.

I’m Paul Barks and joining me by phone

is a leading supplier partner to the multifamily street,

the fabulous Mohusain, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions.

I do want to take a moment and thank some of our sponsors

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So, Moh, let’s talk a little bit about metrics that matter.

There are so many reports and dashboards available.

Different platforms people are using.

What should operators really be paying attention to?

Oh, that’s a really great, great question.

So, in a data risk environment, like multifamily,

it’s very easy to get lots and just a peer report.

And a lot of these software products

offer a lot of different reports, even reports that

are showing the same information in different ways.

We usually advise operators to focus on a very short list,

a short impactful list of key metrics that directly illuminate

the true financial health and operational performance.

And these metrics, these are the metrics

that show where the money is leaking and where it’s being made.

At the top of that list, one that we usually suggest

is turnover timeline and the cost of turning over units.

And the reason that this is important

is because obviously the longer it takes to turn over a unit,

the longer that unit is not generating income.

We look at all the different processes

that go into turning over a unit.

You have the inspection that needs to be done

when the tenant moves out.

You have the work orders or service requests

that need to be created after the move out

and the work that needs to be done.

Usually, the painting, any small renovations.

And then you have the advertising and the marketing

of the unit and then starting the best of prospects,

applicants and then eventually getting

a tenant into the unit.

The industry standard or kind of the goal

for turning over units is about one week time, seven days.

It’s very rare that we’ve ever seen an organization

that’s actually been able to achieve that.

And that’s a significant metric that’s very important

and something that should be seen and shared internally

in the organization with the maintenance staff

that’s working on the unit terms as well as the property managers

that are looking to lease the unit.

We were working with a customer

and then built these dashboarding products for them.

And one of the metrics that they wanted to get

to the ability to do is the cost of turnover

and how long it takes for them to turn over units.

The owner and even their head of operations,

their baseline assumption anecdotally was that,

you know, it doesn’t take us more than about eight or nine days.

When we actually pulled the data out of their database

and analyzed their move ins and move out,

you know, the average turnover we were seeing

was actually closer to about 21 days,

which is three weeks, two weeks more

than what they were potentially expecting.

And there was a couple of different things

that were contributing to that.

One, they had a couple of their properties

and maintenance staff was stretched away to thin.

And there were oftentimes folks that have been in the unit

for quite some time and the heavier renovation effort

was needed, but their staff was too thin to be able

to address that and turn the unit around as quickly

as the organization would have hoped.

And this was concerns that was voiced by their,

some of their maintenance managers,

but the management team did not have the data

to kind of validate what the impact is of not acting

on that and getting that individual,

the additional staff that they needed.

Up until they saw the actual data

and every company has like their Monday morning report

or they’re all hand meeting and one night

and usually they’re looking at some whiteboard

or dashboard or what have you and focusing up certain metrics

like and usually turnovers are one of them.

And so after we built that dashboard

and then armed them with that data,

they supplied the additional staff member.

They’re able to decrease that at turnover time

from about 21 days down to about seven days

and that difference of two weeks materialized

in additional $35,000 in monthly income

that the organization was receiving.

And so from just that change and again,

the data was in their database.

It just wasn’t widely seen focused on

and collaborated across the organization.

So that’s one, another is the delinquency trends,

good place for automation and you know,

outreaching to folks, the tenants that are late on their rent,

you know, having an email and a text reminder,

letting them know that rent is coming due

when it’s about to be late and late piece about the post,

another reminder and then even after so a day,

a couple of days after to send another reminder

and although this may seem multiple different touch points,

what, you know, I have an example of one client

that was following up with tenants on the delinquency,

but they would always send the email

and they weren’t using the software

to send out automated text messages.

And when we actually turned that on

and built out a process kind of around coupling the emails

with the text message automation,

they actually saw a decrease in delinquency

in the beginning of the month.

And so, you know, most folks have their phones on them

and so they may not be looking at their email this time

because they’re probably a lot more privy

in seeing text messages that are coming in.

And so, they may have forgot to pay rent

and see a text message and then they go to pay the rent.

So we thought we thought huge adoption

or decrease in delinquency by just automating that.

Are there any, I guess what you would call vanity metrics

that you see people trying to chase

that really don’t help or mean much?

Yeah, it’s a good question.

But we do frequently encounter operators

to get sidetracked by vanity metrics.

I think it’s important to understand

like any metric that you want to kind of focus on

that needs to be a direct line to either revenue,

time savings or revenue gains, right?

And so, there are metrics that look very impressive

on paper but they offer very little,

a real insight into the bottom line.

Prime example is least velocity.

Well, a high number of least signs per week

might seem fantastic if the underlying expenses

for acquiring and maintaining those residents

are out of control that high velocity

doesn’t help your bottom line.

Once we have that one client as an example

that had actually very high least velocity

but the average cost of acquisition

or converting an applicant was closer to about $1,800

because they’re paying, you know,

these ILS sites are very high lossy fee

to be kind of at the top of the search query

when a potential resident or prospect

is searching for units in their area.

And so, you know, we had suggested a pivot

and what kind of moved some investment over to SDO

so that the organic traffic can increase

and that’s free traffic,

although it requires consistent investment in SEO.

But simply just focusing on, you know,

things like lead volume or like traffic, you know,

can’t be misleading, you know, massive influx of leads

is meaningless if your conversion rate is very low.

It indicates, you know, a fundamental issue

and kind of just your marketing messaging, property appeal.

And so, some of these metrics become truly valuable

only when viewed in conjunction with a conversion rate

or cost and ultimately how revenue is generated.

And so, really the danger of energy metrics

is that they provide a false sense of security,

they divert the attention and resources

from the true drivers of profitability

and operational health.

How does automation help to, I guess,

unlock better, more reliable data

so that someone can make educated decisions?

Yeah, good, good question.

So automation, generally speaking,

is the bedrock of reliable data.

It’s really, it’s primary contribution, it’s ensuring

that processes are done the same way every time.

Manual processes by their nature, you know,

they introduce a lot of variability.

Different people performing different tasks,

slightly differently leading to inconsistent data entry,

missteps and varied interpretations of the data.

So this lack of standardization is a silent killer

of data quality.

And good examples is, you know,

you could be operating a large multi-family portfolio

if one region is doing their release renewal differently

than another region and makes it very difficult

to understand the efficiency of that process, right?

And that automation eliminates this variability.

When the task is automated, it executes that identical

set of steps precisely and consistently every single time.

And this consistency creates clean and trustworthy data.

When you’re reporting and your dashboards

are fed by clean and accurate data,

your insights become far more reliable

and you can make business decisions.

And conversely, when that reporting is based on bad input,

it leads to bad decisions because there’s a lot of noise,

whether that’s, you know, misallocating, you know,

marketing spend or inaccurate conversion rate data

or making poor capital expenditures,

choices based on flawed net operating income figures,

you know, ultimately, you know, clean books

and processes equal confidence in your numbers

and that equals, you know, faster water moves,

especially in a competitive market.

So automation is the engine that kind of drives

that data confidence.

Okay, we are going to be back with our final segment

of this episode right after these messages.

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because multifamily matters.

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Well, we’re back with our final segment of this episode

of Multi-Family Matters, powered by the Multi-Family Media

Network and coming to you exclusively

from the Smart Apartment Data Studio.

We’re discussing the topic of get better results with less

work where automation makes sense in Multi-Family.

I’m Paul Marks and joining me by phone

is a leading supplier partner to the Multi-Family

industry, the awesome Mohusan, the CEO of Balanced Asset

Solutions.

I do want to take a moment in thanks

of our other sponsors that make Multi-Family Matters

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and solutions for efficient access control

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Smart Apartment Data, the most comprehensive

and up-to-date intelligence on the Multi-Family industry,

and CTS Complete Technology Solutions,

making managed IT an easy business decision for Multi-Family.

So, Moh, let’s talk a little bit in this last segment

before we transition about building the right operating

system and for property managers who

feels like they’re behind the eight ball, what’s

the one step they can take today to start

improving their operations?

Yeah, good.

That’s a good question.

And I think this is kind of a general approach

to anybody in the industry, whether it’s

the maintenance manager, leasing manager, property manager,

and executive and operations manager,

pick the single most impactful process that’s very, very painful.

You don’t want to try to fix everything all at once.

You’re going to focus on a notorious bottleneck.

And perhaps one example is talking to a client earlier today

is their property management team goes through a manual

and arduous process when it comes to payment processing

or invoice processing.

And this property manager that I’m speaking of would get

calls throughout the day from vendors

who’ve sent invoices previously weeks back

and had not been paid yet and don’t understand or have

visibility into the status of their invoice

and when they’re going to be getting paid.

This was a great example of a process that they can automate.

The process that they have today,

the invoice gets sent by the vendor.

They print out the invoice, the person

who’s the front desk agent like SAMHSA

to show the reference to data that the invoice will receive,

then it routes the property manager,

the physical piece of paper.

It’s brought to the property manager that oversees

that particular property or portfolio.

They review it for accuracy.

They give their stamp of approval.

Then it goes to the accounting team.

The accounting team enters the original data entry

step and then it gets routed to the CFO

to approve of accuracy and then it gets to the CEO

to actually print his signature on the actual check.

And so that is a very long, arduous process

and it’s not digitized either.

And they’re using a product like Apoli as today

where they can literally automate that entire process.

So what we have suggested is, hey,

take the next vertical action is to map

that entire process out, document, step by step,

everything that’s being done, how long you usually take

to get from one step to the next step

and get very granular, every click, every decision point,

every person that’s involved.

And this mapping process alone often usually reveals

inefficiencies.

One was the need to have the owner sign the check.

You know, he’d be golfing her out of the office

for whatever reason.

And sometimes I can’t get a payment out to a vendor

because the check can’t be physically fine.

However, they have a system today

that is able to process online payments

that can simply ask for the information for the vendor

or once the invoice actually disapproves,

they should be getting their payment within a day or two.

And so usually mapping out this process will reveal

immediate inefficiencies and then start experimenting

with those simple improvements.

And this example that I gave you is actually having

a digital approval workflow or rather than paper being printed,

stamps being used to be able to document

each step of the approval process, use the software

to be able to do so.

And this improvement implementing this feature,

standardizing that template of what that approval process

looks like is helps kind of adopting, you know,

small automation, one step kind of at a time.

And the goal is to really start with what’s flowing

your team down the most, tackling that one very painful area

and deliver immediate release.

And that helps to build crucial momentum and confidence.

And usually when we’re dissecting a company’s process

and asking them, hey, why is this that necessary?

Usually the answer is because the owner or somebody else

wants their ability into the process

and to ensure there’s some control over how expenses

are being paid, which, you know,

software today offers that visibility.

A lot of these programs have, you know, approval workflows

that needed that were expensive need to go through

before a payment is being made.

And ultimately there’s no reason why a check needs

to be printed, you know, the amount of savings

that this organization would receive is, you know,

the back and forth of the property managers have to do

whenever a vendor has a receive payment

or if there’s a check that’s sent in the mail.

And for some reason, USPS drops the ball,

loses the mail or something like that.

And now there’s vendors reaching back out

to the management company and it creates just this chaos

internally of consistently having to, you know,

figure out who, what, who the invoice and where it is

rather than having like an entire approval process digitized.

So that’s completed the ability across the org,

expenses are controlled and the actual payment is automated

by having that HCH or online payment option.

We’ve got about two and a half minutes left

or three minutes left before I want to transition us

to something else, but I wanted to ask you,

in your opinion, what separates the top performing

multifamily operators that you work with

from everyone else?

Good question.

You know, what really consistently separates

top performing operators from the rest is fundamental

commitment to systems, not superheroes.

You know, average operators relying on individual team

members to roably putting out fires, you know,

often working unsustainable hours.

You know, top performers confirm, you know,

conversely, like they build a robust, repeatable processes

and this empowers the team and creates consistency.

You know, their operations are characterized

by accurate data.

They trust their numbers because their processes

ensure clean inputs and their processes are repeatable,

meaning they function consistently

regardless of who is performing the task,

reducing errors, the bottleneck associated

with any one individual and consequently,

their teams aren’t consistently putting out fires

to focus on value add activities, strategic growth.

And these operators don’t simply just chase tools

in search of a magic bullet.

But at first, they build discipline around their workflows,

data integrity and only then, do they strategically

really use technology to scale amplifying that efficiency

and that ensures sustained high performance,

you know, across the portfolio?

I’ve got one more question before we get on to something else.

And that is, you know, you work with a lot of different

companies, do you find that these best performing operators

or top performing operators come in different shapes

and sizes?

In other words, small operators versus the big names

in the business or do you see a lot of them being,

they have to have a larger team to be able to do these things?

No, I mean, here’s, you know, if we fundamentally

break down the central tenants of this industry,

it doesn’t matter if you’re managing a thousand units

or a hundred thousand units at the end of the day.

You have units that need to be filled with tenants,

rent that need to be paid, vendors that need to be paid,

units that need to be renovated and turned over,

management fees that need to be collected,

owners, investors that need to be distributed funds to

and reporting that needs to be put together.

The only difference of, you know, a smaller organization,

from a much larger organization, it’s just the scale

and the volume of the work that needs to be done.

But, you know, we always constantly kind of advocate

to keep it simple and that ensures for you to be able

to scale profitably as well.

And, you know, we’re always constantly trying to help

clients shift from professionally being in get it done mode

to strategically do it better.

When operators are drowning in that day-to-day chaos,

long-term thinking feels impossible.

We help them kind of escape that trap

by first identifying and tackling the single high impact.

The operational bottlenecks, small wins,

build momentum, they provide immediate relief

and demonstrate tangible benefits.

Once we help them free up that critical time,

that mental bandwidth from that daily grind,

they can really finally invest in planning

and not just reacting.

We help them in guiding to leverage their newly gained

confidence, help further kind of develop

a proactive approach and strategic roadmap

for their operations and this includes

building scalable systems, optimizing SOP,

financial reporting, future growth,

enhancing team development.

So, without moving from a firefighting culture

to one of continuous improvement

where every operational refinement contribution

like leads to further long-term profitability

and just standable growth.

We’ve got about two minutes left

and I wanted to kind of change and just tell our listeners

a little bit about balanced asset solutions,

what you guys are looking for and how you can help people

as well as if they want to get in touch

with balanced asset solutions.

Are you, what’s the best way to do that?

Yeah, so I balanced that solution is a CCA

and a technology advisory, a policy firm.

We work with multi-family operators

regardless of what platform or technologies you’re using

or experts and licenses,

Zoltins and Yardee F. Folio, et cetera.

And we help clients, one,

increasing their operational efficiency using technology,

standardizing and scaling processes,

including leveraging automation and these products

as well as developing even custom tools

to help kind of further automate the business.

We are also a TTA firm, so we do also work with auditors.

We also offer audit services and taxes

and things like cost segregation services

and ways to be able to mitigate tax.

Well, so, now I would kind of bundle up

with kind of like a CPA,

Goldman and marketing agency

which is specifically dedicated to the multi-family industry.

If you’d like to get ahold of us,

you can reach out to www.balanceassettesolutions.com.

And just for their benefit,

you work in multiple markets as well?

That’s right, yeah, we have clients

in 38 different states in five countries.

So, yeah, we’re very pretty and knowledgeable

and nuances in particular markets as well.

Well, perfect.

Hey, Mo, thanks so much for being here.

I’m sure I’ll see you at an upcoming conference coming up.

And it’s always great to have you.

You always bring the receipts with you when you come.

So, thanks so much.

I appreciate you.

Thank you so much, Paul.

All right, we’re gonna be back next week

with another great topic in power panel of industry experts.

You’ve been listening to multi-family matters

because multi-family matters.

Thank you for listening to multi-family matters,

a weekly radio show that discusses current topics

and trends in the multi-family industry.

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go to multifamilyradio.com.

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