Multifamily Matters, a weekly radio show that discusses the current topics and trends in the multifamily industry. Stay tuned and listen to the movers and shakers in multifamily. Share their opinions and thoughts about what’s old, what’s new, and where the multifamily industry is heading in the future. You are listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters. Music Well, welcome and thank you for tuning in to Multifamily Matters, now powered by the Multifamily Media Network and the only broadcast radio show in the nation that is solely dedicated to multifamily industry operations. I’m your host, Paul Marks, coming to you exclusively from the Smart Apartment Data Studio, and we have a great show with two special guests who are extremely knowledgeable and right in the middle of today’s topic. And And today we’re discussing something that is important and timely to the multifamily industry. Our topic is the changing resident experience, new expectations in multifamily and senior living. Joining me by phone is a longtime multifamily industry veteran, the awesome Liz Ayala, the administrator with Valley Village Retirement Community, and also with us is a fabulous supplier partner to the multifamily industry, Mo Hussain, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions. So welcome to Liz and Mo. Thanks for joining on the show. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s changed, how the resident expectations are changing. And Liz, this is a question to you. You worked across multifamily and senior living. What are the differences you’re seeing and what residents expect from property management today? Yes, what I’m seeing is that residents now view management as a part of their daily life. It’s not just someone who collects their rent and they see it at the beginning of the month. Now their expectations can range from conflict resolution, emotional support, even social engagement. And as we have more health conscientious and tech-oriented Aware residents, they have higher standards for communication and problem solving. They, you know, want an immediate response and their follow-ups and fast responses to issues like noise or smoke. And Mo, are you seeing the same kind of trends across the country with the operators you work with? Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Liz. I would say across the multifamily housing segment in general, our experiences, our expectations are rising. Now, a lot of renters are comparing property management to on-demand services like Amazon or DoorDash. So a lot of things like communication. Tenants now used to accept email. email or office visits as a main way to kind of get issues resolved. Now, they’re expecting instant communication and two-way updates. This can be about maintenance tickets, other notifications. So, hotels, like standards and services in general and property management has been elevated now to like a hotel-like experience. So, to management around kind of customer service training, SLA, maintenance, and hospital style kind of touches is what really sets communities kind of apart. What do you attribute that to? I mean, I would imagine that is that the world has changed with the technology that we have at our fingertips with, you know, smartphones and so forth, and I would think that A lot of the people, especially in a senior living facility who have, you know, remember the days before all of those types of technologies were available, you would think that they would be a little bit more patient because they remember the old days. But, Liz, do you find that the folks in your retirement community are using this technology and that’s what’s driving them to want this instant gratification and instant communication? Yes, I would, Paul. You know, there’s definitely a… a time where maybe they would come down to the office and not expect it to be instant. But now, with many of our residents using DoorDash, using even Safeway delivery, but everything is being provided to them, they have that expectation of you solving their problem immediately. And we do our best to comply with meeting that demand. But, you know, in a facility like ours where we have 350 residents who live here and call us home and we have their family and their friends that check on them and have questions, that is a lot of communication to be on top of. So I definitely think like automating things and building it into systems can make it easier to manage. But that doesn’t change the fact that, you know, As operators, we need to be aware of their ever-changing expectations and the influence that their family and friends have on that as well. Mo, you obviously, a part of your business is to integrate these types of software packages for your clients. What are you seeing as far as when it comes to that type of situation where people need to have much quicker responses than in the past. How does that work with the technology that’s available? Yeah, great question. There’s a lot of different products that folks are using today to kind of manage operationally, communication, things of that sort. One of our clients, they use kind of AppFolio to help kind of manage that. There was this survey that Zego did back in 2024 that stated 71% of residents said that they expect same-day communication. And what’s really being driven by is kind of that experience now economy that we’re in today, right? So you think about things like Amazon having like two-day shipping and, you know, all these other services like DoorDash and stuff to help make things more simple and allow for immediate kind of gratification or just addressing any needs that folks want. Kind of this whole AI economy now and buzz that we’re kind of going through today. So what we see is most operators are not really necessarily struggling with with people who more lack a structured system. Teams may be spending a lot of time searching for information or having to kind of follow up manually. And these small inefficiencies, you know, 5, 10, 15 minutes here and there kind of add up to big frustrations that bubble up to residents and can have implications on renewals and things like that. Smart processes and leveraging automation is now becoming business critical versus a nice-to-have. You know, things like automated ticketing ticketing systems and response tracking averages issue resolution time by close to 30%, according to Folio’s 2024 efficiency benchmark report. One thing I did want to get Liz’s perspective on is, do you feel like that the, you know, resident expectations have kind of changed or are different kind of pre versus kind of post COVID era? Yeah, I do think that their expectations have changed. You know, There’s a lot more accessibility. During COVID, our facility is very busy. There’s always activity going on in the social center. There’s always people coming to the office to tour. There’s all of these things going on. And then COVID, it was completely quiet. And we were lucky and grateful that our residents, we didn’t have any outbreaks here and things were okay. But During that time, there were a lot of attention on getting older people connected with technology. And so in Silicon Valley, in our area, there were a lot of studies done to try to get people connected with devices, learning how to, you know, stay connected with the world while we were in shutdown, while things are not open. And so a lot of A lot of our residents during that time were able to get more connected on devices, learn how to use Zoom, learn how to, you know, go on library tours through their computer. And so I definitely feel like they had to jump up and using and advancing technology and getting used to that technology. instant information. And so I think that has changed now how a lot of our residents want to communicate with us. They don’t need to come down to the office. They don’t need to call. They’ll try and text. And the great thing about it at Folio is that we can text all of our residents through there. We can send a mass text if we need to for updating them on current information. So yeah, I definitely see a change after COVID. Sounds like you guys made an investment at that time on kind of uplifting or kind of educating the residents on how to use these different digital mediums and kind of training around that and to kind of drive that adoption. Yes. You know, before COVID, we didn’t have online leasing. We were a little late adopters. So when COVID happened, we had to immediately pivot. And so luckily we were, and we had to create videos for touring and all of that stuff. So yeah. I imagine that probably has been able to give the community a substantial ROI, right? Because those residents now don’t need to call in as often if they want to understand like a status on like a maintenance request because they can see the status through their portal. Or if they want to submit a maintenance request, I imagine that is driving kind of operational efficiency within the office staff as well. Yes, it’s definitely helped with office and maintenance and just keeping everyone on the same page. Definitely helps with communication. All right. Well, we are going to break it here. We’re going to be right back after these messages. You’re listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters. Rev, the multifamily leasing company, is the industry’s long-term affordable leasing management solution. After all, it’s really not about cost. It’s really all about revenues. Book Rev’s expert directors and leasing career professionals for your properties today. Let Rev drive revenues and create significant incremental value for you. Reduce stress. 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Joining me by phone is a longtime multifamily industry veteran, the awesome Liz Ayala, the administrator with Valley Village Retirement Community, and also with us is a fabulous supplier partner to the multifamily industry, Mo Hussain, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions. I want to remind our listeners, if you would like to provide show topics, guest ideas, suggestions, or just listen to the archived episode of Multifamily Matters, please go to our website at multifamilyradio.com. So let’s talk a little bit in this segment about some of the community challenges. You know, resident friction is inevitable. How you operationalize its response defines your culture at the company. Liz, talk a little bit about residents expecting more involvement from management and what kinds of conflicts or even issues can come up most often in those situations. Yeah. Okay, Paul, what I’ve been seeing a lot more lately are noise complaints, smoking concerns, and social disputes have been common. When you think of noise complaints or smoking concerns, those are not necessarily new, but they’re still ongoing, and especially as people The cities imposed different laws. For example, Santa Clara had imposed a no smoking ordinance. And so that impacted how we operated. And social disputes can be common even over pets or barking, you know, animals, things like that. You know, often shared spaces. can create tension between new neighbors when someone moves in and they, you know, cook with different spices and things like that. Our team introduced some new devices last year that can detect noise, decimal levels, cigarette and marijuana smoke particles, which have reduced complaints by like 98%. So that’s a beautiful thing. And the success came not necessarily from, you know, enforcement, but from the devices being seen as a deterrent and accountability. So that has really helped us and emphasizing with, you know, the reporting party who is, you know, sharing their concern and validating that, you know, that is their experience. We can’t change that. But also trying to handle a situation with empathy and transparency so that, you know, the parties involved can understand why the rules exist, not just that they have to follow them. And in our case, sometimes residents have lived in their own home for 20 years and they’re now coming to a community and, you know, having to learn how to live in community is a new experience for them. I’d like to jump back into something you said, because it’s the first I’ve heard of that. Tell us a little bit about those devices that detects the noise level and so forth. But what are some of those devices and how do they work? Yeah, so I was kind of at my wits end with the complaints. You know, how do you deal with a smoke complaint if you can’t find a smoker? And so I was searching, you know, what is out there? There’s always new technology that’s coming out. And we found these devices called Minute. And they were used a lot in like Airbnbs and like small businesses. personal rentals. And so I reached out to the organization and they were just starting their enterprise section of their phase of their company. And so they were interested in working with us to employ these devices in one particular building where we had a lot of complaints. And so what we liked about the device is that it is It does protect the tenant’s privacy. So it does not record conversations or anything like that. But it can detect noise decimal levels. And it can detect cigarette particles in the air. And so that’s how it sends an alert. Once we put that in every single unit, and they do have to be charged, so you’ve got to figure that out, and it does have to be on Wi-Fi. So we have older buildings here built in 1964, so that was fun figuring that out. But they worked with us in developing a network that was specifically for those devices. And once we implemented them, I think we only had one alert, and it turned out not to be cigarette smoke, but it turned out to be someone cooking with spices. So you can feed that information into the platform, and then that way they can recognize that the next time. And so the device learns as it’s in the unit. Yeah. Yeah, it’s been great. That’s really interesting. You know, Mo, let’s talk a little bit about how operators can handle these types of issues efficiently from an operational perspective, you know, across the country. Yeah, and I want to commend Liz on that recommendation with that custom device that you guys use. I actually haven’t come across another community or client that actually uses a device like that, and I’m taking a note to look into that after our call here. But what a wonderful example and demonstration on kind of decreasing resident complaints around noise and smoke by using those devices or by 90%. Yeah. Resident friction and challenges around that is probably one of the most significant operational pressure points that we see today. Residents expect more involvement, quicker, faster, and clearer communication. Compounded with that is just the volume and intensity of a lot of resident management interactions have increased, which has led to new kinds of conflicts and just operational strains. Some of the most common conflict areas that we see, a lot of it can be addressed with Clear communication and also commitment and accountability. So things like, you know, maintenance delays and communication gaps. You know, residents expect to be able to file tickets and get updates regularly. Having a centralized ticketing system that automatically gives those status updates. Also having internal SLAs of how long… things should be turned around. And then when there’s items that have been aged for a little bit too long, those get flagged and kind of get operationally escalated to get addressed. And, you know, you know, poor and inconsistent communication, different team members giving conflicting answers. One example or important notices like water shut off aren’t received kind of on time. You know, residents will escalate these small issues because they can’t get kind of a straight answer. So having kind of centralized communication hubs, standardized messaging and logging these interactions and using features like Liz mentioned about mass notification allows for that open, transparent communication. Things like rent increases and policy changes and fees need to be kind of proactively notified to the residents, automated notices and renewal offers, and show kind of, you know, in the tenants’ portals, the fee histories and, like, their ledgers are also important. I would say, you know, things like, you know, high-stakes situations where residents can get frustrated, you know, today more than anything that we have. A lot of technology at our fingertips and residents are very quick to escalate even the smallest things in social media, you know, posting on X or even Google reviews. And these things, these small issues can lead to a snowball effect on public reputational damage. And so frontline staff needs to be kind of equipped on handling kind of these emotionally high conversations and more particularly trained in kind of de-escalation and empathy and tracking that information as well and ensuring that there is visibility into individuals. into those interactions and that the entire operational team is kind of behind the same set of standard operating procedures. I’m curious, Liz, especially I imagine, like especially when we’re in the COVID era, everybody was just frustrated, generally speaking. Were there any policies or things that you guys did differently from like, you know, scenarios where things are being escalated by a particular tenant? Have you guys established any changes in policy or structures or procedures internally to address those? Yes. You know, I think one of the things that we try to do is when a complaint comes in, you know, obviously if it’s first addressed the concern. So if it’s, you know, maintenance, make sure it gets fixed right away. So number one is address the concern. And number two is, you know, is it, Did this problem arise or get escalated because we don’t have a policy in place? You know, does that mean we need more training? Does that mean we need to look at the workflow around the situation to make sure that we are communicating with staff and residents and see if that’s like a policy issue? that we need to enhance or create? Or is that, you know, a performance issue that we need to look at with staff? I think it’s important to look at all three of those so that we can fully address the situation and then hopefully it’s not a repeated situation. You know, we want our residents to have confidence that we are professionals and we are here to address their concerns. Okay, we’re going to break it right there. We’re going to be back right after these messages. You are listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters. Hi, this is Remy Marks, the Chief Connection Officer of Multifamily Now 24-7 Internet Radio, the first and only radio station created exclusively for the multifamily industry. It’s where professionals come together for nonstop insights, stories, and conversations that move our industry forward. And now, you can take that pride beyond the airwaves with the Multifamily Now Store. From t-shirts and gear with the inside jokes only multifamily property pros understand to the apparel that celebrates the people who keep communities thriving. 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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 the changing resident experience. New expectations in multifamily and senior living. I’m Paul Marks. Joining me by phone is a longtime multifamily industry veteran, the awesome Liz Ayala, the administrator with Valley Village Retirement Community, and also with us is a fabulous supplier partner to the multifamily industry, Mo Hussain, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions. I do I do want to take a moment and thank some of our exclusive sponsors that make multifamily matters possible. Econserve, providing multifamily water conservation solutions for properties across the U.S. Plumber, boost your bottom line with custom utility allowance models. Zentra, a seamless security solution designed to solve everyday problems of shared property access. Zentra is the convergence solution. of exceptional security and convenience, and also Two Dots. Two Dots is the only true all-in-one fraud prevention and underwriting solution for multifamily trusted by six of the NMHC top 10. So getting back into the conversation, Liz, let’s talk a little bit about, it’s not just about being responsive, it’s about creating systems that that make responsiveness sustainable? And when you’re juggling your resident care, your maintenance, your staff members, what helps your team stay organized? Well, Paul, it is a lot of work. We have regular team check-ins and clear communication routines. You know, it’s important to have transparent updates with residents on when and how issues will be addressed. That will help with their being able to be prepared for the issue that’s coming up and the fix. Focus on documentation, which has reduced stressors stress and improve follow through. And so we know that our teams are working hard. And so with that documentation, we want to show that our teams are working hard and what they’re doing to address the problem that’s come up. You know, Mo, you work with property management organizations on improving their operations. So in your mind, what separates the teams that thrive from those that seem to struggle? Yeah, and I love Liz’s answer there, and I’ll kind of add to that. So we work with hundreds of property management companies and on-site teams, and usually the biggest gap that we kind of see between those that thrive and those that are struggling usually doesn’t have anything to do with things like market conditions or even the technology and the stack that they’re using. It’s What it comes down to is how they’re able to operationalize their culture, systems, and communications. So one, you know, thriving teams usually treat the property management like a business, not a collection of tasks. And so usually struggling teams, we see they’re operating a lot more reactively. Firefighting maintenance calls, for example, are putting out resident issues one at a time and decisions are made emotionally or based on this that I am absolutely allergic to is just how we’ve always done it. We’ve always done it this way, right? We’ve all heard that in multiple different organizations we’ve worked at and kind of a lack of consistent process between the properties and the team members. So, you know, standardizing the boring stuff in Things like leasing agents and managers. Everybody has their own way of doing things, but documenting, standardizing every repeatable process. So leasing, renewals, collections, maintenance, move in and move out, using templates to automate these workflows and checklists to make the basics kind of foolproof. Another point is that they over-communicate both internally and externally. Teams that operate in silos, like leasing and maintenance and accounting, usually by not having that centralized communication in the CRM or in some system, this usually leads to a lot of inefficiency. Usually when teams or systems are kind of siloed, teams are spending 20% to 30% of their time just reentering data or reconciling information manually. This was pulled from a McKinsey operations report in 2024. Most importantly, they invest in their people. They don’t treat training as a one-time onboarding event, but rather investing in ongoing training. Lastly, using technology as a force multiplier, not a crutch. There’s a lot of noise and stuff that we’re hearing online about, you know, AI and using AI agent technology and whatnot. And it’s meant to be a force multiplier, not a replacement, right? And giving the ability for folks to do more with less headcount or not having to increase headcount at the same clip of increasing, you know, portfolio size or the complexity of kind of operation and using AI technology to automate, you know, the repetitive tasks more than anything else. So I would say, you know, bottom line, you know, The teams at Thrive operate very deliberately to combine strong processes. They empower their people and they use the smart uses technology with a culture of accountability and kind of clear communication. I’m interested in knowing, because you do work with so many property management companies across the country, are you seeing the ones that seem to struggle? Is it in a certain size company? You know, when they reach a certain number of units, they just haven’t hit, the place where they can be that efficient or smaller companies? What do you see? Yeah, great question. So I would say it’s kind of all over the place or it’s across both, you know, smaller companies. We work with smaller companies that only have, you know, a couple hundred units and we work with other clients that have tens of thousands, sometimes over a hundred thousand units that they’re managing across the U S and what we see is, is, you know, the impact of like leadership, the way that technology is used and how, how, how different business units, like let’s say leasing and maintenance and stuff, kind of communicate with each other and interplay how those workflows are kind of built is very, very key. You know, a great example is we were working with a client recently that they had reached out to us needing help with decreasing their vacancy loss. And if you think about vacancies, those, you know, tenant moves out. The unit needs to be advertised as marketing. The unit needs to be turned over and refurbish the painting on the walls and maybe some small renovations that’s owned by maintenance. Then you have accounting that needs to send out the disposition letter, things of that sort. This client was under the impression that on average it took about four or five days to turn over a unit. When in actuality, it was actually closer to 15 days. That’s a 10-day difference. And I think when we extrapolated that out from the entire portfolio, they had a revenue leakage or a vacancy loss of close to half a million dollars annually just because their maintenance team was not using the same system and communicating with their leasing team and the property management team when they would be turning over the unit. And so by operationalizing and standardizing that process for them, we were able to actually significantly decrease and actually bring down the unit turn time to about three to four days. Wow. That’s kind of one example there. Yeah, well, I would like to give some input as a small simulator. So, you know, sometimes we ran into the old way of thinking of, well, you know, we’re not that big, so maybe we don’t need all of – the latest technology or everything automated. And within the last three years, we have definitely outgrown that mindset and started thinking about ways that we can automate everything. And, you know, we’re a single site. And so we’re not, you know, with thousands of units, but it has improved workflows. It has improved staff engagement and, And so we’re continuing on that road, looking at different ways that we can automate every process that we do, at least the first initial steps before we need to get involved. So I would encourage all providers to look at their operations and see where they can implement technology and to help their teams work more efficiently. Okay. I’d love to kind of double click on that point that you mentioned of, hey, we’ve kind of outgrown that mindset of this is how we’ve always done it or technology. We don’t need the latest and greatest kind of in technology. What we’ve seen, and this is also even within my organization here, trying to be cognizant of is listening to the folks that are closest to any issues or challenges, especially and making sure that they have a voice so that those concerns and things are kind of addressed. A lot of organizations that we’ve worked with that struggle operationally, there seems to be a significant silo and the folks that are closest to the problems and issues, those things are not being voiced and kind of quantified on the impact to the business, to the executive leadership and leadership that needs to make a decision on how to kind of address this. Would you say that as you guys have kind of shifted away from that older traditional kind of mindset that, you know, you guys have probably had some cultural shifts or changes, even potentially in leadership that have empowered folks that are closest to the challenges to be able to have a voice to drive the kind of that impact? Yeah, definitely. We always want to hear from those that are doing the work. So it’s really important as part of those regular team check-ins to understand have a space where they can communicate, you know, just taking a moment. Some people might think it sounds silly, but, you know, gathering them in one place, take a moment to breathe, be present in the moment and share your thoughts with us. Because truly, you know, we value our team members and we hire them for a reason. And we want to make sure that they’re also having a great experience working for our And so if we can help improve that, it will also trickle down to the residents and their experience. All right. Well, we are going to break it here. We’re going to be back with our final segment of this episode right after these messages. You’re listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters. ♪♪♪ That’s P-L-U-M-M-E-R dot com. Do you have multiple multifamily properties in your portfolio? Take control of your unpredictable IT spending with our managed IT services. Whether you have five or 500 properties, CTS has you covered with 24/7 nationwide remote and onsite support. Our pricing allows you to budget IT costs year after year with a predictable flat monthly rate. CTS provides the expertise, management, support, and tech infrastructure for all your properties. Call 888-255-9715 or visit ctsglobaltech.com for a free quote. Looking for a solution to balance your assets? Tired of wasted time managing your day-to-day bookkeeping, buggy software implementations, inaccurate financials? Or maybe you’re worried about a pending audit. Would you like more time to focus on revenue-generating activities versus accounting administrative activities? In a world where keeping up with an ever-evolving technology landscape continues to be a challenge, Allegian helps property managers cut through the noise to supply their residents with the amenity most critical to the digital generation, mobile access control. Ideal for the multifamily market, Allegian has designed mobile-enabled solutions that streamlines access while providing the security and benefits for developers, property managers, and residents alike. To learn more about Allegiant’s access control product offerings, please visit usallegiant.com. Hi, this is Remy Marks, the Chief Connection Officer of Multifamily Now 24-7 Internet Radio. The first and only radio station created exclusively for the multifamily industry. It’s where professionals come together for nonstop insights, stories, and conversations that move our industry forward. And now you can take that pride beyond the airwaves with the Multifamily Now Store. ♪♪♪ Well, we are back with our final segment of this episode of Multifamily Matters, powered by the Multifamily Media Network. And coming to you exclusively from the Smart Apartment Data Studio, we’re discussing the topic of the changing resident experience, new expectations of multifamily and senior living. I’m Paul Marks. Joining me by phone is a longtime multifamily industry veteran, the awesome Liz Ayala, the administrator with Valley Village Retirement Community. Also with us is a fabulous supplier partner to the industry, Mo Hussain, the CEO of Balanced Asset Solutions. I do want to take a moment and thank some of our other sponsors that make multifamily matters possible. Allegiant, a leading provider of mobile-enabled products and solutions for efficient access control within multifamily properties, balanced asset solutions, CPAs with expertise in multifamily property management. Direct TV, the ultimate entertainment experience, is now available to all multifamily residents. Smart apartment data, the most comprehensive and up-to-date intelligence on the multifamily industry. And CTS, complete technology solutions, making managed IT an easy business decision for multifamily. So in our last segment, for the next six minutes or so, Let’s talk a little bit about adapting for the future, empowering teams in tech with some processes. And Liz, what are you doing to help your team stay flexible and responsive as the residents’ needs continue to evolve? Well, we’re staying open with new technology, you know, to implementing things, monitoring and communication tools. I’m working right now with a Google workplace consultant who is helping us to automate some of our other processes and forms so we can track things. And it’s built into a system we already use, creating feedback loops through surveys and regular team debriefs. and focusing on empathy training to ensure consistent human-centered service. We’ve also been talking about emotional intelligence in our staff meetings and just giving some books and some resources to team members to bring that focus back on people first. Mo, I’m going to ask you to look into your crystal ball here and tell us what you see as the next logical step for property management operations as expectations continue to rise. Yeah, great piece of feedback there, Liz, on the feedback loop, right? There’s a difference between just taking surveys versus an actual true feedback loop where those issues are actually looked at a little bit more closely and reconciled with operational changes. The next evolution that we see is not about just adding more tech or nicer amenities. It’s about running the property management like a more modern service business that’s personalized, predictive, and platform data-driven. So things like having a true resident experience platform, moving beyond just individual portals or siloed system, but rather a fully integrated ecosystem of at least leasing, maintenance, payments, community engagement, communication, and even reputation management in one place. Things like predictive, proactive operations using data to anticipate things like maintenance issues, help drive optimization of staff, and even personalizing renewal offers. Uh, using workplace or workforce enablement through automation and using, you know, AI and stuff to handle routine administrative work like follow-ups, notices, scheduling reminders, and then using, honestly, operational agility as a core competency. So things like external shocks, like, you know, Regulatory changes like climate shifting and work patterns, all this stuff is going to continue to happen. The next generation of operators are going to treat operational agility and having that flexibility as a strategic asset. I would argue it’s just as important as things like occupancy or even NOI. The net of it is kind of building systems that can pivot fast without breaking. And so, in short, you know, staying flexible today means building living data-informed systems and empowering the folks doing the work to be able to act on and evolving the reactive operations into more of a proactive, you know, personalized platform and data-driven organization, more like hospitality and tech companies than traditional landlords. Yeah, and I guess we’ve got about a minute left before I want to transition. So kind of to sum it all up, Mo, what would you say, you know, what kind of advice or tips can you give to folks out there who may think that they are struggling a little bit operationally? Yes, I would initially start off with a goal and having clarity, not complexity. Technology should make people more effective and shouldn’t replace them. Two, alignment across all platforms and departments. Three, using data as a tool to drive business decisions and democratizing that data. And that’s how important that is. And then using automation, like RPA and stuff for administrative tasks. We see a lot of clients often see manual workloads reduced by 30% or more once automation is implemented. We’ve got about five minutes left and I want to transition and Liz, tell us a little bit about your journey into multifamily and a little bit more about the Valley Village retirement community. You talked before we started the episode, you mentioned some of the amenities you have and the things that you have there. It’s just amazing to me. So let our listeners know a little bit about you and as well as the Valley Village and how someone could reach out to you if they wanted to. Okay, Paul. Well, I started 17 years ago. I found out about a leasing consultant position through my friend on MySpace. And so that was my introduction. And then I grew to… Enjoy the people first part of it, just the interaction with, you know, having someone on the phone who calls and moving them in and their experience through living in your community and sharing their life with you. They come and tell you everything in the office. And then I came to Valley Village 15 years ago. So I’ve been here and love what I do. Valley Village is a retirement community in Santa Clara, California. We have eight and a half acres with 18 buildings. There’s about 300 residents who live here and call our place home. And there’s about 60 employees who serve our residents and retire. We are not licensed care, but we do have services like dining that provides three meals a day, seven days a week. We have weekly housekeeping. We have van transportation that drives our residents anywhere within a 10-mile radius free of charge. And we also have a primary care clinic that is licensed by the state where residents can come and get certain products. procedures done by our medical director. And, you know, we encourage seniors to live at their highest level of independence. And so that might look different for residents. Our average age is 78, but we have residents who are in their 60s and we have residents that are over 100 years old. We have two residents right now, one that’s 101 and one that’s going to be 103 pretty soon. Wow. Wow. That’s fantastic. And if someone wants to reach out to you, how can they do that? They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or if they want more information about Valley Village, they can visit us at valleyvillageretirement.com. Okay. Two and a half minutes left. Mo, tell us a little bit about what’s going on with Balanced Asset Solutions right now. Yeah, so we are a technology and CPA accounting firm specifically dedicated to the real estate industry. We offer a pretty broad range of services to clients from accounting, auditing, taxes, creating custom reports, integrating bespoke services. third-party systems to the centralized ERP product. And we’re kind of the Swiss army knife, if you will, from a technology accounting and expertise in kind of operational management within multifamily. You can find more information about our organization by going to www.balanceassetsolutions.com. We also have our email and phone number there if you would like to reach out. Fantastic. Well, I appreciate both of you being on the show this week. You did a fantastic job of talking about the resident changes that are going on right now and kind of opening the eyes of our audience into what’s going on with a lot of the senior living facilities around the country. But we are going to be back next week with another great topic and power panel of industry experts. You’ve been listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters. Thank you for listening to Multifamily Matters, a weekly radio show that discusses current topics and trends in the multifamily industry. To find out more about the show or make suggestions for topics or interesting guests, go to multifamilyradio.com. You have been listening to Multifamily Matters because multifamily matters.