by Dan Amedro | Apr 9, 2019 12:00:00 AM
Since we published the findings of our 20 for ‘20 research, we have found a broad consensus that multifamily technology is at a technology inflection point, the like of which we have not seen since the 1999-2004 timeframe. During that period pricing and revenue management, web-based property management systems and resident and prospect portals all came to market at once. Dan Amedro was CIO at Archstone from 1997 through 2012. He not only had a front seat to all those changes but as often in the driver’s seat. We asked him to reflect on that time in the industry. As you read this, we think you’ll agree that the experience 15-20 years ago provides a great map to help navigate technology today.
Guest Blog by Dan Amedro - Former CIO and CMO of Archstone
Our strategy was to focus on our core business and not get distracted. That was right in the middle of the dot.com bubble -and the climate was crazy. Interest from industry and customers in new products was huge - even products that were ill-defined or where the business proposition was questionable. The strategy we decided on was to use the newly emerging technologies to either improve our internal business processes, improve the customer experience, or both.
For example, portals made tremendous sense. They allowed prospects and residents to do much of the work our associates used to do—and feel more in control doing it. The early product was pretty limited, but once it got going, it fed off itself. Once you could do a few capabilities in the portal, people wanted more. Even (especially) the customers. You didn’t have to look for your next project: it came to you!
Once customers experienced a new way of conducting business, whether through our efforts or the adoption of these practices by others, it became an expectation. As a new customer expectation, these online capabilities shifted from "nice to have" to "must have."
The biggest challenge was finding the right partners. Our experiences with web-based PMS and with PRM were similar in that we looked for companies that would take us on and allow us to have a higher involvement in the design and capabilities of the product than one might otherwise let you. Mainly due to our size and reputation, we were able to gain this kind of leverage. At the same time, we were still worried about whether the vendors would be there for the long haul.
In hindsight, it turned out to be more important that vendors could get us where we needed to go in the mid-term. Both vendors we chose did a great job in the short-term, and both were subsequently sold multiple times. In the end, core capability and the opportunity to influence the product design proved more important than ownership stability.
Another lesson we learned was to not place bets on technology working. We and many in the industry placed big bets on a company called Broadband Now. Ultimately, their technology couldn’t be made to work and everyone lost. Through that, we learned that our money was best placed to help a vendor grow or to adapt to multifamily housing, but not to prove out the underlying technology. Revenue management was a perfect example. We knew it worked in multiple hospitality verticals; we just had to incubate the transition to ours. The pay-off was huge!
Lastly, I would attribute our success to having top quality talent on our team. I was fortunate enough to be able to hire many people I had worked with at previous employers or people I had previously worked with in the vendor community - known quantities. It was just as important for this talent to be focused on basic operations (accounting, payroll, etc.) as it was to focus on the newer cutting-edge technologies. This allowed us (and me) to avoid the distractions that might have come otherwise.
For more on this research download “20 for ‘20” - our white paper that summarizes our interviews with 20 senior multifamily executives about the outlook to 2020 and beyond.