Tech Talks Daily
00:22:15 · Dan Lifshits, Neil C. Hughes
And I think that the type of companies that they backed, and I think that the type of outcomes that they've built with the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, and a bunch of others, I think does allow them to really dream big and kind of shoot for the huge outcomes. And I think that inspiring with this kind of global vision and thinking about how can you be... Okay. Kind of it's it's clear how you guys can build a billion dollar business. Right? But how can we together build a 10,000,000,000 business, a 100,000,000,000 business. Right? And they're kind of inspiring us to think bolder and more ambitious and kind of go faster. I think that this is where they definitely been a huge huge supporter on our journey. So to those listening, big thanks to general catalyst guys in case if they come across this podcast. [00:23:01] S0: I suspect we will have a mixture of people listening of founders and business leaders and also tenants and indeed landlords. So I'd love to bring to life everything we're talking about here with a a very real example. So let's say we have a tenant that reports something fairly typical like a broken toilet. What actually happens behind the scenes within your AI system and and how that differs from a traditional agency workflow?
00:23:27 · Dan Lifshits
[00:23:27] S1: Yeah. Traditional agency workflows have... Like, they they differentiate a lot. So that's why I think that I'll provide a bit of our unified, aggregated experience that most of the tenants go through today whenever they have, as you mentioned, the kind of toilet leak or something. I think that very often you will write to your property manager. Property manager usually is like working on 100 to 150 properties that they have in their portfolio under management concurrently. So that implies that they have at the moment at every single point of time, like a few hundreds of requests of such nature that they're dealing with. And obviously, kind of for you as a property manager, it's pretty impossible to keep everything just in your memory and in your mind just because as much is going on and put aside that a part of managing the kind of the toilet leaks, you also need to kind of make sure that you're diligent with compliance and with kind of upcoming Rentals Right Act and the regulation and the other things. So kind of more and more, you start having more and more just like mundane admin that you need to take care of rather than just kind of fixing the kind of toilet leaks. Right? So kind of we hope to believe that most of the kind of property managers would pretty imminently kind of pass this message over to the contractor, even though yet sometimes you might just simply miss it in your inbox because your inbox usually is a mess. And then kind of the job might be sitting there for some period of time. Even if you pass this job to contractor. I mean, contractors are always kind of... So all all... Also a type of people that kinda very often are on the road and they are riding and driving and something. So they also might miss things. Right? And effectively, kind of what you need as a property manager to happen is that the contractor would reach out to the tenant. They would agree on the date of the appointment. And then kind of the thing would be solved effectively. Right? But unfortunately, for you as a property manager, not that you've just might potentially have missed the kind of the email or communication, and maybe there were some clarifications that the kind of contractor had been pinging you about after they received the request.
00:25:22 · Dan Lifshits
Another problem is that whenever you send the request over to contractor, you're kind of flying in the dark about has the contractor ever reached out to the tenant? Yes or no? Did they agree on the appointment? If yes, then on which day did they agree on the appointment? And this all happens for you effectively out of the system, out of visibility, and you don't know what's going on. And I think that this is one of the problems that exists in the current world today because, like, property managers genuinely, from what we've seen, and I'm sure can hold to believe that this is the case if you just, look at, like, the, majority of the population, they're genuinely amazing people. They genuinely care about providing an outstanding level of service to their end customers. But I think that there is just a ton of basic mundane admin under which you bury it every single day that just restricts you from being on top of all the things because just as much is going on at every single point of time. And then whenever some of the communications hasn't happened, then whenever you don't know what's going on, it's not very, I would say, rare when what happens is that you pass the note to contractor. Should the contractor try call the tenant and doesn't kind of, for example, reach the tenant, or they kind of... Even if they kind of called and agreed in the appointment, it was, for example, kind of slipped or forgotten or something. And then let's say kind of three weeks has elapsed and you are as a tenant writing to the property manager saying, guys, I mean, my toilet is still leaking. Like, are we gonna do something about it or not? Right? And I think that this is a very unfortunate experience that I think quite a few of the tenants and to some extent the landlords as a result going through. That leads eventually to the results, and this is average statistics across The UK. It's not made up. It's just like factual figures. That average property management request, resolution time across The UK sits in the range of around forty five to fifty days. I think that on average is around forty eight days. Obviously, they range by the criticality. And obviously, if you have, like, really a flood going on in your property, then it's gonna be resolved with the urgent kind of ticker and would be done usually kind of immediately.
00:27:21 · Dan Lifshits
But if you talk about the kind of more simple, whatever, door handles being broken or I don't know, window kind of doesn't close or something like that, then easily it can be ongoing for two months, for three months, for four months because like average is on average month and a half. I think this is the status quo. And this is something that, again, being as a tenant ourselves and being as a landlord, we clearly have seen an opportunity to kind of to make it better. Put aside that you can obviously provide just a much more digital first, and I think that much more at your fingertips products to the end customers. Would it be the tenant? Would it be the landlord? I mean, we're living in a very digital era where today you can order almost everything by the phone. Right? Starting with a kind of cap, talking about food and any other services, cloth, something else. And I think that the level of standards, across the kind of digital collaboration with technology, I think, has increased in lots of the industries. But I think in property management, as we just described, it still remains kind of to some extent quite fragmented and sometimes kind of a little bit still non, kind of analog and non digital. And I think that not that just you can provide visibility to the end customers about what's going on. Kind of, yeah, just state of the art, kind of tenant and landlord portals where you can see all the kind of, jobs and their status being locked on which stage of the process there are. We assessed it, where the contractor is on the way. It's being resolved. It's being fixed. We're waiting for the quote. So that we can provide visibility to every party about kinda where they are on resolution of this job according to kind of across the process. But I think more importantly, the system can ensure that nothing would be slipped and kind of lost between the cracks. So for example, if you are a tenant, you're writing to your property manager about the specific problem, what we can do on the back end is that we effectively already have pre mapped which kind of contractors in which geographical area for which type of the job are the preferred contractor on the level of the individual property. And the landlord can also impact to these criteria with regards to this is my preferred contractor or with this contractor.
00:29:19 · Dan Lifshits
I don't don't wanna kind of do anything anymore because, like, last time, for example, the quality been poor or price been high or kind of something like that. If I go, we have pre mapped this all already. So meaning that when I will receive the request, we almost instantly can kind of tag it along to the kind of right and relevant contractor. Then the system would be having visibility because we'll provide an individual kind of phone, mask phone numbers of the tenant to the contractor. So hence, we can see if the contractor ever has, like, reached out the tenant and if they kind of called or not. In case if they don't call, then again, the system without any kind of personal, effectively human envelope or anything would start pinging the contractor to just say, hey. Please call. Please call. Please call. Kind of few times, it would keep taking the contractor to get in touch with the tenant because we we have visibility and we can see it because it's all running through the system if it ever happened kind of or not. And then obviously, kind of if they did speak to each other and that they agree on the appointment, then effectively throw some speech to text and text to text. You can kind of extract and understand on which day the appointment has been agreed and kind of effectively what has been the context of the appointment and everything. So a lot of the things in the current world, and especially with the help of AI, you can effectively streamline, and you can extract a lot of information from the conversations and from the ongoing context with regards to what's going on to just make sure that nothing is slipped between the cracks. And then kind of in case if something doesn't happen, only then you escalate this job to the kind of to the, effectively, intermediary kind of, human person to effectively kind of get in touch and resolve a bit more complex mediation problem. And that would allow us kind of at the status quo, we already reduced the total, maintenance time by kind of around half effectively. So kind of from something around forty eight days on average across The UK to somewhere in the range of around twenty five days, twenty, twenty five days. And we clearly see that there is a further opportunity to bring it down to kind of to around kind of seven to ten days. And I think that's where you expect it to be.
00:31:18 · Dan Lifshits, Neil C. Hughes
Because, like, if you have a problem, you're a tenant, and you need it being resolved, then I think that it would be unreasonable to kind of expect those things should be taking more than, like, ten days to [00:31:29] S0: get fixed. And if we were to take everything you've just said there and then scale up even further, I was reading how you'd said that one operator can now manage up to 1,000 departments with a much, much higher quality, which is a a huge shift there. So what does that mean for people working in these agencies at the moment, and how are their roles evolving? Because everything's changing at the moment. And what what are you seeing here? How's that space evolving?