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You are the Maintenance Manager for a 20,000-unit multifamily portfolio.
About 7,000 of those units have been acquired in the last year. The acquisitions team is saying there will be another 12,000 this year.
Meanwhile, your team has only grown marginally. Truth is, even if you had the time and budget to hire the staff you need, there simply aren’t enough people in the labor pool to hire.
So, you’ll continue with what you’ve got.
The stated goal of these acquisitions is to bring best practices to the property management and operations to maximize controllable NOI.
But the first step is just figuring out what exists.
Some of the properties are garden style, so that makes it relatively easy from a critical equipment perspective. But whether it’s garden style or high-rise properties, 12,000 additional units means 12,000 additional refrigerators, thousands of washers and dryers, and an unknown number of small HVAC units.
Before now, when the portfolio was more stable, the process would be to have a technician to record all these individual assets (plus their age and relative condition) with pen and paper. They’d come back to the office and input those records into spreadsheets and make sure those files were in the right shared folder.
Today, that process is a fool’s errand. By the time it’s done, the initial spreadsheets must be updated. There’s simply too much to keep track of and replacements are already starting to be reactive rather than according to a plan
There must be a better way.
What is a Digital Transformation Anyway?
If you only read the headlines, you’d think that buildings were already well on their way to being giant Tesla’s – autonomously operating themselves according to the real-time conditions.
The realty for the vast majority of properties, definitely in multifamily but also in office, hospitality, retail and industrial, is that most workflows are still being done not only manually, but on paper.
That translates to 30% of an operator’s day spent on admin!
The digital transformation of real estate does hold a lot of promises of truly “intelligent” buildings, and important work is being done to get there.
But it must be a progression. Nowhere on the horizon is technology going to displace building operators. What technology can do today is give them 30% of their week back so they can focus on proactively operating assets instead of running from emergency to emergency.
The Digital Transformation in Practice
When a digital transformation is done right, it takes a current process and improves it.
Let’s take the asset tracking process.
There’s no way around it. Someone is going to have to figure out what exists in all these new properties.
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