Arvand Sabetian and Nick Bokaie, founders of Ziprent, have leveraged the virtual showing process among other automations to create a property management company built on efficiency.
They join Andrew to discuss how Ziprent came about, their philosophies on innovating in the PM space, and how they’ve used automations to reduce vacancy, ultimately creating a better service for their clients.
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Season 4 Episode 18 features Arvand Sabetian and Nick Bokaie
The Triple Win Property Management podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature
Nick Bokaie
Ultimately, that's one of, if not the biggest cost of any landlord, is vacancy. So that's like problem number one. How do we solve vacancy? So the remote showings were certainly step one. Get more people in faster. You can do more showings per day, yielding you more applications per day, reducing the vacancy time.
Andrew Smallwood
Hello, professional property managers, Andrew Smallwood here, host of the Triple-Win podcast. And I'm joined by Arvand and Nick today from Ziprent. Excited to talk to these guys. Really, just got connected with them recently. But they've got some really interesting things are working on that. I think, you know, this audience I get get a lot of value from and stimulate some, some good conversation and some good discussion. So guys, first off just want to say welcome to the pod. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today.
Arvand Sabetian
Thanks for having us.
Andrew Smallwood
Absolutely. So, hey, for those who don't know, you are familiar with you and Ziprent. Can you guys give a little background of what were you doing before you were in property management? How did you get into this industry, and what kind of led to, you know, the birth of the venture that you guys, are on here and Arvand I’ll goto you up first for that one.
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah. Sounds good. So I actually had a different startup, in the web hosting field. About a decade ago. You know, I grew that, in an organic fashion, kind of one customer at a time. It got to a pretty good size. So, you know, when I sold that business, I got into real estate. I started, you know, owning a few single-family and smaller multifamily buildings and, around in the late 2010s, 2017, 2018 is when I realized, you know, I'm remotely managing these properties, but I can't really remotely place tenants because they're all kind of spread out. I kind of spread them all out across a larger geographic region. And I was using different brokers in different regions. And, you know, as, as you might know, it's like, say, in Bay area where I'm located, you're going to find a property manager in the city of San Francisco, might not cross bridges. So if you have three properties spread out in the Bay area, you're going to need to use three different brokers, to place tenants. So it just kind of became important for me, at least for my portfolio, to be able to come up with a streamlined, uniform fashion of treating that turnover process when a tenant leaves and to acquire a new tenant. So I have a set expectation for how long is it going to take? Where are we at? Is it working? Should we drop the price? That sort of thing. Which wasn't very transparent to me. At that point in time. So that's how Ziprent was born, really. It was to create a tenant placement product that was highly transparent and also, pretty lean from, from an operational perspective to really concentrate on the touch points that are absolutely needed to place that tenant into the property. And then we went from there, right. You place to tenants and then, you know, I was like, okay, well, we built this up for that. Let's handle rent collection. It's just, you know, one of the easiest parts. And then you go into kind of dealing with all the the repairs, processes and automating as much as that possible. Then you go to turnovers and turnovers become either renewals or re listing the property. So every one of those processes we started tackling over time, within the last four years to try and perfect them as much as possible.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. Thanks for that backdrop. And Nick would love it if you could share a little bit of your background before and how you got into property management.
Nick Bokaie
Yes, I came from I had once aspirations of being a neuroscientist and quickly pivoted, to, kind of a product design focus. So I did the product design worlds for, you know, like a small CRM company based out of San Diego. Cut my teeth helping build that product. Did some light agency work in the interim. And then I kind of serendipitously met Arvand, while traveling, and we both realized we're from the same area. And he was having this. I was, you know, kind of tenant placement problem that he was trying to solve back in 2016, 2017. And I think the opportunity was too good to just start helping out and starting to cut my teeth on the property management world, helping kind of build out that product. And now we find ourselves five years later and 33,00-34,00 units under our belt. So not something that I set out or had a particular, you know, calling for, but it just so happened to kind of fall into both of our labs and here we are now.
Andrew Smallwood
And I think people are going to have, you know, an interest. I'm sure we'll get into more of like the tech platform and some of the unique, you know, things that you guys are building there and problems that you're solving there. Before we do, I do think people listening to this are going to be interested in, okay, 0 to 3000 plus units right over the period of, of a few years. But I think you guys have taken a very intentional approach to how you've grown the company up to this point. And I'm wondering if you guys could share a little more detail on how you have approached growing the company, you know, to that size and scale and what are some of the kind of like, key things you focused on to get there?
Nick Bokaie
So, you know, one thing that was really apparent from the start for us was, was kind of the reputation management. Right? And building a product that served a particular need and taking great care in the customer service aspect of it. So, you know, we were hyper-localized, focusing just in the Bay area and from the start. And this is at a point, even though we had this, the aspirations and the intention of being fully remote and being, you know, leveraging tech as much as possible, we still wanted to provide this high level of customer service to the point where Arvand and I would drive out and meet customers and drive them around and just be like, we can, you know, you should really trust us- we know what we're doing, even though, you know, we somewhat didn't at the time, but, it's it helped build that kind of trust and set that expectation and, threshold for kind of providing this, you know, really hands-on, high level of customer service. So that, you know, as we continue to grow, even within the Bay area, making sure that we kept our reputation high, that we, you know, move forward with integrity, that one; those customers would refer other property management, other customers. Right. So often as a case in property management where if you talk to someone in your landlord, you're like, oh, who's your property manager? If they only have great things to say about you, it really is a cascading snowball effect. And that was how we really kind of leveraged that growth from you know, property 1 to property 1000 was being very intentional and started this day of our reputation moving forward with integrity and trying to have those high touch points, even though we're still trying to automate as many things as possible. We really wanted to automate the right things so that our staff could be there to give that high level of service. So that was kind of like the overarching ethos that we tried to kind of, maintain as we, you know, had this kind of rapid growth, this engine from 2019 till now, pretty much.
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah. And just I mean, I guess to summarize that, tech, our whole philosophy has been tech doesn't have to mean cheap or lower quality. And so when we first built the product, we didn't just throw a bunch of tech at it. We built it with a lot of high touch and a lot of customer service to keep up our reputation, but also built it with the intention that at some point in time, portions of this can be automated not only to our benefit but to the benefit of our customers so that they can get more rapid results out of our out of our services. And so at first we had a lot more human touchpoints. Now we have a lot less. But arguably our quality of product has increased because we've only removed the portions that are just annoying for everyone, including our customers.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. And I guess are there. It sounds like a lot of, you know, where your customers are coming from is through word of mouth and referral, right from some of your existing customers, and that you guys are continually turning that flywheel. Are there other sources of advertising or customer acquisition that have been, successful for you guys up to this point beyond that?
Nick Bokaie
We've been fairly successful and, you know, Google Ads, PPC campaigns, and then, you know, also advertising on Yelp. I'm sure every property manager has their own opinion on Yelp's place in the market and the game sometimes you have to play and be beholden to them. We've found that it's it's worth the the headache often to kind of play the Yelp game. But those have been our two kind of bigger, you know, kind of third-party lead generation channels. You know, we've played around with I'm sure everyone's heard of Bill GM had allpropertymanagement.com for a while. I'm sure a lot of your listeners I've used them back in the day. I don't even know if it's still still generating leads. But those were those are kind of our primary, lead generation sources as well.
Andrew Smallwood
So it sounds like some digital acquisition as well. You've found some, some success with. Yeah. So digging into a little bit more of kind of this tech platform, it sounds like, hey, we're going to get really close to the problem, really close to the customer hands-on and really understand this deeply and that you, you know, it sounds like you guys were in the investment game and trying to solve these problems yourself, which I think is different from some other folks that we've seen who have tried to bring tech to the industry. Right. And just immediately throw at it. But it sounds like you guys are staying close and really intentionally, developing that to get improvements as you go. And you know, what we often see with people building tech in the industry is there's a lot of activity and there's a lot of data in property management across the entire journey. And so it can be challenging kind of knowing where to start, you know, where to focus and where you're going to be able to return, that investment right on the, on the development costs and distribute that, you know, across your units. It sounds like, though you guys have, you know, reached a point I think you shared. You know, your company's profitable, right? Reach that point and so I'm curious if you could speak to why you guys focus on tenant placement first, or can you speak to the tech platform? What's evolved? Are you still using any third party tools versus building the entire thing yourself? Or how do you kind of see that working together, as you're building your platform out?
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah, yeah, I'll take a crack at that. So, you know, from the perspective of why tenant placement first, maybe that will be an easier one is, you know, my philosophy at least, a long time ago, before Covid was always, you know, remote work. Why are we, you know, are we spending two hours commuting, when we could just be there with technology and internet, etc.? So when it comes to, property management, it's a lot more difficult, right? Because the property is in a specific location. But with technology, I found that, you know, just piecemeal and different products together. You know, a landlord could remotely manage the property pretty well. In this day and age, especially with tenants being more comfortable with technology as well. But tenant placement was a more difficult thing to tackle, especially before Covid. We were probably one of the first companies to aggressively utilize, remote showings using lock boxes. Now it's like everybody's doing it right. And Covid, in a sense, helped us because we started right before Covid, and then Covid happens. Before Covid people would be like, I don't know if I'm okay with you guys just giving the key to the tenant. Covid happens and there is no other choice. You know, you can't meet them, so you gotta let them just use a lock box to get inside the unit if you want to get your property rented. And so that was that's like one aspect of the whole thing, right? There are a lot of different pieces of that tenant placement where the norm has been to go in person, go into a leasing office, fill out an application, you know, come in and sign a lease. So there's all of those things that we kind of slowly kind of did away with that I felt was not necessary to be able to introduce tech into it. And then from a, from a holistic approach of like; how did we get here with our tech? I think what's what's important to note about our approach is that, we, we built everything from the ground up. And this comes from my previous company and I had a web hosting company. I would essentially have servers that I would lease out, to people who wanted websites. But I had a control panel and everything was off the shelf that I would buy from a software provider that would install my servers, and I would sell to our customers. When we started this, I said, look, I have the resources to build something from the ground up. And we literally did our phone system. It was built in-house. And that has nothing to do with property management per se, but that has everything to do with customer service. So, you know, that that is a big aspect of this, right? If I were to go out and get a piece of software from App Folio and something else from Property Wire and put them all together to try and make it work, it's never going to feel like how our system is feeling right now because we slowly built every aspect of it to exactly how we want to approach property management and the level of customer service we want to provide to the owners and tenants, and that's, that's where I feel the differences and we're going to get surmountable gains as a result of it. Because of the level of automation we can introduce into the process, given that it's all our software.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. And I think a lot of property managers are very focused right now on process, workflow automation and, you know, there's this big conversation in the industry of how can we work across more open systems over time, right, to be able to free up data and make it portable, and operationalize it. But we're still not there yet. Right. And so it sounds like you guys are building a platform that gives you that kind of, you know, flexibility to do that. What are some of the kind of, like, key outcomes now that you guys are able to deliver through this tech-enabled automation? It's like, hey, old world- here's how it works, new world- here's how it's working now from, you know, maybe we could start with the tenant placement of what you guys are really doing differently there.
Nick Bokaie
Sure. So, you know, when it comes to kind of the tenant placement product, and tenant placement process, for that matter, is, you know, at the end of the day, we wanted to focus on, you know, being as efficient as possible when it comes to, you know, reviewing applications, reducing vacancy time for our customers. Right. Ultimately, that's one of if not the biggest cost of any of any landlord is vacancy. So that's like problem number one. How do we solve vacancy. So the remote showings was certainly step one. Get more people in faster. You had can do more showings per day yielding you more applications per day reducing the vacancy time. So when it came to application processing, you know, all of us as property managers know the gamut of different types of income statements and people’s certain, you know, like my moving date I have I'm at 1099, but I'm also a W-2. But here's my background check, and here's my credit. And how can we use technology to efficiently analyze all that information, normalize that data so that we can have a high degree of confidence saying, this person makes this much money, they have this credit, they have clean background checks. Here's your tenant, right? And do it in a way that, you know, one is, you know, fair to every applicant that comes in. They're all being judged by this same standard and removing sometimes the ambiguity of a human touch. Right. Oftentimes, you know, you get into these situations where you feel like, okay, you can there's some inherent biases that someone looking at an application may have. In this process, it removes those biases. It says, here's a certain set of conditions income, credit, you know background, when's your move-in date- here it is. We present it and are able to make decisions much more quickly and have owners ultimately make the decisions, too. I know we're a little bit different in that we, owners have to sign off on who they want to choose, right? We, you know, a lot of property management companies will have that autonomy themselves to just place a tenant and the owners just kick back and don't have to have any say in it. We've taken the process of wanting to be as transparent as possible, because a lot of our customer base in what we've found in the retail segment, is that owners want to be involved to some extent, right? They want to have some say in what's going on in their property. And we've kind of set up our framework to help provide that sense of action and sense of control that they have. And we're working as a team rather than, hey, we're just going to take ten, 15% and do our thing, you know, and kind of be this black box for them. And so on the tenant placement side, you know, being able to fully automate that process to the point where owners can, we can list the property for an owner and within 24 hours they can have a signed lease, you know, depending on the volume of that day, just really makes them feel like they have a sense of control and know what's going on at their property, and we help facilitate that in a positive way. So that's like a little short story of how we tried to utilize tenant placement as, kind of our main focal point when it comes to kind of like that, where that efficiency is gained, leveraging tech and automation.
Arvand Sabetian
Maybe to put it in one sentence, if you were to click less in our platform on a property that's fully able to be listed, I've got photos and lock box set up and all that chances that that property will get leased without any interaction from our side is over 50%, and it still provides a high-level service about the tenant and the owner. Because the owner is still making decision, the tenants are still getting their applications processed in 10-15 minutes max. They're able to see the property on demand. And we're still there to provide support to both sides. But we take out the human factor that slows everything out down.
Andrew Smallwood
Yes, I want to ask more about that specifically in the screening process. And so when I think about, income verification, when I think about employment verification, when I think about, credit reports, right, and running that and the information on it and looking for delinquencies and utility payments, obviously landlord debt, etc… Criminal background, you know, in screening, how do you guys kind of manage a robust screening process and also some of the risk of fraudulent applicants or incomplete information coming through with it sounds like a really incredible speed, right, that you're able to move people through that process. And in most cases, like if I hear an application approved in 15 minutes and over half of them don't require any human intervention, you know, as a part of that, you know, that sounds interesting. And I'm curious, like how you guys kind of navigated some of those decisions of balancing, you know, the quality and risk of placing the wrong tenant or a bad tenant or a fraudulent tenant against, moving people through really quickly and conveniently through the process.
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah. Well, that's a great question because I, I feel like that's been our concentration for the last two and a half years, of essentially getting that process down. And, I'd say, so it all comes from the first thing is that we need data points, right? That's made data points as possible. So let's let's use income as an example. We are asking for pay stubs, but then they can also use, a platform to log in to their payroll provider to give us that data. They could log in to their bank accounts to essentially evaluate their, deposits. And then there's obviously databases that provide income data instantly to for like 20, 30% of the population. So we never shut it if we just stop the pace, pay stubs and said, look, we got it right, we wouldn't have the complete picture, right? We never shy away from adding more data into our, processing to make it as, as accurate as possible. And then when it comes to fraud, obviously the more data we have, the more we'll have the opportunity to say, hey, wait a second. This doesn't line up. Obviously, there's two types of fraud, right? There's there's someone faking the pay stub, etc. that is, our system is really good at catching up because we have different data points than there is straight up, you know, identity theft. And that is a little bit more difficult, to get around. And we all deal with that. But the benefit, though, that that we came across as a result of employing this automation was, you know, initially we had staff reading pay stubs. And as I would review this, I would see that, you know, about 20% of the time they would be reading the wrong column. It would I mean, we're human. We make mistakes. Right? And the moment we went into automated processing of pay stubs, we essentially have a system that reads the pay stub and then normalizes the data. Right. That went down to like 2%, right? Computers rarely make mistakes. Sometimes they would read one number wrong out of, you know, a thousand, pay stubs. So, the quality of processing actually increased meanwhile, reducing the, the downtime of being able to get back to the applicant and say, hey, I have everything, but it's not enough. And that's the most important thing. I want to get back to the app and, and say, I have everything, you're good to go. I'm waiting on the owner and, or I have everything. It's not enough. I still sent it to the owner. But give me more, and I'll help you out. And then on the owner side. Right. Like, if, if they're using our services versus doing it themselves or using a, different property management company that might not be doing it as programmatically, you know, they're able to get back to the applicant within an hour or two if they're, you know, checking their emails and and providing their approvals, whereas, someone else might take two days, and that means that that person might lose on that applicant who is really just anxious to get going. It's housing. Housing is a serious issue. They want a roof over their head. They will move fast If you move fast.
Andrew Smallwood
Okay. And you guys were mentioning the owners involved in the process, it sounds like, hey, maybe you're processing and really surfacing the data to help them make an informed decision. And maybe there's even some recommendation. Yeah, that's happening there. But ultimately they're retaining some of the decision authority for actually approving the applicant and moving them forward in the process. Did I understand that right?
Nick Bokaie
Exactly. Yeah, we made it. It's part of this whole idea that, you know, a lot of our customer base is what you find in single-family homes. And like the retail customer kind of a section is that oftentimes, the types of owners are typically not investors who are looking at this from a I'm trying to make this as efficient as possible, and I'm trying to maximize my, my NOI over my portfolio and all this and that. Most of our customers are, this was their first home or this was their childhood home, this is something that they inherited. This was, you know, there's some emotional value to it. And what we've found over these last 4 or 5 years is that if you, ultimately the customers, majority of the customers want to feel involved and want to have some say in what's going on. And we've kind of taken this approach of being able to kind of shape like them to make the best decisions for their property. Right? We're here to be that conduit to help and be a team where we say, hey, there's the best applicant that we feel out of this out of all of these applicant sets, you can review all of them. We're not going to take away that ability and create this black box, but here's the ability to make that decision and feel some sense of ownership, you know, in this kind of management of the unit. We’d take away the burden and the, the, you know, kind of mundane aspects of it so that you feel like you have control. You can make a decision, we do all the hard work for you, and that's been helpful I think, in creating that relationship with all of our customers where it's very much, you know, a partnership as opposed to, you know, I'm giving you the keys, just don't crash the car, you know? And, you know, they don't get upset when, you know, they see every step of the process when it's whether it's the tenant we place or the repair that we do, the vendor that we pick. You know, it all works out, and be more mutually beneficial as opposed to we're just going to take, you know, take our 10%, 15% if I'm traditional and just do what we're going to do.
Arvand Sabetian
But you might you might ask, well, if you're just going to process an application and send some data to the owner and leave the decision-making out to the owner, what makes you different than some off-the-shelf software that that's either figured it out, or on their way of figuring out exactly doing what we're doing and that, you know, you kind of hit that a little bit with your question was there is a high emphasis on recommendation. I don't want to, we never really hit an owner with- what do you think? It's more like, give me a yes or no. Right. I don't I don't want to waste your time with what do you think? Because I'm the property manager, I should know what you should think. But I want to still make sure that you're okay with what you should be thinking. And so, you know, we have a zip score. As a zip score comes up with a price based off of income credit. And we surface that and, and say, look, this at this zip score, I would 100% move forward with this. Just say yes. Or look, we're on the cusp here. This is what I would do in this decision. And the software makes those recommendations and gives them the button to press to say, let's go ahead. But then, you know, about 50% of time they saw questions. Right. And that's where our staff come in. And that's that's why we're a property manager, not just software as a service.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, I think it's interesting. You guys clearly are saying, hey, we're really trying to provide transparency and all the information somebody would need to make a decision. We're bringing our expertise, right? And our insights to that, to probably a less educated customer than us who doesn't have as many at bats for this and experience with this. And so you can bring that value, but by allowing them to be involved right in the decision and have some authority, it's a little less like if something were to happen later. Hey, we did talk about this risk right at the time and sometimes things happen, etc., but they were involved in the decision versus say, oh, my property manager managers no good, so to speak. And taking on the blame for that. It sounds like that transparency and engagement applies not just to tenant placement, but also even maintenance decisions or other things throughout the process that you're educating them on. Is that right?
Arvand Sabetian
You're absolutely right. I think it is from that perspective. But I never go back and say, hey, I told you so, right? I'm still the broker record. I'm still the property manager. It is on me as much as it's partially on you because you approved it. Right? So we'll make things right for our customers if things go wrong, which they do, where we're not in a perfect world. At the same time, they were there as part of that decision-making body to make sure that everything was in place in accordance with how they view their property managed.
Andrew Smallwood
Well, I've got one kind of final question on this, which is, you know, I imagine the number of clients you guys have amassed, etc., that I just hear stories from property managers of a property owner who wants to make a decision that could violate a fair housing, you know, law or be non-compliant, or could just be radically outside of their so radically outside of their self-interests and ultimately, you know, maybe even a boundary where I'm not sure we would even want to manage this anymore from your perspective to go that kind of direction. Do you guys ever encounter those kind of situations and how do you handle that conversation? How does that go in those kind of scenarios? If so.
Nick Bokaie
Yeah, it's we we certainly encounter it. It's unavoidable in our industry. It's just it really comes down to, you know, our staff, this is where having that that kind of high touch point and having the staff available to have those difficult conversations with owners if they're going to skirt this line or cross this boundary that we know is not appropriate, we are asked in our ability to have those conversations and make sure that the owner is if an owner wants to proceed in a way that is not compliant or is not kosher and, and in whatever particular instance that we're able to say, we don't feel comfortable doing this, we're not going to be your property manager moving forward. Right? We don't hold we don't, our property management agreements are essentially once a month, right? We don't lock clients into, you know, to annual contracts or anything like that. It's, you know, one, it's a, you know, it's a hedge on ourselves that we are confident in our ability to, you know, not have to lock anyone annually in because we're confident in our, in our ability to provide a high level of service. But it's also to protect ourselves from owners who may want to go against this grain or this norm, and allows us to take a stance that, you know, we're not going to go cross this boundary with you. And so you know it, it's unfortunate when those conversations come up, but our staff does a really good job of knowing where those boundaries are, knowing how to talk, to have those difficult conversations and taking the appropriate action so that, you know, we don't find ourselves in a situation where fair housing was violated or an owner just like took a stance that was completely inappropriate, you know, and so it's just one of those things you always have to battle. But we try and set expectations from the start that like that behavior is not going to be tolerated. So, you know, if we see a red flag and an owner from the moment they get onboarded, we're pretty quick to be like, we don't maybe think this is the right fit so that we don't find ourselves down the line in a more precarious situation where it's maybe a little bit more difficult to part ways.
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah, I would say it's it's the expectation setting, having your reputation management done right so that an owner, when they look at our reviews are like, these guys know what they're doing. Maybe I should listen to that, right? If you have poor reviews, then every decision that you're trying to get out of an owner guess question and then finally being there, right, like we don't want to go, we don't want to end that, hey, we're not going to be your property manager because you're making a bad decision. We want to have that conversation and convince them to make the right decision, because that's the best thing for them as best thing for us. That's the best thing for the tenants as well. But just, you know, all of those three expectations setting reputation management and having that conversation in a nice way to try and convince them to do the right thing. Well.
Andrew Smallwood
Well, hey guys, really appreciate digging it out. You know, with the time that we have left, I'd love to have 1 or 2 other things which we've dug in a lot here in the tenant placement which really feels like your guys kind of like gold medal talent and really kind of what you guys have really focused on, building a great process and system around it and policies around it. Are there other opportunities as you think about, like the occupied experience or other places? I mean, I'm just imagining it seems like you guys are really focused on high touch, and you're resourcing enough with a team, right? To be able to really, provide support to property owners and residents. As you're also building the tech to automate some of the mundane and routine away. And I'm just curious, you know, if you were to say, hey, there's 1 or 2 other big things that you guys have done that have had a big impact on your company's success and a different kind of experience you’re able to provide or, you know, your company's profitability or both? What comes to mind as something that you guys do, differently or uniquely?
Arvand Sabetian
Well, I guess, you know, when you kind of think about how we've impacted the tenant placement cycle, it's taking out those waiting periods where people are waiting. Tenants or owners are waiting on our staff to do something. So as we go into the rest of the process, we try to do the same, right? Like, for example, repairs. You know, a tenant puts in a repair request. There is that period where the owner, you know, the owner gets to approve repairs, but that we can't help much besides setting more expectations and providing even more data to get them to make the decision quicker. But we could present everything to them quicker. So we have an automated bid collection process before we go out there and say, hey, what do you think about this? How much do you charge to go out there? You know, you know, we get three bids from three different pest companies. Now that's pretty much automated. Same thing with dispatch, right? As soon as the owner says, okay, you're not waiting on our staff to say, go, the systems go, because why wait? Why would you wait for him and say go when you already know they need to go, right, so that the vendor is notified, the tenants is notified, they connect, they set a schedule and they get going. And then also the invoicing. And you know, when it comes to repairs, it's even a more difficult challenge, I feel like than a tenant placement because tenant placement you have three stakeholders. It's us, the tenant, the owner, with repairs we have the vendor involved. And so you also want to take care of the vendor so that they're there for you and your owners. So now, you know, the vendors can upload their own invoices and get paid faster. Why are you waiting for someone on my side to upload an invoice and press pay? Do it yourself, get paid faster and everyone would rather do that. So, that's an example of repairs, right? And now we're just kind of getting into, you know, evaluating walkthroughs. You know, that's all that has been done manually. That's a little bit more complex and a little bit more leaning towards AI. But we've started leveraging and comparing an AI evaluation of a walkthrough versus a human evaluation, a walkthrough. And it's actually more accurate. Right. And the more accuracy you add to the process, the more you have an owner trust you and the more you have a tenant trust you. And that trust is what binds us all together to be able to properly manage a property and have a happy tenant and happy owner. So that those are just kind of some of the examples you can tell, right? Like even in onboarding now we're getting to a point where if an owner wants to get going, they can sign a property management agreement and update some of the dates that they're available. And a photographer gets dispatched automatically because I don't want to lose out on that vacancy period. You know, if I can get a photographer there today and list tomorrow as opposed to a week from now, I just saved you seven days.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, yeah, those are great examples. Nick. Were you going to add something there?
Nick Bokaie
No, those it it's, you know, it's it's really kind of being beholden to this whole ethos of finding that right balance of like, where can we leverage as much automation as possible to make everyone's life easier and provide as much confidence in the data that we're having being presented, making more informed decisions more quickly? And still providing that high-level experience like that's always kind of what's pushing us on the development side. And what was the benefit of us not going the third-party route of like picking Yardy, picking AppFolio, even though we feel, you know, we're opinionated in a lot of ways and how we approach property management and having developed our own system, even to the, you know, dismay of everyone who says, don't build your own system. Just use something off the shelf. For us, it's really worked and helped us kind of achieve that rapid growth quickly. Because we're able to iterate, make decisions more quickly, build out functionality, so that we can help progress and make a better owner experience, tenant experience, vendor experience. And that's been kind of that rocket fuel for us to kind of grow so quickly, in an industry that, you know, for us to grow this fast without acquisitions is, it's, I don't know of many companies, who have gotten to this scale as fast as us. So, yeah, it's a fun time to be in the property management space, especially seeing everyone kind of approach it in a different way and getting that feedback from customers and seeing what can we do to make ourselves differentiate in an otherwise kind of saturated industry. Right. There's a million property management companies, so how can you really differentiate yourself in the most positive ways possible? So yeah.
Andrew Smallwood
But one thing I really appreciate about you guys in this conversation is, you know, somebody might listen to this and they may have a different perspective about what's most important, you know, in prioritizing and how they organize their company and what kind of experience they're providing for their customers. But, there's no arguing that you guys are clear on your opinion and your point of view. Right? Which is, I mean, it's in your name and your brand promise. Right. Ziprent. You're clearly providing speed and convenience and immediacy at points of the process that have, you know, economic impact and experiential impact for residents, investors. Right. Your team, and obviously you guys have some really great momentum, right, to show for all the success you guys have, have created so far. So I've really enjoyed the conversation and getting to know you guys better. If people are interested in learning more about Ziprent or connecting with you guys, what would be the best place for them to look at going to do that?
Arvand Sabetian
Yeah. So I would say, you know, both Nick and I are very hands-on, with our approach in managing the business. So reach out to us directly, you know, that's just my name @Ziprent.com. Nick@Ziprent.com. Pretty simple. Read our emails, and respond to emails as it is a big emphasis on our part with, you know, being highly responsive within our teams. And that starts with us, and the rest of our management staff, and then, the rest of the team. The other thing that we've been kind of concentrating on is obviously we've gotten to a point where I feel like we've built something right, based off of a property management direction. Right. Which our software does have attitude. And that attitude is our attitude. That's just been kind of we laid on to it. But if it's something that jibes for some aspect of our industry and we can cut costs for, you know, some of the other property managers and why not do that? So we’ve started building kind of, a white label API, to offer it to some of our competitors. You know, if it's, if we have, a property manager, especially in a, in a region or we're not really present, and we can save them, you know, 50% on the tenant placement costs, and have them concentrating on growing their business in a fashion that they trust and that they can leverage, how they want, we would love to do that. And that's kind of the next chapter, I think, for us is taking what we built, putting all this effort into and offering that out so that everyone can benefit from it, as opposed to just our direct customers.
Andrew Smallwood
Awesome. Arvand, Nick, really appreciate you coming on the pod today and sharing generously, pulling back the curtain on what you guys have been working on at Ziprent. I think it's really interesting. Excited to continue to track your guys’ progress and success in the years ahead. Thanks again.
Nick Bokaie
Cheers, Andrew.
Laura Mac & Carol Housel
And that wraps up another episode of the Triple-Win Property Management podcast. Thank you for pressing play. We hope you've gained valuable insights and inspiration.
The Triple-Win Property Management Podcast is proudly produced and distributed by Second Nature, where we believe in a Triple-Win, building winning experiences for your residents, investors and your teams with the only fully managed resident benefits package. Visit SecondNature.com to learn more and talk to an RBP expert in your area. If you have any questions or comments or want to weigh in on the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Email TripleWin@SecondNature.com. That's TripleWin@SecondNature.com. Stay connected with us beyond the podcast. Visit our website at SecondNature.com to stay updated with upcoming property management events and articles. And don't forget, you can keep the conversation going in the Triple-Win Property Management Facebook group. It's exclusively for property managers. To receive even more valuable insights and updates, subscribe to our newsletter. You can find the link to that and much more in the show notes. On behalf of the Triple-Win community, this is Laura Mac, thanking you for tuning in. And on behalf of Second Nature, this is Carol Housel. Check back soon for another exciting episode. Until then, keep striving for that Triple-Win.