Multifamily Unpacked, Season 1, Episode 3: Scott Wesson — Making every bit of data count
Multifamily Unpacked, Season 1, Episode 3: Scott Wesson — Making every bit of data count
Scott Wesson, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of UDR, Inc. (NYSE: UDR), an S&P 500 company, shares just how far multifamily technology has come bit by bit and the early days of REITs.
He shares the philosophy behind UDR’s, (a public REIT based in Colorado with 58,374 units), technology adoption to better understand renter preferences, and how they decide which technology to implement to better serve renters.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Disruption in multifamily has often come from our Public Real Estate Investment Trusts. REITs feel the financial pressure to outperform the market every single quarter, and that pressure can lead to innovation. In this podcast, we sit down with Scott Wesson, Chief Digital Officer of UDR, a public REIT based in the Denver Colorado area, who currently own and operate over 55,000 units. Scott has been an industry Innovator for decades and brings a unique perspective to where the industry came from, where it is and where it’s going. Scott shares his passion on this podcast for sustainability and we even got him to share some challenges that future entrepreneurs can tackle. Please enjoy. All right, welcome to Multifamily Unpacked. Scott, thank you for joining us. I am the host of this podcast. I’m Tyler Christiansen, the CEO of Funnel Leasing. Today, I have a good friend of mine, not a customer though, a thought leader on the Funnel product and in general, just the industry titan, Scott Weston, Chief Digital Officer at UDR. Scott, thank you for joining us.
Scott Wesson, UDR
Absolutely.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
You and I have a lot of these conversations off the record. And so we decided to do this podcast, I thought, I know I’m passionate about multifamily technology, and I know someone else who is. Excited to unpack the history of multifamily and kind of where we see it going. So with that first question is, you know, tell us how you fell into this industry. How did you get started in multifamily technology?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah. I guess like a lot of folks that are in my age group, you know, we weren’t as much planning to go into technology as we kind of got sucked into it, right. And so, you know, I didn’t get into this until several years out of college. The University of Texas, go horns. And I got into it because I had done a lot of work in my first job out of college where I was an analyst for Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. We had done a lot of things with flash sales and distributed databases and all this type of thing. Then later, I was at a consulting business, and one of my customers back in 1991, 21 years ago, 31 years ago, was Lincoln Property Company. And Lincoln had some visionary leadership at the time. They wanted to leverage and act on property data across their portfolio, but they couldn’t do it. One of the reasons they couldn’t do it, for those of you that weren’t, you know, back there in those days, because there were people that weren’t alive back then, was because all the databases were closed. You could not inquiry them, and even if you could, they were all disconnected in different locations around the country. So we had some fundamental technology issues that we had to solve to connect them all, but that was provided that we could actually even get to an open data platform.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
That’s a really great place to kind of start our technology journey, because I like to ask, you know, what was the state of multifamily tech when you started? To make sure everyone is aware, you know, you came into the industry, you’ve been on the consulting side of our industry, where Lincoln, you’re at real foundations, AIMCO, and obviously, now, Chief Digital Officer with UDR. That’s a lot of unpacking to do, but you know, you set the stage that even just getting the data itself was challenging when you first came into the industry? You know, what were some of the big innovative ideas that you were a part of that today seem just like table stakes, but at the time were novel?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Sure. Well, a lot of it was, you know, I mean, it’s funny, because people today, particularly technologists, wonder why in the world, did we ever have a Y2K problem, right? And for those of us who lived through the age of mainframes, you know, every bit counted, right? It was very hard to move data, we didn’t have high-speed networks in order to transmit data across large distances and so forth. And so, a lot of things you know, the way I used to put it is it was kind of like: you’re going to a desert island, what data do you want to take with you? You couldn’t have it all. So you had to take whatever you could get your hands on. So the state of the technology back then was pretty nonexistent. In fact, you were considered very progressive to even have the system on a computer at all, even with a closed database. So when I came into Lincoln, they had just moved from pegboard. If anyone knows what the heck that is. So you know, when you think of, you know, Excel or Lotus 123, or even VisiCalc before that, they were based on a paper model. That paper model was called a spreadsheet. And what you used to do is you would put their pegboard down, and then you would do all your calculations for your 12 months of a lease. And then you would forecast and of course, it was all humans with 10 keys, trying to add that all— so much error. So much error. And so then you try to figure out what occupancy was. Then we had this modern invention called a fax machine, right, where you could fax in these daily, and weekly flash numbers. Then somebody in corporate would then take a 10 key, and tabulate and try to figure out what is the overall occupancy of the company. It was really, really crazy. One of the big events because there’s always a big event, right? The big event that really started pushing technology was actually not people like me, or even visionaries like the leadership at Lincoln, when when I first arrived, it was the S&L crisis. Right? So you ended up having a lot of savings and loans that were failing. And so you had banks that were in receivership, and they were trying to figure out, what do I own? And how is it being managed? And so you know, the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) started pushing for more data, and more granular data. And so all of us were trying to figure out this problem kind of at the same time. And so we were looking for things like open databases. And that’s where I started, kind of my search to look for companies that had open databases. I was going to be happy with kind of the way we had done it in the retail world, which is flash sales, take a portion of the data and move it up, and even then it was going to be a day old. Right. Real-time was just a dream. Yeah. So that was kind of back then
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Amazing. Well, I think that, for those who don’t know me, most will know UDR, and the reputation you have in the industry of being a real technology forward-leaning organization, it’s crazy to think that we’re gonna get to conversations here, you and I about electric vehicles, IoT and AI. But that’s where we started, right. And I as a multifamily geek, appreciate the work, the legwork that was done to build that foundation, because I do think we see even today, you and I are here sitting in Park City RET Summit, it takes a it takes a village to move the mountains that we need to advance this industry. The battles that were being faced back then seem trivial now that of course, we’re going to have open data. But you know, it was bit by bit, to use the pun, that we made that progress. You started to tell us a story. This wasn’t on my questions, but I want to hear how it ends. So because I love a good Genesis story, I myself always look back at the people that told me that Funnel was going to fail, and you know, whatever else. So tell me about your mission, the mission that you’ve been on with UDR, again, for those who don’t know, UDR has really in many ways created the new operating model in multifamily. I always joke with people that Funnel tries to sell what UDR built off the shelf. Thanks for all the years and ideas. But tell me about that mission, that passion, and I’ll share the story that kind of set you on that journey.
Scott Wesson, UDR
Well, I mean, it really is, you can kind of narrow it down to a single event. And years ago, when I was at AIMCO, I used to go on trips to the rating agencies and one of the rating agencies was Moody’s. In fact, they were in the Old World Trade Center, I think it was Trade Center Two. So one day, me and my CEO had made the trip to go talk to Moody’s. And we were talking to a specific analyst. You know, this was when REITs were pretty big time, right? This was 2000. We probably had 17 REIT peers at the time, we have six now. So it was a much bigger day, back then, and there was a lot more competition for capital with that many REIT peers. So we were trying to kind of get to the bottom of well, what does it take to get a better, you know, credit rating from Moody’s? The analyst at one point appeared to be kind of frustrated and she puts her pen down and she says, ‘You know, guys I don’t think I’m ever going to rate any REIT to trade above net asset value.’ And of course, that’s the whole point of our visit was to say we have enterprise value that’s over and above what assets are worth. I mean, it’s literally like you know, we joke sometimes as individuals when we have a lot of life insurance that were worth more dead than alive I mean, that’s what trading at NAV is, it means you’re worth about the same whether you’re dead or alive.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
You are adding no value in the job that you and your team are doing.
Scott Wesson, UDR
And so, you know, I kind of got on the edge of my seat and I said, ‘Well, you know, why? Why wouldn’t you want to rate us above NAV? And she said, ‘You guys are all the same. You’re just a collection of assets, and there’s really no enterprise value over and above the assets. So I’m never going to rate you there.’ And I got irritated. To me, those were fighting words. And so I literally pointed at her and I said, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my career proving you wrong,’ because I think that is the difference between, you know, not just the real estate investment trusts, but real estate companies in general. You know, we all have our brand, the things that we’re trying to do that sets us apart. And sure, we like to think we’re good purchasers and timely sellers of our assets. But we also want to believe that we’ve created enterprise value, and one of the ways you can do that is with innovation and technology and process.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
That is so well said, it’s interesting, because, like I said, I’ve got my own Genesis stores. But as it relates to multifamily, my first entry into the industry was working. My father was a CFO at a multifamily company in the Salt Lake City area. And I worked on the team that did due diligence on new projects. And it always was strange to me that never once in any of my work that we talk about the renter, the consumer, right? It just did not jive with the fact that at the end of the day providing homes for people, but it was always about the NOI and the value of the asset. And I think that what you said is really, I think, even from the 10 years I’ve been in the industry. And again, to your point, this was 2000, and you’ve been on this journey, that the industry continues to become more aware of the opportunity to add value above and beyond the asset itself. Right. And that there is a lot of FFO (funds from operation) that can be generated by having a better operating platform. So let’s use that as a segue. I gave you guys a lot of kudos, and the street does as well, I love reading your earnings calls. But knowing you know, again, that UDR was very early and had a lot of innovative technologies. Maybe actually, let’s touch on that because we’re here again, the RET LP Summit. You know, SmartRent public company, you all were very early in that. And I’d love to double-click on that one for a second. What was the initial problem you were trying to solve as it related to IoT and access? And where do you think that’s brought us today? In terms of, are we better today than we were five years ago, with the advent of hardware and access and bringing our buildings online? Because five years ago, I would imagine even UDR probably had very little in terms of, you know, IoT and smart homes.
Scott Wesson, UDR
It was the thesis, though, more so it sounds like what that approach, was it an ancillary income objective? What upgrades are available? No, but we were experimenting. That’s kind of one of the basic fundamental parts of our DNA, we experiment a lot, right? So, you know, long before we ever raise our hand and go out and try to find a vendor to meet a need, we actually try to experiment ourselves. So well before SmartRent was just a glint in Lucas’s eye. I think we were out there and we’ve picked a market that we knew that it would be accepted in because they were very tech forward in Seattle. And we started experiments saying, what do people value in an enhanced smart home package? And so, you know, we went high end, you know, we did locks, we did thermostats just like Lucas did, but we also did more. We were doing window coverings, and we were doing Sonos systems, and you know, just basically anything that you could think of, in the IoT, and we were trying to figure out what stuck, right? Because we figured that, if the Seattle customer didn’t want it, no one would want it. What was the goal? I mean, it’s funny is, I have a saying that I use a lot of UDR is, ‘You know, we aren’t geniuses today, and we weren’t idiots yesterday.’ You know, we try to be humble, right. So when we approached it initially, I’d love to tell you some, you know, flowery story about how we had this view that we were going to reduce, you know, our operating expense platform, et cetera. But that wasn’t the initial view. The initial view was like you said, it was an amenity, you know, is this something that people want? The other thing we were trying to figure out is, how much effort does it take to actually support these things? Right. So if we ended up having to hire a bunch of people just to run it, then it wouldn’t have been financially feasible for us. But along the way, we figured out some interesting things. One was that while they were okay with some of the things we put on the platform, the only ones they really wanted were the basic ones, you know, and so we had a hard time on turn, sometimes selling the entire package. They were like, ‘Oh, I just want to lock.” Right? ‘I want the thermostat, And that’s, that’s really all I want.’ Well, then we started saying, ‘Well, what’s not in there that we want?’ So the first one was the customer, and then we said, what do we want? And then, we were already doing experiments with self-guided tours. So we were thinking, Okay, well, one thing we want to do with a self-guided tour is to truly make it self-guided, so that you don’t have to go to the office and pick up a key or a fob or something of that nature. And so, then we started thinking, well, what about service that’s going to save them time by not having to go to you know, get keys after every single service request, and, and all the security issues that solves. So, you know, it ended up being a platform play of how can we operate at a much lower cost? But it didn’t start there. It just kind of evolved to it.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah. It’s interesting. I think that, like you said, I mean, similar to a lot of the things that happened at Funnel, I’d love to say that we knew centralization is going to be THE thing, we kind of fell into it by trying to solve all their problems. I think one thing you guys did a great job of Scott, is I can hear it in the way you describe the problem is you start from the consumers perspective. When I talk with you, don’t talk about, ‘Well, as Chief Digital Officer, I’ve got this problem in the boardroom.’ It’s no, ‘I went to the community. And you know, what, I realized that this was painful. And this is a, you know, this is an opportunity.’ So I guess, to segway us then into today, where we exist, you know, UDR, and yourself long history of innovation and new technology. What are, and again, you’re sitting here and getting to hear from some of the real innovators in multifamily pitching you on, you know, you’ve got your own Shark Tank down the hall here of good ideas, and probably, you know, not as great ideas. But what are the challenges that you see today, either that you’re actively working to address? Or maybe even some that are unsolved?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah. Well, we don’t have that much time, I guess, would be the first thing to say. But I mean, as far as big challenges, I still think our product is too hard to buy. You know, and I think about how far the retail experience has come. When everything, and you know, early days of the Internet, everything was brochure wear, you would go to a hotel website, and it would say, ‘call this number for reservations,’ right. And now we look at that, you know, we’re really going to web 3.0 now, and what web 2.0 was moving from brochure wear to an actual e-commerce platform. We really didn’t want browsers, which is unfortunately the term that got, you know, applied. We want to be shoppers, you know, and we want to be buyers, we don’t want to be necessarily shoppers, we may have inquiries we want to do etcetera. But when we’re ready to buy, we’re ready to buy. I think that is the number one thing that makes our product frictional. We use a lot of legal language that customers don’t use. And you think about the horror that it is actually easier to commit to a 30-year mortgage than to get a one-year lease. There’s something wrong right there. You know, and so that’s something that I think we, as an industry, really need to focus on.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah, I know you and I share that passion for that challenge. And I think that the perspective that you bring of, the consumer experiences that we have outside of multifamily, really does present the opportunity or the example. I love that through the 2.0 brochure wear, to 3.0. And now we’re moving on. So I guess this is a little bit tangential to that. Are we better off five years on from, you know, the last several projects that you’ve seen, obviously, 30 years? Yes. But, you know, if we really look at just the last couple of years, there’s been, you know, new CRM platforms, you will have your own, we have one, there’s IoT in the space, there’s AI in the space, from my perspective, it’s been a very disruptive five years, but do you feel like we’re better off as an industry?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Absolutely. We are, and I can answer that very specifically from UDRs’ perspective, or I can say just generally from the industry. I think there are things that all of the investment dollars that have gone into PropTech have been good because unfortunately, there are a lot of foundational technologies that needed to be in place for us to get better. And it reminds me a little bit of those early days, we were saying, how do we get a more sophisticated data architecture so that we can move data and see it faster and act on it faster? Well, today’s version of that is still a data issue, right? It’s how do we move prospect data faster? How do we allow customers to self-serve through their lifecycle with us? But it’s, it’s also going, you know, deeper into ESG issues now. So, yeah, I would not want to go back, and we’ve all been beneficiaries of it.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah, that’s a great one. I think to your point, I agree. When I think about where we have advanced as an industry, the proliferation of capital to more technology companies has had a massively positive impact. I agree with you that we are still not where I think any of us hoped to be from a data access and portability perspective. So, now thinking looking ahead and putting, our eyes on the future, let me start specifically with data with access, because I’m fortunate to get to talk to a lot of smart folks like yourself, who are actively trying to minimize those barriers that exist to having access to your data and allowing UDR to operate the way it wants to operate. Where does this go? Because I think you know, you’re gonna have conversations with your peers. You know, without naming any obviously, we’ve all been relying on the pm software for a very long time. But that’s changing to a certain extent, the openness of data and middle-ware and APIs. And it seems like it’s, we are maybe at an inflection point where there really is going to be more control, more leverage on the operator side, to make technology decisions independent of your back office systems. Is that where we’re going?
Scott Wesson, UDR
I think so. And to just kind of call back something you said a minute ago, I think the customer is the one that’s taken us there, right? Because customer expectations drive a lot. And you see that in a lot of the innovations that we do. In fact, when I talk to our UDR board about what it is we’re trying to do with technology, I always stress that we’re not trying to take a customer where they’re not already going in their lives, right? They’re already using Uber and they’re already using GrubHub, et cetera. Instacart, right. So they want those experiences. And every time we’ve delivered them, you know, and this is, boy, you don’t want to talk about a humility moment, right? Every time we deliver them. I don’t hear this round of applause. Instead, I hear, ‘It’s about time. What kept you guys?’ right, like, ‘Thank you for finally doing this.’ But it’s not the reward that you expect, like, ‘Oh, that’s so good.’ Right? It’s like, ‘Thank you. But why so late?’
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
That’s well said, Yeah, I think you said, moving from the brochure wear (I love that expression), to just let me self-schedule my own appointment, please. Right. And I think to your point, I know UDR tests a lot of these things, either low tech or not integrated tech, like just give the consumer the experience, and you’ll learn the data. Let me ask that question that wasn’t on my list. But you know, I think a lot of folks who listen to this are probably looking at, well, Scott’s got all sorts of resources. But man, how can I, you know, be as progressive and adding new technology and staying closer to the cutting edge? Maybe they can’t be on the bleeding edge that you and I like to operate on. But what’s some advice you would give to technology leaders in multifamily on how to bring innovations into their platform?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah, I have this conversation with a lot of our peers all the time. So some things do come to mind. I mean, the first one is, we try to target value creation. So we don’t ever look at technology for its own sake. And you know, it’s always a short meeting, if someone comes in and says, ‘Look at my shiny object,’ So we’re, we are looking for value either the customer valuing it, us valuing it, it creating margin and expansion. Targeting value is a big part of it. And a second one is one you refer to a minute ago, and that is we always do process before technology. We always try that first, like, you know, we had such an amazing vision, originally for what we wanted self-guided tours to be. And it was really cool someday, I’ll show you the screenshots. It was really cool. We mocked up all this stuff, a really immersive experience, almost like a VR-type thing. And you know, what? We did what we always do, we said, well, let’s do some things manually and see what the customer says. The customer rejected it, they did not want that. In fact, I can tell you some of the quotes that they said were things like, ‘I don’t want to play games, I want to look at, I want to look at this property because that’s the thing that I’m validating by coming to the property.” So ‘I already saw your pictures on the website, I saw your pricing, I saw your availability, I’m here to see and feel. I mean, I’m trying to use all my senses on this place to see, is this a place I want to live?’ So that’s kind of that’s another one. You’ve already hit on another one of ours, that’s a major precept, which is focused on the customer, you know, what do they value? If you’re going to change things in your tech stack, change things that matter to them, right? So if they’re saying, ‘Hey, your bills are too hard to read,’ spend time fixing that, right? Don’t, you know, don’t focus on moving data faster just for its own sake, if you haven’t started with a customer first. And the last one is probably my favorite one. Because it’s a major precept of my whole career, but it’s something that is very near and dear to my boss Tom Toomey’s heart as well, which is making decisions with data. You know, what does the data tell us? What is the customer behavior telling us? You know, let’s just drop all the opinions at the door and be willing to be wrong when the data says you’re wrong.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah. Man, I love that. I really love the first one, just focusing on value creation. Right? I think that too often, to your point, self-guided tours are out there and so we should do it. What is the value we’re hoping to achieve from that? Right? We very often fall into RFPs, where we’re basically checking boxes, and I have to ask, what are you actually trying to create? Because we’re not going to win the check the box, you know, as a startup, we’re not going to. But if there’s a value, I would love to help you with that. Yeah. All right, so I want to, we’re gonna go into a little rapid fire here to wrap up, because I know there’s a lot of folks out there that want to talk to you. So favorite non-work app, or can be a work app, what’s an app that you have on your phone that you check first thing in the morning?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Well, this is going to be nerdy. So get ready for that, my favorite one lately has been this one that’s available through a lot of utility companies, and it’s called Smart Hub. What Smart Hub is, is if you have a solar plant at your home, it gives you netmeter information so I can see, you know, how much power did we use today? And then how much netted out from my solar plant, so that it came to a kilowatt number. And I think that is the future of where we’re all going with energy consumption. Let’s gamify it, let’s get this out in front of people so that they can help us as an industry lower our carbon footprint. So that’s my favorite one. That’s really nerdy, like, another one that I liked that a lot of people use is Duolingo. And one of my favorite things about Duolingo is again, it’s kind of that gamification of learning. I love the fact that it’s just, you know, it’s like, ‘Hey, you dropped to number 11. Don’t you want to finish number 10 this week?’ And so it encourages you to brush up on the languages that you’re trying to learn.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Love that. Yeah, and the first thing about energy, I’m gonna circle back, I saved one multifamily future question for the end, I think we may come back to that one. All right. Is there a book or a podcast that you’ve listened to or read lately that you really enjoyed?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Sure. Well, you know, I read over 200 books a year. So I’m not gonna give you one, I’ll give you three. Okay, how’s that sound, because it’s a bigger denominator, they’re probably my favorite one that I’ve read in the last month is a book called “Stolen Focus.” And it’s a really good book to kind of help you take charge of how you are interacting with the digital world, because we all use it too much, right? And even though we get these little things if you’re an Apple customer that said, “Hey, you went down 10% last month or last week”, I really liked the book, Stolen Focus. Another one that I just finished last week is called “Speed and Scale” by John Doerr who used to be at Kleiner Perkins. It’s basically on what we need to do to lower our carbon footprint, and it is such a, you know, if you know John Doerr, you know, he’s the money guy behind Google and Facebook, right. And one of his key precepts is you need to be able to create management and metrics on everything. And he’s suggesting some ways we can manage this to lower, you know, carbon emissions for our whole planet. So I can’t think of a book that impressed me more recently.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
That’s awesome. Yeah, Doerr is fantastic. Measure what matters I read earlier this year.
Scott Wesson, UDR
Can I give you a couple more. So my last one, because I know some people get bored with all these business books. But I just finished a book this last weekend, called An Upgrade by Blake Crouch. It’s a sci-fi book, and I love sci-fi, this particular genre of sci-fi and Blake Crouch is a great, great author. And he is talking about something that has, when I first heard about it, it scared me and I’m like, someone’s going to write a good sci-fi book about it. And he did. It’s on gene editing. And what can go wrong? What could possibly go wrong when we edit the human genome? Right? Yeah. And that’s what his thriller is about. It’s pretty cool.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
But okay, yeah, amazing. Very cool. I’m gonna check those out. In the next podcast, I’m gonna ask you how you’re so productive, yet you read 200 books a year. That I need to unpack. All right. So you have a lot of hobbies and interests. I know you’re involved in biotech. If you were to retire tomorrow, what’s the passion project, because I know you’re not going to be just on your compound, watching the bears, you’re going to be busy. So is it philanthropy? Is it a startup? What would you put your passion into if you walked away from UDR?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah, it’s such a great question. I mean, I think that I’m interested in if you were to come to my house, you’d see and I’m interested in all things sustainable. So I think if I were to retire today, and definitely not wanting to be bored, I think I would be trying to create sustainable housing in the third world. I just think that there’s so many ways we can harness what’s, you know, either solar or water, hydropower, battery technology, you know, that’s really advancing very quickly. But even down to rain catchment, you know, for places like where I live where I get nine inches a year, right of rain, and so I just think there’s so much that we can do with sustainable housing.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Okay, when you do that, call me up, we would love our H.O.M.E. charity to help fund some of that. That’s awesome. And personally, my passion is in Latin America, and I’m always thinking about how can we take the success of multifamily housing to places that need it? Alright, last two on the rapid-fire here, what’s an opinion multifamily or otherwise, you feel so strongly about? You put it on a billboard? I’ve got a billboard for you here in Salt Lake on I-80. It’s Scott’s opinion, whatever you want to say, you know, it could be for your kids or it could be for you know, your peers in the industry. What’s that opinion?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah, does it have to be about multifamily?
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
No, it could be anything, it could be, ‘Turn on your blinker.’
Scott Wesson, UDR
No, I think. And this is probably the audience for this is probably the owner of businesses, but also the customer of the business. And that is stop, stop, stop, stop accepting crappy frictional disjointed customer experiences. Put your foot down and stop accepting it. You know, I mean, I have stopped doing business with companies that have those frictional processes and I go somewhere else that I don’t have to deal with them. And I think if more of us did that, we would see technology platforms advance even faster.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah. You heard my story earlier today. But I will never walk into a car dealership again after my ecommerce experience. I agree with you. Our tagline, Scott, is renter-centric. But to us, that means something but UDR has long been renter-centric, although maybe that’s not the way you described it. But when you think about renter-centric or renter-centricity, what does it mean to you?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Well, you know, we think in terms of the lifecycle a lot at UDR. And so I think you start at the beginning of the lifecycle and say, sell the way the customer wants to buy. That would be number one. And then number two, is to create transparency and all your processes with the customer. We are so occluded in this industry. I’ll go to the other end of the spectrum, and that is not just Amazon. But when Amazon drivers are delivering your package, you get a text, ‘Your driver is seven stops away, your driver is three stops away. Here’s a picture from your porch of your package.’ Right. That’s transparency, and that’s the kind of transparency that Amazon is setting the bar and I think we all want that. We want that with service requests. We want to know, hey, am I next on the list? Or am I six down the list? Or if I’m being rescheduled, why am I being rescheduled? Is it because I mean, our customers understand supply chain issues, — so if we can’t get a part, that’s cool, just tell us. Fix the transparency issue.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Love it. Yeah, renter-centric is customer-centric. We’re all customers. We know what good consumer experiences are. I sense some really great themes throughout this conversation. Scott, I want to rap with the billion-dollar question. We’re gonna give the listeners just some free advice. You’ve got decades of multifamily experience. You’ve got passion, if you were, you know, coming out of UT right now. RET that didn’t exist, right. A multifamily-focused VC, what’s a business that you would start? In the space addresses? We’ve talked a lot about, you know, unmet needs, but what’s a business that you would start if you were in those entrepreneur’s shoes today, specifically to multifamily? Is it ESG? related? Is it renewable energy?
Scott Wesson, UDR
Yeah, I mean, it’s a hard question. I’ll tell you why, and then I’ll answer it. Yeah. It’s a hard question, because I think some of the biggest problems that face us right now are hard to face alone. And so that’s harder for the entrepreneur, for example, the biggest problem that we face today, the new granularity that we lack is information about energy consumption at the unit level. But I want to go beyond unit level, I want to go to the outlet level, I think it’s really important for people to understand where are those kilowatts going, is it you know, all of these devices that I have plugged in and I could lower it by 10% if I just unplugged them? You know, or is it that I, my HVAC is actually working too hard and we need to have it serviced. I mean, there’s all kinds of things there. So I told you what I want. Here’s why it’s hard, and here’s why an entrepreneur will have difficulty with it is those things are controlled by large utility companies. They’re not motivated to help right now, and so we need lobbyists. We need, you know, we need help from Congress, we need help from public utility companies or the governing bodies to help us open up this kind of last, you know, it’s not even the last mile problem. It’s like the last 20 feet problem, right. And without that information, I think when I talk to our residents, I think they want to help lower the carbon footprint, but they don’t know how. And so all of this ESG reporting, in essence, is kind of silly as it is today, because we’re only reporting 10% of that building’s carbon footprint. The other 90% is controlled by residents, and it’s a black hole to us. And it’s a black hole to them.
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
Yeah, and therefore, there’s no action that we can take, right? It’s not actionable. Well, you know, what makes me very optimistic about that challenge is that I do think I agree, the industry has come a long way. And the last couple of decades and even the last five years. And to your point, what I’ve loved about this partnership, is although UDR is not a customer today, a Funnel.
Scott Wesson, UDR
How many times have you said that?
Tyler Christiansen, Funnel Leasing
I’ve said it a lot, I think hopefully you picked up on the hint. But that, you know, these kinds of conversations, there’s so many folks that are trying to solve these problems. And there’s, there’s capital now, and there are a lot of innovators. And I know, that you know, folks like UDR and even yourself are going to, you know, on an ongoing basis, challenge the industry and push it so I think we’ll make progress on that. I hope so, Scott, thank you for your time. As always, this is super fun, and we’ll get the contracts overdue so we can fix that kind of customer problem. Thank you, sir. Thanks for listening to this episode of Multifamily Unpacked. If you enjoyed what you heard here, leave a review and rating on Apple podcasts and follow Funnel on LinkedIn.