Challenge
For a real estate management company like Veritas Investments, the longer rental units remain unoccupied, the greater the revenue loss.
“The average monthly apartment rental in San Francisco is approximately $2,500 to $3,000,” says Matt Leedham, Technical Consultant at Veritas. “That means every unoccupied unit costs the company $100 a day. Any time there are delays, whether it’s a few days or a week between turn hand-offs, it’s lost revenue.”
With a portfolio of over 7,000 rental units, the tools Veritas used to manage its processes were holding the company back.
Each department maintained its own spreadsheets for tracking tasks and all hand-offs were managed through email. That method proved too cumbersome and wasn’t scalable. Veritas also tried using its accounting program to integrate workflows, but the system wasn’t intuitive.
“Users have very high expectations today,” Matt says. “They’re used to being able to quickly and easily consume data and use apps on their smartphones and tablets.”
Veritas needed a seamless way to weave its systems and data into clear, efficient, and frictionless user experiences for its stakeholders. It needed a customizable approach that could simplify and expedite the many workflows, processes, and tasks involved in managing rental units from purchase to lease.
Solution
Veritas used Skuid to create DRIVE—a powerful, integrated, and customized platform that meets its business teams’ unique requirements.
The DRIVE platform serves about 250 employees and streamlines the way Veritas manages multi-functional operations. It simplifies the user experience and automates many business processes and workflows, helping users achieve greater operational efficiency.
DRIVE’s apps include features for repairs and maintenance, leasing, investments, property onboarding, website management, risk management, turn management, and construction.
“We’ve created a Turn Management app to help us extract more value from every unit,” says Matt. “The app provides our management teams with a single dashboard for all things pertaining to turn workflows and processes. This includes information on unit renovations to achieve the best rental value.”
The turn management process at Veritas involves several teams, decisions, activities, and workflows. Onsite and satellite building managers, regional and assistant property managers, asset managers, portfolio managers, and a property services team must all coordinate to ensure smooth transitions.
DRIVE helps everyone keep track of turns during handoffs and streamlines every element with a robust and transparent tracking process. All users can see their tasks through a dashboard view appropriate to their role. The platform provides performance metrics to the executive team, too.
DRIVE also integrates third-party solutions to aggregate data, images, and processes into the company’s business operations. Integrations include business intelligence, a property accounting system, listing information with ILS integration services, syndication services, property inspection services, and data feed services.
Results
With Skuid, Veritas built a single platform that helps it manage operations for mixed-use properties within a single, easy-to-use dashboard. The DRIVE platform improves operational efficiency by:
- Significantly reducing turn hand-off timeframes.
- Improving ability to optimize revenue.
- Enforcing task accountability.
- Tracking schedule costs to determine task timeframes.
- Comparing budgets with schedules and actual costs.
In addition to efficiency gains from the new platform, using Skuid has helped the Veritas technical consultancy team quickly respond to user requests. Many of DRIVE’s new features, capabilities, and changes are actually accomplished on the fly.
“Our users love it because they can come up with ideas to increase their productivity and have greater visibility into their processes,” says Matt. “They can make a request in the morning, and we might have the new function or feature to them within hours, if not minutes. It gives them a feeling of involvement and a strong sense of ownership in the application building process.”
The apps Veritas builds are always evolving. During the pandemic, the company's leasing processes needed to change rapidly. San Francisco went from a strong market that didn’t require many rent concessions to a mass exodus that demanded real estate management companies to adapt.
These changes required Veritas to be nimble and update its apps to reflect evolving market needs. The market is now in a recovery phase, with renters starting to come back. Veritas can now quickly and effectively update the DRIVE platform to respond to any market challenge.
“We have a small team, and our main developer is located in France. Even with the distance and time zone differences, we’re able to build, revise and update web pages in real-time, through our Zoom meetings. It’s amazing.” - Matt Leedham