Key benefits of Property Management Software

0:00 – Strata Manager Shortage in BC

0:00 Shervin Shapourian: Hi everyone, my name is Shervin. I'm one of the co-founders and the CTO of PowerStrata Systems. I'm going to talk a little bit about the benefits of using a software system to manage strata buildings, and cover a few things. Let's see how it ends up. So hopefully you can see the screen that I've shared with you. Of course I can see that as well. So let's go through these slides.

0:25 One of the things that you hear a lot about these days is the problem that strata management companies and strata managers are in demand, and we do not have enough strata managers to take care of all these strata corporations in British Columbia. In fact, if you look at the news, these are some of the headlines that I've copied here. You can see, BC facing a critical shortage of strata property managers, Global News.

0:57 BC suffering an acute shortage of strata managers, Vancouver Sun. There's a similar headline from CTV News, all in March 2023. So everywhere you go, everybody is talking about this. The fact is that this is not something new. British Columbia has been suffering from this problem for, I believe, at least for 10 years. If you look at older headlines you can see that these are some of the older ones, back in 2015.

1:29 CityNews had an article concerning shortage of experienced property managers, and similar articles and news from other news channels as well. So we have been dealing with this problem for a long time, and the problem is just getting worse every year, unfortunately. If you look at some of the numbers, by the way these are just estimates, they may not be 100 percent accurate today. For example, the stats that we got from Land Title and Survey Authority back in 2021, two years ago, showed that around 34,000 strata corporations are in British Columbia.

2:18 It might be slightly more than that today. A big group of these strata corporations are very small ones, like duplexes, triplexes, stratas with less than five units, and most of them are usually self-managed. We have around 1,400 registered strata managers, but unfortunately not all of them actively manage portfolios. The estimate is, again, less than half of them actually do manage a strata building. So we are left with around 700 active strata managers in British Columbia taking care of thousands and thousands of buildings.

3:02 We did a rough calculation. The estimate is that around 20 buildings is the size of a portfolio for a typical strata manager, or around 850 units. Of course this is just average. There are strata managers that take over a lot more buildings. I personally have seen people with portfolios over 30 or even 40 buildings, which is insane. And even if you take care of just a few buildings, even 10, 15, depending on the type of the building, they may be high-rises, so you end up taking care of a lot more units compared to the 850 that we have here.

3:44 The point is that you are dealing with a lot of units, with a lot of people. Everybody demands to ask questions, get informed about stuff going on in the complex, they may have complaints, they may have some sort of request. And one of the main aspects of managing a building is that the strata managers need to attend meetings: council meetings, general meetings, AGM, SGM. And at minimum a typical strata corporation has a council meeting every three months, the smaller ones.

4:22 Of course the larger complexes have a lot more. And at least one general meeting, which is the annual general meeting. They may have special general meetings as well. So, five meetings a year minimum, 20 buildings, that means that a strata manager has to deal with a hundred meetings every year, which is, again, insane.

4:37 – Overworked Managers and Owner Complaints

4:46 Shervin Shapourian: So these are some of the numbers. What problem do these things cause? First of all, strata managers often feel overworked, no wonder. And because of that, in many cases their response time may not be ideal. I've heard this so many times from owners, that they say my strata manager is not responsive, I send them an email and it takes ages for them to get back to me.

5:18 And the problem is that the owner sees one single email that they have sent to the strata manager. They don't see the hundreds, or multiple hundreds, even the thousand emails that a typical strata manager might receive in a week. And of course it takes a long time to go through all these emails and filter them out.

5:41 Some of them are just the emails that we all receive, there might be junk, kind of spam, but just even leaving them out, there are still hundreds and hundreds of emails that are legitimate, and the strata manager has to go through them and respond to them and see which one is more urgent, which one can wait a little bit. So it's a large amount of communication and it's a huge task for the strata manager.

6:12 On the other hand, strata council members, especially the ones in smaller complexes, struggle with finding strata management companies. Because of this shortage of strata managers, many management companies are hesitant to take over smaller complexes, and that is another issue. So basically we are forcing a number of strata corporations in British Columbia to become self-managed, because basically they don't have any other options available to them.

6:45 On top of all of these, the estimate is that a large group of experienced strata managers will be retired in the next five years, which means that everything that I mentioned will be a much larger problem a few years down the road.

7:00 – Solutions: Assistant Managers and Efficiency

7:03 Shervin Shapourian: Now, let's take a look at a few possible solutions for these problems. The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, train and hire more strata managers. But we all know that this is easier said than done. If it was an option we would have solved this problem years ago. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, there aren't many people that are interested to become licensed strata managers. The other option is to train and hire assistant property managers, which are the people that help the property manager or the strata manager, but they don't need to be licensed.

7:41 And the good news is that there are tons and tons of things that these people can do and they do not need to be licensed strata managers: responding to owners, providing additional information, of course under the supervision of the strata manager. They can be a huge help. But as soon as you add more and more people to the job, you need to provide a process or a proper system for them to be able to communicate with each other, to work with each other and work together to provide service to their clients.

8:22 And the other solution would be to increase the efficiency of the strata managers. There are tons and tons of things that the strata managers have to do these days which is not really the best way of using their time, and I will mention a few later. So if we can find a way to provide a system to make strata managers more efficient, that will free up some of their time, it will reduce the pressure that they feel today, and if they choose they can even manage more buildings with less stress and pressure.

9:07 And for the strata corporations, the ones that we mentioned that they have no choice other than become self-managed, again, using proper tools can make it much easier for the council members to take care of the day-to-day operation of their strata. So, now let's take a look at how a software system can help with any one of these items.

9:29 – Email Overload and Message Templates

9:37 Shervin Shapourian: So let's start with the communication. Like I mentioned, email is one of the problems. Don't get me wrong, email is great, it's a very easy and quick way to communicate, and for that email is a great thing. At the same time email is terrible, again because it's very easy and simple to use. So an owner might be sitting on the toilet and send an email to the strata manager asking for information.

10:03 It's that simple. We don't recommend that, but it's possible. So as a result strata managers receive tons and tons of emails. That's why, if you ask any strata manager what they hate the most, is the sheer volume of the emails that they receive. Now, there's no way to just prevent that. When the communication should take place it's important to be able to communicate with your owners in a complex, but we need to make it more efficient.

10:41 So one of the ways that strata managers can save time is to use templates. If you use, again, a proper system where you can define or create templates, basically boilerplate texts for various different requests that you receive. Noise complaints: if you receive a noise complaint there are certain things that you need to ask from the owner that made that complaint. All that can be created as a checklist, part of the email.

11:09 You just choose that message, reply to the person, and it will save you a ton of time. This is just one example, there are a lot of other things that you can do using these kinds of templates. Also it helps if you use a system that allows you to share these messages. And I'm not talking about a single email that everybody has the password to log in and check the inbox.

11:33 That's not the best way to do this. Instead you can have a system that, when people send a message to a shared message box, that becomes the main channel of communication between the strata corporation, management company and the owners. Those messages will be automatically shared among multiple people: strata manager, maybe the assistant, maybe the council members. And they all work together, and every single one of them knows what kind of requests should be replied to by whom in this system.

12:08 And even better, if you can eliminate some of those emails, that's best. A lot of emails that the strata managers receive…

12:17 – Sharing Information to Cut Requests

12:17 Shervin Shapourian: I'm talking a lot about strata managers, but in reality, self-managed stratas, the council members kind of act as strata managers for their own building, so it will be applicable to them as well. So a lot of requests that are received by the strata managers are information requests that people send. Sometimes people need to get copies of documents, maybe a project is going on in the strata and they need to know the updates, the status.

12:48 Windows are getting replaced in a complex: okay, when's the time, when is it my turn, when are they going to come to my unit to replace my windows? All those kinds of questions people need to ask. So if you provide that information in advance, in an easy way, so that all owners, council members, everybody, all the parties involved have easy access to that information, they don't have to send the email to ask those questions, and that will free up a lot of time that can be put into much better use elsewhere.

13:21 – Preventing Excel Strata Fee Errors

13:28 Shervin Shapourian: The other thing is eliminating mistakes and errors. No need to say that if you make a mistake, in a blink of an eye you can double the amount of your workload. You need to now go and fix that problem, you need to respond to so many people, explain why the mistake happened, or what was the course of action, how you fixed that problem, how you're going to prevent that from happening again.

13:52 It will add a lot to your plate. So using a software system that can detect and warn you about commonly made mistakes, that can prevent a lot of issues and headache down the road. To give you an example, many strata corporations and even strata management companies use Excel to calculate strata fees. Excel is a great tool, however it's a generic tool to do any kind of calculation, and it's very easy to make mistakes, and because it does not know the context it cannot give you a warning or errors that, oh, you're missing something.

14:40 So you have a sheet in your Excel file that shows the annual budget, and in a second sheet you calculate the strata fees. You need to get the total of all the expenses from the first sheet. If you leave out by mistake one of the items, or a couple of items, the amount that you calculate is completely wrong, and it may take some time to realize the error.

15:03 And at that point it has already added so much to your plate, then you need to now go back and fix all that.

15:08 – Centralized Records and Lost Documents

15:14 Shervin Shapourian: Easy access to records, I sort of covered that. So if you provide easy access to information to the owners you can prevent some of the unnecessary communication. Also it doesn't matter whether a strata is self-managed or professionally managed, at the end of the day it is the responsibility of the council to make all the decisions. If they do not have access to the current and accurate information, all the records of this strata, it becomes very hard for them to make informed decisions.

15:45 They may make decisions, but they may not be the best decisions. So it's very important to provide information. Also it is crucial to have a centralized system. Otherwise, if you just have documents all over the place, as a strata manager you may have a copy of a document on your computer at the office, another one on your laptop, a copy of it in your email. Very soon it becomes almost impossible to know, okay, which one is the most recent one, which one is the one that we need to use?

16:21 You need to always use a centralized system, so that if you need a copy of a document you know where to go to get it, and it's guaranteed that you are getting the most up-to-date and the actual document that you're looking for. The most up-to-date copy of it you are getting, it's not something old or draft or stuff like that. So that will help you a lot.

16:48 Another example is that there are tons of important documents that the strata corporations need to maintain, and if you lose them it can become very costly for the strata. I personally had this experience years ago in a strata, that the roof had to be replaced after 20… well, basically after 10 years. It was a 20 year old building, the roof had to be replaced, but the roof was only 10 years, because after 10 years the original roof had to be replaced because of some problems.

17:20 Because it was under warranty, at least the cost of the shingles was covered, so it was not that expensive a job to replace the roof. Another 10 years, the same problem happened again, but at that point the strata was managed by a different company. None of the previous council members were around, so nobody knew whether the new roof — well, the newer roof, the 10-year roof — was still under warranty or not.

17:48 Nobody had access to the documents. It could be a printed piece of paper somewhere that nobody knew where, or whether it actually existed or not. And that basically was a costly thing for the strata. So it's very important to have a centralized system, some place that you know where to go and get all that information. And the last thing is, of course, you need to comply with all sorts of legislation when you manage a strata building in British Columbia.

18:21 – Complying With SPA, PIPA and RESA

18:23 Shervin Shapourian: To give you some examples, these are the main ones: Strata Property Act and regulation, of course, Personal Information Protection Act, and Real Estate Services Act. So if you do not use a system that complies with these, that can cause issues. So for example, Google Docs is not a great idea to store all your strata records there, especially if you are a management company. I don't think any management company in BC would do that, they all know that the records that the strata management company keeps must be kept in British Columbia according to section 25 of the Real Estate Services Act.

19:03 Or, if you are a strata corporation, you have the responsibility to protect the personal information of the owners. So the documents, records, personal information of the owners that you have access to must be stored somewhere secure, so nobody has access to them other than those who need to review those, like the elected council members.

19:23 – About Power Strata Systems

19:27 Shervin Shapourian: All right, so let's pivot a little bit here. I'm going to very briefly talk about our company. PowerStrata Systems, established back in 2011, a little more than a decade ago. That's how long we have been in business, and that's how long we have provided service to strata corporations and management companies in British Columbia. Our head office is located in North Vancouver, we are a BC based local company.

19:57 Currently we serve more than 60,000 users across the province, and by users I mean strata owners, council members, even tenants, staff of the management company, property managers, all the parties involved in strata and strata management. They all can use our system. And we are fully compliant with the Strata Property Act, Personal Information Protection Act and Real Estate Services Act. For example, our main servers are located in Kelowna, that's where all the records, all the information that our clients store in our system will be kept.

20:34 So you are fully compliant, or at least you can satisfy section 25 of the Real Estate Services Act. Because of that… What is PowerStrata? PowerStrata is a feature-rich strata management system, so it simplifies the day-to-day operation of the management companies and strata corporations. Sometimes we hear this from people, that when owners hear about PowerStrata they think, oh okay, these are the guys who provide a website for the strata.

21:05 But that's not correct. A website, by definition, is something that's open to the public, anybody can visit the website, it provides information to everybody. Our system, although it gives you a presence using a web portal for the owners, it is secure. You have full control over who has access to what information. Again, some documents, like bylaws of the strata, are available to everybody in the complex, but there are certain documents with sensitive information of the owners, like bank account numbers and stuff like that, which should not be shared with others.

21:44 So only the council members, or maybe only the treasurer, or only the property manager, depending on the case, will have access to that piece of information. And who can use PowerStrata? I've already mentioned that all strata management companies in British Columbia, all the strata corporations, whether they are self-managed or professionally managed, can use our system. And we already have a lot of them, I believe around 800 strata buildings in British Columbia are currently using PowerStrata.

22:13 We only provide service in BC, and that's because our system has been designed specifically to follow the legislation applicable to strata management in British Columbia. Okay, now let's… we have just a few minutes left. It's a short presentation, so I'm going to very quickly show you what PowerStrata looks like and briefly mention some of the items that I mentioned earlier.

22:29 – Demo: Owner Dashboard and Forms

22:37 Shervin Shapourian: So I'm going to log in as a strata manager and show you the system. Everything that you see here is also available to the strata council members as well. So when you log into PowerStrata you end up on the dashboard. I mentioned earlier that it's very important to share information with the owners, so when owners log in they see a lot of information. And you can see if you have new messages, you can submit requests, which the strata corporation, the council members, can add to these.

23:07 You can easily create custom forms to collect information, for example pet registration. You can just create a form, say what kind of information you would like to receive from the pet owner, and that way you can receive the request from them. As a council member, or as a property manager or strata manager, you can communicate with everybody in this complex. Owner-to-owner communication is limited in PowerStrata, because that potentially can cause issues, but there are other ways, other than sending emails, that owners can still communicate with each other through PowerStrata.

23:42 So if something is going on in the complex it's very easy to just send a message to all owners, or owners and tenants, basically everybody at the complex, and immediately inform all residents via email. But when people log in they can get a lot of information themselves as well, like commonly used documents and forms, like a Form K. If an owner wants to rent out their unit they need to fill out a Form K.

24:08 Again, they don't have to contact the strata manager asking for a Form K, they can just go to the dashboard, download a copy of that form, fill it out and submit that. Or recently added documents, like the meeting minutes of the most recent meetings, will show up here. Whenever you add a new document, people always see the five most recent ones here. Plus a lot more: you can always go to the main documents page and have access to the entire library of documents for your strata.

24:44 Again, not everything is available to everybody, depending on your role some sensitive information may be kept just for the council access, but everything will be there. If there is a change in the council, you know that you will not lose any information. If there's a change in the management company, if you become a self-managed strata, any kind of change in a strata usually results in some sort of information loss.

25:12 But when you have a centralized system like this, it assures you that this will not happen. You just store all the information that you have, no matter who's going to manage this building in future, you will always have access to the same set of records. Upcoming events, the same thing: if there is an active project going on in the complex, people can come here and see all the important dates, important notes and announcements.

25:40 You can have another section on the screen that shows owners the important thing again, if the elevator is out of service, or is under service on a certain date and certain time, you just add it here. Anything that's important for the owners can be shared. And that's just the amount of information that owners can get just by visiting the dashboard.

26:00 – Documents, Calendar and Issue Tracking

26:02 Shervin Shapourian: And as you can see, we have a whole bunch of other things. Documents is another important part of any strata management system, so people have easy access to the entire set of documents here. You can just browse the documents. If you want to check your bylaws, very quickly you can see them, or financial statements, all other things, very easily available to the council members, strata managers and the owners 24/7, as long as you have access to the internet.

26:32 You can log into PowerStrata and access all those records. Calendar is again, like I mentioned, another method of communication with the owners, to let them know about important things going on in the strata. So you can add all the items to the calendar, owners can subscribe to our calendars and they can just check their phones. There's no need to install any additional app on your phone, you just bring up your regular calendar.

27:00 If you have already subscribed to our calendar, all the events showing up in our system, or on our calendar, will show up on your phone as well. Communication: I mentioned that you can easily send messages to predefined groups of people, like owners, tenants. If there are multiple buildings in a complex you have control over that as well. Maybe there is a problem with the elevator in building A but not in buildings B and C, so when you send a notice to owners you can limit it to the owners in one building, no need to inform others in the other two buildings.

27:39 So it makes it easier to communicate that way. Another thing that is very important for strata corporations is an issue tracking module that we have. So you can create tickets for various different projects, anything that's going on in your strata, and you can maintain all sorts of details for the active projects. It can be documents, communication with the owners or service providers, checklist of items that you need to do.

28:06 You can create a poll to collect input from owners, or maybe you need to submit quote requests to multiple service providers, you can do all that within our system. Ultimately PowerStrata creates a poll for the council, they can review all the quotes that they have received and choose, by voting in that poll, which one of the quotes they would like to use, or which company they would like to hire to do the job.

28:40 Plus a lot more things. Of course this is not enough time to go through the entire system, I just wanted to mention a few things.

28:47 – Q&A: Saving Correspondence and Shared Inboxes

28:47 Shervin Shapourian: I would like to keep a few minutes to answer the questions, so I'm going to very quickly see what questions we have here and try to answer them. Okay, so the first one: will you be improving your email portion, as it is difficult to save correspondence in an easily accessible way? This is something that you need to contact our support about. There are many ways that you can save messages.

29:13 When you receive a message within PowerStrata there is a button that you can click, a PDF version of that message can be automatically saved into the documents page. We even have libraries for individual units. If the correspondence is specific to a unit you can save it as a PDF file to that unit, or all the attachments of the message can be automatically saved to that unit. There are multiple different ways to do that.

29:41 Or even if you receive an email outside PowerStrata, there is a specific email address assigned to every single user in the system. You can just basically forward the email that you have received outside PowerStrata to that address, and that way you basically bring the message into PowerStrata. Then you can do all those things, you can save it, you can share it with others. There are many different things that you can do.

30:05 If you have more questions you can always contact our support, my colleagues will be more than happy to walk you through all that. The other question is, what are the most useful features? Well, it's hard to tell, but I can tell a few things. For every strata it might be a different thing, but the things that almost all the strata corporations have to use is the list of documents, a calendar of events, communication with the owners.

30:36 And then you can do the maintenance planning. If you have a depreciation report you can bring up the list of assets, maintenance plan, the capital planning, to PowerStrata, and that 30 year capital plan becomes a dynamic plan for you. You can just change stuff, defer a job and see how it will affect financially the plan that you have. Or you can have the list of meetings, council meetings, AGM, SGM.

31:05 You can have polls for the council members to vote and approve things, or for the owners to provide their input on various different things. There are tons and tons of things that you can do in our system, depending on your need. Some might be more important to some stratas, the other might be interested in something else. Okay, another person…

31:40 Okay, the other question is that the president of a strata council mentioned that they would like to have a shared email for the council, so that the owners can send information to that email, but their concern is the liability or legal issues when the strata manager does not have access to that. This is exactly what I mentioned earlier, when I talked about a shared messaging system. I'm not talking about a shared email, because maintaining access to that email is very difficult.

32:14 You may have a single email address, let's say Gmail, all council members have access to that. What if one of the council members resigns? What if next year you will have new council members? It's just more work for you to go ahead and change the password, share the information with the new council members. It's not easy to do. And you cannot expect your strata manager to log into a separate email address to receive those messages.

32:43 In PowerStrata you can create a shared message box. When you create that you specify who has access to it, you can specify a group of people to be the recipients of the messages. So when an owner sends a message to that shared message box, you can choose to deliver a copy to your strata manager, to some of the council members or all of them, and that way they will all receive individual copies of that message.

33:06 They can all respond to it if they want. If next year one of the council members resigns and is not serving the council anymore, automatically PowerStrata blocks access to those shared message boxes in the system. If a new council member is elected, the new person will have access to that. So we help with the continuity of the information. My time is up.

33:30 Ryan Grant: Yeah, yes, it looks like you have about 30 seconds. Is there any last little quick question there that you think can fit that?

33:40 Shervin Shapourian: Well, in 30 seconds I cannot answer questions, but I can tell you, if you have questions you can always send us emails to info@powerstrata.com and we will be more than happy to answer all those questions.

33:53 Ryan Grant: Awesome, that was a super presentation there, Shervin. We really appreciate you coming on the show, and thank you very much. Hope everyone saw a lot of value, because I surely did. Thank you very much. And I'll remind everyone else that we have the questions that are going to be posted to the presenters later, so if your question doesn't get answered then, it might get answered at a later time.

34:18 Shervin Shapourian: Okay, thanks.

34:18 Ryan Grant: Thank you, bye.

34:18 Shervin Shapourian: Take care.