B.C. Strata Tech Podcast

0:00 – Inbox Overload and Research Fatigue

0:00 Ryan Grant: Hello everyone, welcome back to the B.C. Strata Tech podcast. I'm your host Ryan Grant. On today's show, we're tackling the number one killer of productivity for strata managers: the overflowing inbox and the research fatigue that comes with it. When you are facing up to 400 emails a day, finding the right bylaw or minute to answer a complex question could take an hour of searching. But what if it could happen instantly?

0:28 Today we're covering Unicli, a specialized software integrated directly into your email client that uses AI to context check your building's specific history and draft accurate, professional responses for you. We discuss how it cuts down the emotional labour of difficult emails, ensures data privacy, and helps managers avoid burnout. And now we'll bring in our guest, the co-founder of Unicli, Greg Bickert. Hi Greg, how's it going?

0:59 Greg Bickert: Yeah, good. Good to see you again.

1:01 Ryan Grant: Yeah, this is great. I think people are going to be pretty excited today to learn a bit about how Unicli can help them out, from both the manager's perspective and also, you know, the end user, right? The owners and residents of the stratas. We have a lot to unpack and go into, but I figured we can kind of start the show with you telling everyone about how you got into starting up Unicli, and what your background kind of is.

1:23 – Greg's Strata Management Background

1:32 Greg Bickert: Yeah. So maybe I'll just go back to the beginning here. I got into strata management back in 2005. So I started with a company that was quite disorganized. They were letting staff go. They were letting clients go. It was kind of a mess. But all of that, at the time, the owner was trying to improve things. So although there was a lot of turnover, a lot of it was at least sort of planned.

1:59 But what it did mean is I was very much hands-on helping fix things and build systems, and literally writing command scripts and things to, you know... I built a filing system in the office so that you could, at the scanner, type in the name of the file and the computer would just auto-file it where it's supposed to be on the server, using DOS commands.

2:28 Ryan Grant: Oh man, that's the employee that everyone wants, right? The ones that are able to, you know, help build out these little scripts and automations and get everyone moving faster.

2:38 Greg Bickert: Yeah. Yeah. So it's just been, like, for years, you know, 20 years now, basically I've been trying to make life better for my office, and that just sort of slowly grew. It was more than my company. I started participating in PAMA, the Professional Association of Managing Agents.

2:55 Ryan Grant: Yes.

2:55 Greg Bickert: Volunteering at the education committee, and, you know, just trying to educate others and improve things. And eventually I started my own company, Inspire Property Management. You know, the owner at the company that I was working for, he sold the business, and it just didn't make sense to stay there. So I have my own company now. And just one of those life things that happened here.

3:28 – How Unicli Was Founded

3:29 Greg Bickert: My bookkeeper, she had to move to Vancouver, because her husband, who's a software developer, his project ended in Kelowna and the work is in Vancouver. So they had to move down to Vancouver. It's all pre-COVID. So even in the development world, they're kind of like, everything needs to be in person, you know, physically in the office. So it's funny how it is. So they moved, and I stayed connected, and just one of those things.

4:06 My daughter had a birthday, and Nikolai and Karina, their son had an invitation. We invited him out to the birthday party, and Nikolai, who's the co-founder of Unicli now, he was interested in building something for himself. You know, he's tired of working for other companies, building these fancy projects where people make so much money, they have all these great ideas that he has to execute on, and, you know, just didn't have an idea of his own.

4:39 And so that's kind of where he was stuck. And you know, he's like, I just really need a big problem to fix, something that nobody's fixed yet. I'm like, oh gosh, you want problems to fix? I've got thousands. So we literally spent, you know, probably four hours at that birthday party just talking through everything that I felt could be solved with software. And he was coming at it from the AI angle, because right at the time AI was sort of really starting to take off.

5:09 And yeah, from there, I mean, it just went somewhere. And funnily enough, my actual involvement, I just went, great, if you solve this, I'll be your first client. Like, go do it.

5:24 Ryan Grant: Yeah. Let's talk.

5:24 Greg Bickert: Prototype it. Get it working. Exactly. So, you know, didn't hear from him for a little bit. Six months or so later, he asked me if he could have a meeting with me, and drove up to my office, and he had a pitch deck ready to go and everything. I thought he was going to sell me, you know, some product. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. Okay, let's see what you're cooking.

5:48 But he was coming actually to propose that I join this company that he's making, to be a co-founder, the subject matter expert for the team. So even better, right? And I get to build it.

6:04 Ryan Grant: Yes. You have direct input, not just as a consumer, right? You're there to work with it and envision how it's going to roll out to everybody.

6:13 Greg Bickert: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he, I mean, it was good.

6:16 – What Unicli Does Inside Outlook

6:16 Greg Bickert: He came in, he did all his research. He kind of confirmed a lot of what I told him. And I think that's also why in his mind he needed to have someone like me on the team. You know, he's polling people across North America and they're saying the same thing I was saying. It's going, okay, this is very validating. This is great. We've got something. We need to fix it.

6:37 So yeah, so I guess what we built, Unicli, so it's a communication tool. It's made for strata managers. It's built into your Outlook. It's built into your Word. Helps with the written communication. It's ChatGPT on steroids, really. You know, because it can read your client's data without having to do any uploads. It's just connected to where your data is located. So when I get an email and somebody's asking me, you know, can I have a cat, or what are my strata fees, or whatever it is, I don't have to go look up the information.

7:22 It's just available. It's picked the property. It knows who we are. It knows my relationship, that I'm a strata manager. I'm not just some customer service agent trying to say yes to everything. It understands I have a client I need to answer to here. And helps draft those replies. And then the complex ones, it helps draft those too. But you know, I can quickly revise it, or give it that kind of professional level of input that you need to, that AI just can't do on its own.

7:54 Ryan Grant: You know, it's automatic. Yeah, go ahead. And more clunky of an experience when you're using something like ChatGPT, because it's more of a web interface.

8:01 – Why Generic ChatGPT Falls Short

8:06 Ryan Grant: I find whenever I'm doing a little bit of strata research and I use AI, I have to use it very cautiously, right, because it's not directly trained on everything that I'm looking into, right? It has a very broad kind of spectrum, and it sometimes contextualizes things in the wrong way, right, where it's referencing incorrect aspects of the Strata Property Act or CRT cases. Sometimes it even hallucinates and makes them up, right?

8:37 So you have to be very careful when using something like ChatGPT or those other interfaces, and they're more clunky. I can imagine, you know, if people are writing emails constantly, if they would have to, you know, copy and paste from their email platform into the website to try and, you know, get ChatGPT to help, versus your solution is more of a plug-in system.

8:59 Greg Bickert: Yeah, exactly. And actually, funnily enough, when we originally started building it, we weren't necessarily thinking about building it right into Outlook right away. We just happened to get a really great CTO that was like, oh yeah, no, I can build that.

9:15 Ryan Grant: We're going to do it after.

9:17 Greg Bickert: There's no point in doing this the clunky way, right? Okay, great. Let's launch with the best base. So yeah, we cut out that step of copy and paste.

9:28 Ryan Grant: It's super helpful though, right? You know, even ChatGPT, or any of the ways you get to your AI product of choice, right?

9:37 Greg Bickert: Yes. The problem is partially what you just said, like the knowledge it doesn't know. But you know, as a professional, hopefully you're not relying on it to know everything anyway.

9:51 Ryan Grant: Yeah. You're not that owner that's just like, hey, argue about this and tell them why I should be right, based on a bunch of fake CRT cases, and then they get in trouble with the court because they're getting these...

10:05 Greg Bickert: Doesn't exist.

10:06 Ryan Grant: Yeah, filing these claims with fake cases being referenced. It's a problem right now.

10:13 Greg Bickert: But as a professional, I'm in control, right? And so I can still use those products. I can copy and paste. The power of our product is not just that it has the knowledge, but it's also just instantly there, right? It's the Strata Property Act. It's able... like it's on there, it's available, it can quote it for you.

10:33 Ryan Grant: Yeah. Trained on it.

10:34 Greg Bickert: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then if you've got a client that's not a strata, it's a society, you know, same thing. It just switches. It knows which governing legislation you're using. And so you're not having to, like with ChatGPT, to get the same thing, it's like, okay, this one specifically uses the Societies Act, and then the bylaws that are applicable. And then, oh, here's a bunch of related minutes to this issue that we're talking about, and can you draft this letter for this two-line email, right?

11:05 Just do it.

11:11 Ryan Grant: It's too much effort then at that point.

11:14 Greg Bickert: Yeah. You're going to spend 10 minutes just uploading the stuff, which it would have taken you 10 minutes just to read it and then reply. So you're not going to do that.

11:21 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

11:23 Greg Bickert: So we help with the complex stuff, but also those end up being just a one-click reply sort of thing.

11:31 Ryan Grant: And I guess for your residents and the owners in these communities, how do you find the response so far?

11:37 – Survey Results and a Difficult Owner

11:40 Ryan Grant: And I guess, on the flip side, the managers, how are they finding that this system is really helping them out?

11:49 Greg Bickert: Yeah. So our customers are the strata managers. So they are the ones that are actually using the product. And then the councils and the owners, they're just seeing better, faster communications with the managers. We were fortunate enough that we had a customer that was a property management company that was willing to survey their clients, to see before they were using Unicli, and then checked in again later.

12:16 You were able to see, they had a 3.2 out of five is what their clients rated their written communication skills. This is a company that thought they were doing quite well. Frankly, from what I've seen, they were. It was fine. It was normal levels on the inside, but yeah, 3.2 out of five, not very spectacular. And then later on they surveyed their clients again and they got a 4.5 out of five for communication.

12:48 Ryan Grant: Yeah, that's an impressive jump.

12:51 Greg Bickert: It's a huge jump. So this is email communication, minutes, you know, letters. Those are the sorts of things that they have an opportunity to consider before they gave that ranking. A big increase there. So yeah, they're seeing it. Funny story. An owner that was... we've all got them, right? They're habitual complaints. They're rude. They write all in caps. They just go on for, you know, three, four pages worth of paper, but it's all in an email.

13:24 And because they can send them as emails, they're just rapid fire sending these huge long things. Well, we had one where the owner was sending this. The property manager was getting so fed up. Wasn't really using Unicli yet. It was sort of early for them. But they're like, you know what, I'm going to just give it a try. Like, let's just see what it does, because I don't even know where to start with this.

13:46 I'm just so fed up. I just tried our one-click reply feature. And first off, they were like, that's a good reply. Holy. And then they were like, what is it talking about here? Like, why is it even talking about this subject? And they have to go back and read the email and go, man, I didn't even read that the first time. And it's answering everything. So they're super happy with it.

14:09 They hit send. And this happened a couple of times. The tone of the communications from this upset owner just got so improved. And to the point where they actually messaged back to the manager, you know, thank you very much for your attention to detail. And they even said the council were approached by this owner and said, hey, thanks, you know, you guys are working hard. I can tell.

14:38 And you know, I like your strata. And that's where the council approached the manager: and what did you do? Like, what's happening? What's going on? This makes no sense. He's been a jerk for so long. What's going on? He shared, he chuckled when he heard this, because yes, he's like, you know, honestly, I'm interacting with him so much less. It's mostly just the AI now responding.

15:04 – Email Volume, Burnout and Human Oversight

15:04 Greg Bickert: You know, I read it, but I kind of just don't give him any more. So long as the answer is correct, I don't worry if it doesn't sound exactly like me. I just hit send. I don't stress about it. It's done. And that's it. They're like, okay, keep it up. Perfect. You know...

15:21 Ryan Grant: And that's also a feature, is the benefit of it is that sometimes as a manager, I'm sure they get frustrated and they sometimes say things a little more intense, right? Like, not as fully professional as they normally would be, right? Because they're just trying to get the email out quickly, and they're thrown off guard, right? And you know, the AI helps bring that tone back, right, that they wanted, to always uphold that standard kind of tone that they're wanting to.

15:58 I can see that really helping out, right, because it takes time to really express yourself in that kind of manner with each person. They're a little different with how you need to address them, right? And the AI can really help speed that up.

16:11 Greg Bickert: Well, it makes people feel heard. Yeah. Where it goes, right? The owner hears it. It's designed to sort of confirm that you understand the issue and then answer it, you know, and that's partially our design and in how it's set up to reply. And we didn't set out to actually reduce stress per se directly. But it's actually one of the number one things we hear back from users.

16:39 They're saying like, the stress is less, you know, the emotional labour to just even read that email in the first place. Now there's so much less stress looking at that email, I know I can just reply. I mean, I will say I was a victim of this too. I go home, I talk to my wife about it, I'm upset about the email, like, he can't believe what this jerk said, you know?

17:06 Ryan Grant: Yeah. So you're thinking about it for hours, for something that should take 10, 15 minutes to reply, but hours and hours of labour of just strain, and it burns people out.

17:18 Greg Bickert: And now they're just like, you know what, it's good. The work is done. I've dealt with the people. I'm home with my wife. I'm not talking about work.

17:29 Ryan Grant: Exactly, right. And the AI is there. It's got your back to help you out when you need to reply, right? It's able to contextualize everything and track it, which is perfect. And I guess that's another thing we can... because not all viewers of our show will understand the complexities that the managers go through, and what their daily tasks are. But to make people aware, I don't know if you're familiar with this statistic that I've heard before, which is, managers have about two to 400 emails a day if they've got a pretty sizable portfolio.

18:02 And I'm sure, you know, managers under your company as well have quite a bit of email overload at times too. And this really probably helps reduce that. Like, get through that email, turn through it pretty quickly, right?

18:22 Greg Bickert: Exactly. And that was what we sort of set out to do as the main point. You know, yeah. It's the thing that's not solved. Well, it's solved now, but yeah. Yeah. You know, but there's other products out there. They're trying to solve it, you know. There's one that you probably see ads for all the time. And I won't name them, just because I don't want to go after the competition here, I guess.

18:47 But I've tried it and it's just like a general AI product. It doesn't know my stuff, and everyone that's used it that I've talked to, they're just like, oh, it's garbage. It's such garbage. Yeah, it replies to stuff, but I can't send a single one of them, so what's the point?

19:04 Ryan Grant: Trust it. Yeah, you have to edit everything, which then it's more of a burden than use, right? If you've got those two to 400 emails to reply to, you don't have time to second guess everything.

19:18 Greg Bickert: Yeah. Well actually, you know, in fairness, I think as professionals, our view has been we don't want to have anything happening automatically. There may be some stuff down the line in different scenarios, but yes, when it comes to email, you need a human looking at the darn thing.

19:35 Ryan Grant: It doesn't mean you can't have AI to help draft that reply, right.

19:38 Greg Bickert: Exactly. But it's my licence. I'm on the line. If this goes out, some disclaimer just saying, hey, the AI replied automatically, is probably not good enough. So why take the risk? Let's just make it easy and you stay in control. The other stuff that maybe gets done through a website or self-serve thing, you know, that's a different story. But no, the emails I need to be in control of.

20:06 Ryan Grant: Yeah. And it really helps almost be like an assistant, right? Is how I kind of view the AI at that point. It's more there to be an assistant, help streamline things, but you get to give the stamp of approval before things go.

20:19 – Live Demo: One-Click Reply in Outlook

20:22 Greg Bickert: That's right. Yeah. Well, I can show you a demo if you'd like, actually show you how it works.

20:28 Ryan Grant: That would be great. Let me know when you've got your screen ready and I'll put it on the screen here for everyone.

20:33 Greg Bickert: Be good to go now.

20:33 Ryan Grant: Yeah, perfect. There we go. Yeah, I can see Outlook. Looks like...

20:40 Greg Bickert: We've got Outlook open. So we've got our add-in. It's built in. I've got an email. I'd like to say it's typical, but there's only 11 unread emails, so there's no way that's typical for a manager. So, a bunch of sample emails. So most people are using it now. You have the ability to provide all kinds of instructions here, just like any kind of AI chatbot. But basically it's picked up that this is an email about miniature cows.

21:11 And I can just one-click reply and it'll draft an email here. So what it's doing here is it's going and searching the documents. It's already done before I can tell you what it's doing. So you know, it's looking at the documents, it's looking at the email, finding what's relevant and then finding the answer. So in this case, they have a little cow. I love this one actually because this is a real thing.

21:39 These miniature cows.

21:42 Ryan Grant: Yes.

21:42 Greg Bickert: So this wasn't my client. I wish I could say it was, but they knew about these mini cows that you could get, so they amended their bylaws to allow mini cows. They're cute and all, but it's unexpected. So now, you know, this owner going like, what the heck, there's a cow in our townhome.

22:02 Ryan Grant: Oh my goodness.

22:06 Greg Bickert: So, you know, in reality, if I was a junior manager, I'd probably read that email and go, well, yeah, obviously there's something wrong here. Like, you can have a dog or a cat. That's what the standard bylaws say. So I might make a mistake and move through this fast and just say no. If I'm more experienced, I'm going to read the bylaws first and be surprised. But this one here, of course, I just clicked the button, it read the bylaws, found out that it is allowed.

22:33 Ryan Grant: And tells us the information we need.

22:37 Greg Bickert: I can even attach the document, you know, from the add-in. So if I've got the document that's referenced, just click a button, boom. If I want to send them a copy to prove it, email's ready to go. Just hit send.

22:50 Ryan Grant: Yeah, you don't have to scan through your file folder or go through some cloud thing to download the document, find that client, which I've seen managers in the past, you know, and my own strata before, having to do, working with them on issues, you know, take them 5, 10 minutes just to try and find some reference when we're talking about something, right? And that's amazing, just to instantly be able to show you what is potentially available, and draft up an amazing email right away with minimal or no edits.

23:24 – Tone Controls and Form B Rush Fee

23:25 Greg Bickert: Yeah, most of the time I'm not editing. Now, that's just because we've put in a lot of work for the last year or so, you know, with that problem specifically, optimizing for strata here. But sometimes you have to, again, you're a professional, you know what you want it to answer. So I don't know. Let's try this guy. I can even control, you know, the style. I want to be concise or explanatory.

23:49 Ryan Grant: Yes. Want casual or humorous. It's again the tone thing. When you know the client, you know which tone and what style they want, right? Some don't want to see too much. They just want, you know, quick bullet points, versus the others love a big deep explanation, right? Where they want to go into details.

24:11 Greg Bickert: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And sometimes, like this one, I got this guy from, what do we call him, Rickety Real Estate. Yeah. So he thinks that he shouldn't have to pay extra for his Form B to get that early.

24:23 Ryan Grant: Okay. Yeah.

24:24 Greg Bickert: Right. So here we go. Let's see. I've been working on this problem, and now, I used to like using this demo to explain why a professional needs to read these things, but it answers it correctly now, so I can't do that. I'll find another one that's an example. Yeah. But yeah, like this is a problem we see with ChatGPT. If you throw it on there and you say, you know, when is the Form B due, it might understand some of it.

24:56 It might even understand that they got it by email, so it's delayed by four days, but it'll forget about the Interpretation Act, and it'll not properly calculate the timeline to deliver the Form B. So this guy that wants to avoid this fee for expediting it might have, in the past, sort of the default reply would be like, oh yeah, it looks like you're correct. Let's look about getting you a refund.

25:25 Well, now it's like, well, actually, no. You asked for it to be rushed and that fee is applicable.

25:33 Ryan Grant: Yes. Yeah. And it's able to reference it and show exactly why it's applicable.

25:39 Greg Bickert: Yeah. And because I chose explanatory, it's sort of explaining how we got there. So it's a little longer. You could be concise, of course, and just say, no, go talk to your broker.

25:49 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

25:52 Greg Bickert: Now, part of this is because we do reference some public sources.

25:54 – Partner Sources and Data Confidentiality

25:54 Greg Bickert: Not very many. We're very selective of what we want to do. This one does reference a report from council on the BCFSA's website. So you can, you know, see the information from that. And then actually maybe I'll just show you one more. I don't want to just do a bunch of demos here, but let's try, I think there's somebody that asked a bunch of questions about... yeah, here it is, about the meeting.

26:22 We also have some partners that we've integrated with.

26:31 Ryan Grant: Integrated with.

26:31 Greg Bickert: Yeah, exactly. So, like Normac, they're an insurance appraisal company, BFL Insurance. They're partners of ours, they've written some articles, and when they're relevant... actually, I thought this one had questions about the appraisal. I guess not. There we go. There's the appraisal. So, you know, if it's relevant to their question, then it can come up in the search. In this case, it wasn't actually relevant, but it was a very general insurance appraisal question.

27:09 But if he was asking a little bit more appraisal related stuff, then it'd show up in here telling you that Normac supplied some of this information to answer the question. And again, you could attach it, or you could review it yourself if you'd like and see, you know, why is it that the 90% co-insurance clause applies, or how to avoid it, or whatever the question is that they ask.

27:34 Ryan Grant: So, very helpful.

27:34 Greg Bickert: And super helpful. Again, we don't want to look at online sources. This is why you get that kind of misinformation, because it looks at something that somebody said on Reddit if you just Google, right? Wrong answer.

27:51 Ryan Grant: Not an expert, or, you know, a governing kind of opinion, right?

27:56 Greg Bickert: Yeah. So we've been very selective of what we're allowing in. Now, you can, as a property manager user, put in whatever you'd like.

28:05 Ryan Grant: Yeah. Or training data type thing. Yeah.

28:07 Greg Bickert: You can control... yeah, bring in all those documents. And then we're confidential. We don't actually train on your client's data. That's important for us. We do accept feedback so that we can learn from feedback, but we don't just watch everything that's in the system. We're trying to make sure that it's all still confidential. Really important to us. Yeah. I mean, so that's how most people are using it.

28:39 – Drafting Minutes and Searching Building History

28:39 Greg Bickert: I can probably not bore your viewers showing a bunch of demo stuff here. So probably stop sharing screen here. I'll remove that. There we go. But yeah, it works in Word as well.

28:57 Ryan Grant: Oh wow. So it's fully integrated there. So they can use an online website, they can also use Outlook, or, you know, their email client, and then Microsoft Word as places that they can interface with Unicli.

29:12 Greg Bickert: Yeah, most people are using Word for minutes. That's the thing that they complain about most. Letters, they can do that too. But it seems like that's not the main problem. It's just getting these darn minutes done and out. So being able to just select some text and just, you know, like, hey, fix these minutes up, then boom, it's done. That's just magic for some people.

29:36 Ryan Grant: Yeah, that would save a lot of time. And the accuracy too. It's hard as a strata manager when you have, you know, four or five meetings in a week potentially, to be trying to manage all those different documents, you know, of all your notes for each meeting, right, to go and finally draft up your minutes. Make sure you don't make a mistake copying something from a different meeting, right.

30:05 Greg Bickert: Exactly. And there's also, you've had this history of turnover. So when all of the minutes, the whole history of the building, are available, and somebody asks something, or you want to write something about it in the minutes, you know, about whatever it is, you know, the last time the plumbing stack was cleared or whatever it was, right?

30:29 Ryan Grant: And they didn't find that right away.

30:31 Greg Bickert: Yeah. I can, in the middle of the meeting, you know, while the council are like, well, when's the last time we cleaned the plumbing stack, I just ask in the chat, when is the last time we cleaned the plumbing stack? It'll just say, well, the minutes from April 2022 say that they were cleaned last month, you know.

30:46 Ryan Grant: Oh, okay.

30:48 Greg Bickert: So long as I keep detailed records and put them in the minutes, then this information is suddenly available at my fingertips, literally.

30:56 Ryan Grant: Yeah, it's really a game changer in that respect, because I hate going through, you know, when I was on council especially, I hate having a billion different emails of all these different subjects that we've covered as a council over the years, especially when you're on council for many years. As you can imagine, it just piles up with this archive of emails, and then you're trying to reference old, you know, issues, bringing up, oh, you know, remember this one contractor said this one little nuance thing, I think, if I can recall, right?

31:30 To try and find it takes you, you know, an hour to search through your emails. You may not find it. You may give up, right? Because you're like, oh shoot, right? You know, I must not be using the right terms or something, right, in the search filter. But with Unicli, wow, that sounds like it would really save some time.

31:51 Greg Bickert: It honestly does, right? We had, you know, Amazon had that outage. And then I think a week later we had a Microsoft outage that happened. Now we don't use Amazon, so we were kind of like, oh well, missed the no problem. And then Microsoft went down for a couple of hours.

32:11 Ryan Grant: Oh, shoot.

32:13 Greg Bickert: But I was in a meeting and I could just hear people in the hallway sort of saying like, well, I mean, Unicli's down. I'm not even sure, like, should I just go home? How do I do my job?

32:27 Ryan Grant: It's vital basically, right? Especially when they're dealing with so much volume. That's how they know, like, there's no chance in trying to search all this stuff again manually for quite a few of those.

32:40 Greg Bickert: Well, it went pretty quiet afterwards, because they all realized they're going to have to just hunker down. Like, they don't know how long it's going to be. So they hunker down.

32:47 Ryan Grant: You could just hear it.

32:51 Greg Bickert: Yeah. And now they don't have that spare time to chat. They have to go actually read minutes again and find everything.

32:55 Ryan Grant: You've got to still deal with the pile. Yes. Yes. It's just a tool, right? It's just a tool, and if the tool isn't available, then they need to manage it. But it's very rare that these, you know, downtimes happen anyway with these big cloud providers, especially Microsoft, right? I'm guessing it's, you know, once a year type of thing, where it's, you know, 10, 20 minutes, and this is the really odd case where it was down a couple of hours, right?

33:24 Greg Bickert: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's our only time we've had a Microsoft outage. So...

33:30 Ryan Grant: Outage. Yeah. No, and usually they're planned outages too, for, you know, 5 minutes at nighttime or something, 3 in the morning when people aren't going to be using the cloud services very often. Awesome. Well, that's great. I guess how can people really learn more about Unicli and get in touch? What's the best way to reach you guys, and can they follow you on some social media as well potentially?

33:59 Greg Bickert: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, our website, so it's unicli.ai. You can go there. There's a link to videos, there's demos, all kinds of information there. You can find me on pick your social media platform. I'm StrataGreg. Easy to find me if I'm on the platform. Just search StrataGreg. I'm a lot on LinkedIn. That's my...

34:30 Ryan Grant: Yes. Where I see you the most.

34:33 Greg Bickert: Mostly professional stuff. Yeah. And our CEO, Nikolai Nikov, he's again mostly LinkedIn, X. You can look him up that way too. And yeah, we try and inform people and update people of what's going on in the industry, and or even just, you know, if we're doing charity work or whatever. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on in our industry. We try to do a lot of good.

35:01 Ryan Grant: Yes, I see you guys always have really cool things to talk about, and we could dig into the charity just briefly there. It'd be good to spotlight that charity work that you do.

35:10 – Motionball Special Olympics Fundraising

35:12 Ryan Grant: Do you want to give the viewers a little bit of background there?

35:15 Greg Bickert: Yeah, sure. So what we're talking about is Motionball for Special Olympics.

35:22 Ryan Grant: Yes.

35:22 Greg Bickert: So it's an event that is a fundraiser for Special Olympics Canada. I got involved several years ago. But this last year, I really wanted to figure out a way to get a big number. In my mind, you know, over 10 grand. I really wanted to get over 10 grand. So I was working really hard, and frankly Unicli actually is one of the reasons I was able to do really well.

35:49 I was able to write the personal notes, all the posts that I wanted to do. But the problem has always been, you know, capacity, right? It takes a long time to write something thoughtful and do it every day. You know, I can still just put in my thoughts and not get it perfect, and then just say, you know, Unicli, make this a social media post, and it writes a much better version of it that's post ready, and it's like, great, okay, so I could do this, right?

36:18 And it took off this year. So almost $30,000 for my personal campaign raised.

36:27 Ryan Grant: It was incredible.

36:28 Greg Bickert: Yeah.

36:28 Ryan Grant: Congratulations. I mean, you put a lot of effort and time into it, and you're being resourceful with the tools and solutions, and that really, you know, brought in a lot for everybody.

36:43 Greg Bickert: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people with diverse abilities that don't have access to sport without Special Olympics. Kelowna is sort of an interesting case study for this, because it's the only place in Canada where the athletes aren't required to pay to attend the programs. It's fully funded through Special Olympics.

37:07 Ryan Grant: Yes.

37:07 Greg Bickert: And the subscribers, the people that join, are more than double in other areas. So the per capita number of people that participate is that much higher, which really in my mind does illustrate that one of the main barriers to accessing sport is the cost.

37:30 Ryan Grant: So many people can't afford it. It's already too difficult. And you've got people that have, you know, they might be in a wheelchair or they have, you know, a mental disability, you know, something that's making it very difficult and expensive for the family to support them properly. And so they cut the things that they see as being elective, like sport. Even though it is something that's really important for their personal health and their mental health, but they cut it, see it as optional when it's a high cost.

38:01 So yeah, I feel very strongly.

38:06 Greg Bickert: It's an important cause and I love to support it. I'm going to support it again next year.

38:12 Ryan Grant: Yeah, we will too. It's amazing work that you guys do and it brings so much joy to everyone. So thank you so much for providing that. We'll also include some of that information with the podcast too. We'll provide that in the description so people can check that out.

38:27 Greg Bickert: That would be great. I'll have a new charity donation link live here pretty soon. So I'll send you the new link, and yeah, that'd be great.

38:39 Ryan Grant: We'll get it. Well, thanks so much again for coming on the show, Greg. And we'll definitely, you know, stay in touch and do some follow-up in the future.

38:51 Greg Bickert: Awesome. Thank you very much for your time, Ryan. Appreciate you.

0:00 – Why Choosing a Realtor Is Hard

0:00 Ryan Grant: Hello everyone, welcome back to the B.C. Strata Tech podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Grant. On today's show, we're tackling a process that for many people is a high-pressure, anxiety-driven nightmare: finding a realtor. How do you compare them? How do you know who to trust? Especially when data shows 80% of people just go with the first agent that they meet. Today we'll be covering an exciting new service called Agent Market, that aims to solve that very problem.

0:31 Agent Market helps connect experienced realtors, home sellers and home buyers together in a new, transparent way. We'll cover exactly what Agent Market is, how it came to be, and how it provides a free, anonymous, no-obligation way for you to compare agents. And now we'll bring in our guest, the founder of Agent Market, Kimberley Knook. Hello Kimberley, thanks for coming on the show.

1:00 Kimberley Knook: Thank you for having me.

1:04 Ryan Grant: It's going to be exciting today. I want to learn everything about Agent Market, and I know a little bit about your background, but I think we're going to have to, you know, go over that for our viewers. You know, let them know why Agent Market even exists, and who you are, what your background is.

1:20 Kimberley Knook: So, I'm Kimberley. I'm the founder of Agent Market. Proud Dutch Canadian based in North Vancouver, and we launched Agent Market based on a frustration of being able to compare real estate agents.

1:26 – Founding Agent Market and the Comparison Gap

1:36 Kimberley Knook: So the data shows that 80% of people go with the first agent they meet, and 50% of people aren't really sure if they would use that real estate agent again. On average, they spend around two to three hours online, right? And what do you come back with? You come back with a name, contact details, and they're the number one in something, right? So that's why we launched Agent Market.

2:05 Our mission is to be the first place that people go to when they want to find a real estate agent.

2:15 Ryan Grant: That sounds really great. At least from my experience when I was house hunting, it was pretty anxiety-driven where, you know, I'm going to spend a lot of money. It's my first time buying a home and I don't know where to start. I don't know who to trust, and I don't want to be locked into something before, you know, I just want to browse and look around first and talk to people, right?

2:39 Kimberley Knook: Yeah, 100%. Like, you compare your mortgage, right? You compare different car dealers, you compare car purchases. So you should be able to do the same thing for real estate agents. But when you do go and talk to real estate agents, like you mentioned, you straight away end up on a newsletter. And that's why with our platform, we've chosen to keep it for buyers and sellers so that it's on their terms to connect with a real estate agent.

3:10 And for real estate agents, the great thing is that when you get a call, you know that this person is serious, right? They want to work with you. So it's a great foot in the door.

3:22 Ryan Grant: Yeah, perfect. So it sounds like realtors are able to sign up on Agent Market and be able to, you know, be there for when buyers or sellers are looking for a realtor, right? And they're able to sell themselves through their experience, and, you know, being able to list what they specialize in, for example, right?

3:49 Kimberley Knook: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Would you like me to show you how it works?

3:52 – Browsing Agent Profiles on Agent Market

3:54 Ryan Grant: Yeah, that would be great.

3:55 Kimberley Knook: So yeah, Agent Market is fully online. As mentioned, we're a Canadian company, agentmarket.ca. And you can either choose, as a buyer or seller, to fill out one of our two-minute questionnaires to find a seller or a buyer agent. And I'll go through that in a minute in terms of what that looks like. Now, if you were to get a referral from someone about an agent, right, you can also go and view the agents that we have online.

4:25 So this is what we were talking about in terms of their online public profiles. Over here you can view all the agents that have an annual membership with us. We do not take a commission split. It's $300 for a whole year to sign up, and that will include your own public profile, and that will include access to information package requests from potential buyers and sellers. We're launching team profiles in the near future as well.

5:03 So it includes all of that, and we're adding and adding on the longer that we go. And we built this together with real estate agents. So from my side, I'm very much focused on the user experience. So I talk to potential buyers and sellers after they've used it. What did you like? What did you not like? Right? Try and improve the experience for them. I do the same with real estate agents.

5:31 What do you need in order to stand out, right? So based on that, what you can see is, you can see obviously their name, the brokerage that they're with, the years of experience, the number of sales in the past 12 months, and the regions, three regions, that they are focused on. Now when you go into a profile, that's where you will be able to find the details in terms of how they're different.

5:58 – What an Agent Profile Includes

6:03 Kimberley Knook: So besides the contact details, you'll find out a little bit about the agent, their specialties, any languages that they speak. They can upload a video, what their point of difference is from other agents, a little bit about their team if they're part of a team, and we provide backlinks to your website where you can show your latest sales, your current listings, right? And a PDF: you can upload any marketing materials that you have, link to your socials, and any awards that you've won as well.

6:36 So this is really your website, or your resume, so to say, like how you stand out on one page, right? So someone, a potential buyer or seller, comes here, goes through it, and they can then decide, you know what, let's contact Tyler straight away, send him an email or call him, right? Which you can do from your phone. I'm on my laptop, so the button won't work for me.

7:12 But when you're on your phone, obviously you can call. Or you can say, you know what, actually I would like to request some more information. And that's when you go into I want to find a seller agent or a buyer agent.

7:23 – Requesting Information Packages From Agents

7:26 Kimberley Knook: Now, I won't walk you through all the steps, right? But it asks the basic information, from your address, right? And we always ask what the buyer or seller is looking for in an agent as well. And then there's the option to choose real estate agents that you would like to get an information package from, or you can let Agent Market select for you. And we provide anyone with up to five information packages, right?

8:01 And that is a really nice way of being able to compare these agents. So I'll show you what an information package would look like, because this is really the chance for a real estate agent to stand out and show why they are better than the rest, right? So you would receive five of these. Obviously I'm not a real estate agent, which might not be so obvious for people actually.

8:26 I'm not a real estate agent. We are not a brokerage. My background is with Red Bull, CPG. I used to manage half of the countries where they had their own sales team, and I helped them with their strategies and created all the sales and management trainings for them. So, not a real estate agent by trade. So I just wanted to mention that because you can see that I have not put a brokerage here.

8:56 I've put our own logo here. But what you would get is, you would get yours, and you would see the agent's picture, their headshot, their brokerage logo, and the logo of their team name if they are part of a team. You would find their contact details in here. Pricing strategy, right? So what do they think that they could sell your place for? This is always going to be a range, right, because an agent cannot determine a specific price without visiting your property, but they'll be able to provide you with a price range.

9:29 – Comparing Pricing Strategies and Service Packages

9:37 Kimberley Knook: So based on that, imagine having this five times. You'll really be able to see the outliers, and you'll be able to say, you know what, this one agent is just overselling themselves. The price is too high, right? It seems like this pricing is a lot more reasonable because these four others all believe that it's in the same ballpark. Or you might say, you know what, I'm going to invite this agent and I'm going to invite one of the other agents, and I'm going to ask specific questions.

10:04 I now want to see what the data is based on, that they believe that they can get me a higher price, right? So then from there you can have a look at, how long do they think they need to sell your place? What's their contract length, their commission structure, right? That can vary anywhere from two and a half to 3%.

10:31 Ryan Grant: It's nicely laid out, which I like.

10:34 Kimberley Knook: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then we also show a marketing services package, right, that the real estate agents include. So you can see whether professional photos are included, open houses, if it's as many as you want or maybe you only get six or eight. Staging: some agents include staging, which could be very helpful for some sellers, right? And then any additional services that an agent might offer that could be beneficial for you.

11:11 You then get more information about their pricing and timeline strategy, additional information. They can include recent sales history there, and then any marketing materials again. So you can also add additional materials like references and testimonials, or the market data, right, that you've used. So now, as a potential seller, I have all this information from five different agents. I can now create a list with very specific questions that I want to ask.

11:47 And when I call two agents, right, to discuss and walk through my property, I'm actually prepared. And it doesn't become like a sales pitch as such anymore. It really becomes a conversation about setting expectations. And I honestly am a firm believer that if you set the right expectation, right, you have a much higher probability of achieving your goals, right, and being happy with the outcome. It's not something that is done on any other website really.

12:22 I mean, I've had people ask about, oh, but what about realtor.ca? You can find the name and contact details. REW, yes, sure, you can add more details, but for everything you pay a little bit extra, right? And also REW is a site where you go to find properties. It's not a site to go to find a real estate agent per se, right? So that's how we are different and that's our focus.

12:55 Ryan Grant: A great onboarding experience into the journey of real estate for people is how I feel from it. Right. I guess basically the last question would be, you know, how do people get involved in this, from both, you know, the buyer-seller and the realtor side? Do they just go to the website, or is there different areas of engagement that, you know, realtors need to get on to sign up and all that stuff?

13:22 Maybe...

13:24 Kimberley Knook: Yeah. So, very good question. So for agents, what you would do is go to our website agentmarket.ca and then go to the for-agents page. This is where you can join, right? As I mentioned, it's $300 for the year.

13:42 – Agent Membership Cost Versus Google Ads

13:42 Kimberley Knook: What we compare it to is, we compare it to Google Ads, right? Yeah, if, as a real estate agent, the cost per click on average, if not higher, is around $15 a click. So you need 20 clicks in the whole year, right, to make up for the Agent Market membership. And for us, the client inquiries is unlimited. So we really focus ourselves on that visibility piece, on that transparency piece, providing that information.

14:18 And I think when someone clicks on your profile at Agent Market, they get a lot more value out of it than just clicking on a Google Ad. So that's basically it. It's quite easy: you click on join now, you sign up, you go to the pricing plans.

14:40 Ryan Grant: Then for the buyers and sellers they just go to the Agent Market...

14:44 Kimberley Knook: For buyers and sellers, yeah. You go to agentmarket.ca, and you can either go and view the online profiles of the agents, or you can go through the process of the two-minute survey to request your information packages.

15:04 – Free Anonymous Access for Buyers and Sellers

15:04 Ryan Grant: Perfect, that's great. And everything is free for the buyers and sellers.

15:08 Kimberley Knook: Correct. Buyers, sellers: no cost, anonymous, no obligation, no strings. There's no risk. No, I don't... Yeah, honestly, I don't. I've had... This is the funny thing I've had. So when I do presentations, literally every time I give the presentation, I hear, what's the catch? But from both sides, also from real estate agents, they're like, what's the catch? Like, there is no catch. It's $300 for a whole year.

15:41 You get your online public profile, you get that visibility. That's it. For buyers and sellers there is literally no risk. There's no cost, no commitment. It's anonymous. Yeah, like, just do it, really.

15:58 Ryan Grant: Exactly. You're not here to be a complete monopoly money generator to squeeze everything from the buyers, sellers and the realtors. You're trying to provide an awesome service because you saw a gap in the market and frustrations for yourselves, right?

16:16 Kimberley Knook: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we genuinely want to improve the experience, improve the experience of, yeah, exactly, how people find a real estate agent, and for real estate agents improve the experience of finding new clients and not just referrals, right? Exactly. Yeah.

16:43 Ryan Grant: Perfect. Well, thank you for coming on the show. And you know, that was great to really learn everything about Agent Market, and again to have a good chat with you. It's always great to chat with Kimberley. We always go over so many great topics. And yeah, we'll definitely, you know, stay in touch here and cover you again for any progress updates.

17:08 Kimberley Knook: Thank you very much. And if anybody wants to connect with me outside of this, look me up on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with anyone.

0:00 – Meet WeTech Security Solutions

0:01 Ryan Grant: Hello everyone, and welcome to the B.C. Strata Tech podcast. I'm here today with Subhan Vohra from WeTech Security Solutions. He's going to be covering modern security solutions for strata corporations. Hello Subhan, how are you?

0:13 Subhan Vohra: I am good. Ryan, how are you?

0:16 Ryan Grant: Not too bad. I'm really excited to be covering this topic because there's a lot of different people in the strata community that have reached out to me asking about security solutions, and I said, oh, you know, this is perfect timing, because you and I just connected recently and I've seen all the great work that you've been doing with your implementations. So with that being said, I'd like to get you to just do a little intro about yourself, and how you got into this space, and why you're focusing on the strata communities with your solutions.

0:51 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. You know, this is perfect timing I guess. But yeah, I mean, we are a security company. We install access control systems, smart access control systems, video intercom systems, CCTV systems and parkade entry management systems. So what we basically focus on is not the traditional system that you guys have been seeing for a long time, but we do stuff differently, like a cloud access control where you don't have to have a computer on site or anything like that, right?

1:24 While we go more into that, I will show you and share some slides and past work, and then the viewer would have more idea of kind of what we do and why we do stuff.

1:37 Ryan Grant: Yeah, perfect, that's great.

1:37 Subhan Vohra: Would you like me to share the slides first right now? So right now in the Vancouver market, what we've been seeing is those analog intercoms, which is basically Mircom or Kantech, with limited functionality of course, because the intercom that we've been seeing in a brand new condo, it's just the regular Mircom intercom.

1:47 – Android Video Intercom vs Analog Systems

2:01 Subhan Vohra: So think of this as a giant phone. So every six months, one year, the update comes with a lot of new features, right? So this is one of the benefits of having this Android intercom, because this is a giant tablet, and then you can customize according to the building's needs, right? So this is one of the most selling items that we have, the S539, right? It has so many features.

2:31 The main functionality of this is the video intercom. So basically how it works is, when the guest comes at the front and dials a unit number, the resident would actually get a video call on their cell phone and they will be able to see them, they can talk to them, and if you want to grant them access, they can just straight up do it from their application, right?

2:51 And so that way you're just eliminating the possibilities of, like, you know, the intruder. Because most of the time what we hear from the stratas that we upgrade the intercom is, imagine you're living in like a 400 unit building or 300 unit building, right? Let's say 10% of them are expecting Amazon there. So anyone can just dial whatever unit number, 101, and just pretend like an Amazon guy, right?

3:20 Ryan Grant: Yes.

3:20 Subhan Vohra: If that doesn't answer, he can try. But I'm pretty sure if he does five units, he's going to get lucky and would just simply open the door for them. So that's a huge security risk, right? But when you have something like this, you can actually see them on your phone, and then you can actually verify that, okay, that's the Amazon driver, right?

3:42 Ryan Grant: Yes.

3:42 Subhan Vohra: So we're just eliminating the huge security risk with the traditional intercom system, right? And this intercom is not only just the intercom. This is also a built-in access control system. So it also has the card reader, the facial recognition, NFC, Bluetooth, RFID cards.

4:05 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

4:05 Subhan Vohra: So it's best for the buildings that are still using keys. So they get two in one, right? They get the video intercom plus the access control at the front. So this is like the perfect solution, because you get two things in one, right? More on to this intercom system. Sometimes, you know, if you have guests or deliveries or anything like that, sometimes we are not able to answer the call and then we simply miss the deliveries.

4:32 – Temporary Codes and QR Keys for Deliveries

4:35 Subhan Vohra: Because imagine, me and my wife, we are both working, right? And if somebody buzzes, we are in a meeting or something, we are not able to answer the call. So we just simply miss the deliveries. So one of the features that this intercom has is it has the temporary keys.

4:52 Ryan Grant: What you can generate?

4:55 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. So what you can do is, let's say if you're expecting a delivery tomorrow, right, from Amazon, UPS, whatever, you can just generate a temporary code for them. And when they come at the front, they don't even need to call you. They just go into the code, and they just enter the code, and they get access into the building, and the assigned elevator floor unlocks as well.

5:21 Ryan Grant: That's really a big difference from traditional systems, right? I've never seen that, where you can give those temporary codes, so that really makes it more convenient, right? And especially when you have visitors or somebody that's, you know, coming, and you just know that they're going to be, you know, at different times of the day and you may not be available, then this really is helpful, right? Because you know who the person is and you're authorizing them with that one-time kind of use key, or timed use, right?

5:49 Is it just one-time use, or can you also set it up for a longer period?

5:55 Subhan Vohra: Great question. So there's two options. You can generate one time. So let's say you generate a one-time code, once they use it, it's no longer valid.

6:04 Ryan Grant: So you don't actually have to go manually delete that key.

6:09 Subhan Vohra: Yes. And then we can set it up as a frequent, like let's say you can set up every week Monday or something. So this is actually good for the property manager, the building manager as well. So if you have, let's say, a cleaning crew coming every Monday and Thursday between 9 to 5, you don't actually have to hand them a fob or key. What you can do is you can just generate the QR code and just select the doors that you want to give access to, right?

6:37 And just send them digitally. So every time when they want the access, all they need to do is just scan the QR code, right?

6:48 Ryan Grant: That's great. It's very easy.

6:48 Subhan Vohra: And then also the building manager, they would have a log of what time they actually entered the building, right, because they are scanning the QR code. So everything would be visible in the portal. So it serves both purposes. And also, let's say if you have a guest that's going to stay here for six, seven days, you don't have to give... just generate them a code and they can just use that code to get in and out of the building, and you have total control over it.

7:18 Ryan Grant: Right. Wow.

7:21 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then one of the things that this one has is, as I said, it serves everyone. It's not only... I mean, we have some people that don't have a cell phone. They are not good with the smartphone and they just don't want to deal with the technology.

7:38 – Landline Calls, Sequence and Group Calling

7:39 Ryan Grant: Right.

7:39 Subhan Vohra: Yes. So for them, what we can do is we can just program their unit number to function as a traditional intercom. So if somebody doesn't have the application, the system will automatically recognize that this person does not have the application. So it would just give them a cellular call, just like you can see it on the screen.

8:01 Ryan Grant: Right. Perfect.

8:01 Subhan Vohra: From there you answer the call, press 9, into the building. Yes, right. And then also you can set the landline number as well. If somebody doesn't have a phone they can just use their current landline and just press 9, or six, whatever we want. We can just go back and then they can just enter into the building and it works the same way.

8:22 So let's say, since this is... let's say if your phone doesn't have Wi-Fi or data is off for some reason, then the system is smart enough to identify that the person does not have the data on, and that would just transfer the call straight to the cellular call, and then from there you can just press nine to, like, you know, grant access.

8:41 Ryan Grant: So it's not just modernizing the system and kind of taking over the old ways. It's also including, you know, those old types of ways of access just in case there's some people that don't have smartphones and stuff like that, right, to try and get into the building or help get people into the building, right? The person that just has a landline, like you said, in their unit, and they don't have a smartphone, they don't have cellular reception, they're able to just pick up that landline that's traditional in their home and open up the door for the person, right?

9:19 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that I didn't mention is, per unit you can add up to four numbers. So one application, and then each application can add up to four numbers. So that's 16 numbers per unit.

9:34 Ryan Grant: Wow.

9:34 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then you can set them on a sequence call or a group call.

9:40 Ryan Grant: Oh, great.

9:43 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. So when somebody doesn't answer the call, it will automatically direct it to the second person.

9:48 Ryan Grant: Yeah. It'll roll over to the next line, right? So that way, if I don't pick up the phone, then it rolls over maybe to my wife, so it keeps ringing, right, as the person buzzes the intercom, and it rings and rings until somebody on my authorized list picks up the phone, dials them in, right? Okay, that's great. Yeah, right. Because right now I haven't really seen that in current solutions that I've reviewed, and in my own solution in my own strata, right?

10:16 We don't have that. It's just, you know, they buzz the one code and it's linked directly to me only, right? To my cell phone, and then I have to, you know, hope that I'm going to be able to be around to answer it. So this would really be helpful, right, where if I'm not able to answer it for whatever reason, then you know my wife or somebody else can answer that buzzer call, making sure I don't miss the person or the package.

10:44 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, exactly. And this one also has a group call as well. So you can set it up as a group call. So let's say if you have four family members.

10:51 Ryan Grant: Yes.

10:51 Subhan Vohra: Someone buzzes your unit number, all four of them get the call at the same time. Doesn't matter.

10:57 Ryan Grant: Oh wow.

10:57 Subhan Vohra: Anywhere in the world. All four of you get the call, and then whoever picks up first, they get to talk to the visitor.

11:03 Ryan Grant: Wow, that's great. So that's a configurable option. Obviously it's not going to do that automatically unless you've configured it for that, right? Because some people may not want that, right? They just want the rollover. They don't want everybody in the group. But for people that would find that beneficial, then that option's there. So that's really good.

11:24 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. One of the key advantages of this system is it's totally customizable. Every building is different. Everybody is different, right? So this is totally customizable. So let's say if you are expecting a package tomorrow, then you can set yourself as a first contact. But let's say your wife expects a delivery, then you can just set your wife as first for one day or two days, whatever, right?

11:52 So it's totally customizable upon your needs. And then you also have sequence call options.

11:58 Ryan Grant: So yes, so it gives strata council a lot of configurability for how they and their ownership want to, you know, use all these features. So they don't have to use most of the features. Let's say they want to be more traditional but they still want to have, you know, future proofing, and then they can have this system to enable certain types of features maybe for contractors only, right, or whatever, right?

12:26 Like the one-time code. So maybe they wouldn't want that for all the residents, having to manage that, for whatever, right, whatever they may want. Then the contractor for example, the council could set it up just for them or something, right. So they have all those options that they're able to choose what they want to do, and it's always nice to have options.

12:47 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as I said, it's customizable, meaning so you can, let's say if it's a rental building and you're like, only we have two names on the lease only. So actually the building manager can restrict a specific unit to have a family member count limit. So basically 101 can only add two phone numbers. Or it's totally customizable: you can pick certain units or all of the units to use a pin code or whatever function.

13:21 So it's totally customizable, right? And then also this one has, like, you can leave a voicemail, like a video message. If the delivery driver misses you, they can just send it, it will actually record the video of them, and then on the resident application you'll be able to see, okay, this is the person that was there.

13:33 – Access Logs, Photo Capture and AWS Hosting

13:40 Ryan Grant: And so you have activities on your application, right? And those activities are just unit based, so 101 can see only 101 logs?

13:53 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. And as a building manager they have access to everything.

13:55 Ryan Grant: To everything.

13:58 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, exactly. And then every time someone grants access, it takes a picture of them.

14:02 Ryan Grant: So wow.

14:02 Subhan Vohra: So as a building manager, it's really beneficial that people are just not allowing random people, right?

14:08 Ryan Grant: Yes.

14:08 Subhan Vohra: So you know who you're allowing, and then you can see logs, and it's over the cloud. We don't have to have a hardware setup on site, right? And the system uses AWS, which is the most secure, stable. Because all the banks... like what we found is, when we present this to a strata or a rental building, this is the question that we get asked a lot, like, hey, what happens to all this data?

14:35 Ryan Grant: Yes.

14:35 Subhan Vohra: Right. So we just want to let you know, guys, this is the safest server you can have. Even the Canadian government stores the data in AWS.

14:45 Ryan Grant: Yes, YouTube, Amazon, everything is on AWS.

14:52 Subhan Vohra: So it's pretty safe, right? And then, if you have, let's say, if you still have some privacy concern, we can have the local server on site.

14:59 Ryan Grant: Oh wow.

15:03 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. But that's hard to maintain. You have to pay fees, and then the computer has to be super fast with the specific, you know, the RAM requirement and everything. So it's an added cost.

15:14 Ryan Grant: But at least the option's there for the people that say, no, I don't want to have anything in the cloud, I just want it on-site, on-prem kind of installation, then you're able to accommodate.

15:26 Subhan Vohra: Absolutely. And you know, in some buildings I think there's two, three owners that would always have problems. So for them... and we're not like... all these features are optional. You can use your intercom as you're using your old intercom, just adding your number, as you can see on the screen, just press nine and you don't have to get it.

15:43 Ryan Grant: Yes, you don't need the apps or anything.

15:47 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, not at all. And then especially in Vancouver, I haven't seen a building where everybody goes 100% application. There's always two, three people who don't have a cell phone or they don't want to use the application.

16:01 Ryan Grant: So yes, they need a system that can accommodate. It's cool to have all the new features, and especially, you know, the younger generation may really love to do everything on their cell phones, right? But you know, there's a real need to still have the basic kind of features, right, and be able to support everybody in the community.

16:19 – Entry Options and Two-Factor Authentication

16:25 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, absolutely. And then I will show you the access control functionality as well. So this has 15 plus entry options.

16:33 Ryan Grant: Wow.

16:37 Subhan Vohra: Right. So you can see on the screen is pin code, you can create, there's a Bluetooth option, there's an NFC option, there's a facial recognition option, there's a QR code option, and then the last is the traditional fob. If you don't want to deal with any of those, you can still use your fob, right? So again, keeping everybody in mind, we have the solution, right? And there are some, let's say, sensitive businesses or buildings, you can actually activate two levels of authentication.

17:11 So you can use your facial recognition plus you have to use your pin. Same thing, facial recognition plus card, or card plus pin. Customizable.

17:20 Ryan Grant: So that could be good for like commercial stratas especially, they may have more kind of strict rules for security that they may want to implement, right? And now this way, in a mixed-use strata especially, where you have residential and commercial, if they're looking at one of these types of systems to upgrade to, typically both sections are going to want to, you know, do the upgrade together, or they may be forced to, as you're aware that, you know, sometimes these mixed-use stratas have the same system that they share, right?

17:56 So then that can create tension, right, where the residential like, oh, I don't need all these features. But the commercial section, well, we need these features, and then, you know, they don't want to pay a premium for all these other services. But your solution provides everything all-in-one. So they don't have to have that infighting between the community, because the residential section could just enable what they want, and then the commercial section could have the advanced security if they wanted, right?

18:24 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, absolutely. And then thanks for reminding, actually. If you have two mixed, strata, commercial, residential, they can create two different portals. So one device, two portals. So they can manage their own portal and they can enable and disable features that they want, and the residents can manage their features, right? So this is one of the flexibilities: it's customizable. You can do however you like, right? You can enable and disable any features.

18:54 So this one here is the pin code options. We don't recommend the pin code options, because if you have 100 units in your building, somebody's going to set one two three four.

19:06 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

19:06 Subhan Vohra: Right? So we just... I mean, but let's say if the building only has 10 units or 15 units, maybe this is a good option, right? Or they can add a facial recognition plus pin code. So even if your pin code is not... if you have the pin code, you still need to be physically in front of the intercom, right?

19:26 Ryan Grant: Yes. Yes. Yeah. The two factor of different access features, right? So even if it is one, two, three, four for the PIN, but if they don't have the face, right, then they're not getting in. Or if they don't have the card, or, you know, whatever it is, then they're not getting in because they know a simple PIN, right? So that's really good. Yeah, I haven't seen that before.

19:47 I don't know how many other systems have similar features like that, but yeah, that's new to me.

19:51 – Demo: NFC, Bluetooth and Hands-Free Unlock

19:53 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And these are the security features, right? I'm going to show you a quick video of... this is the convenience. You can literally... it's next level. Okay, so what we do is, let's say if you have your phone application, then if you go to a certain door you just have to find that actual door and then just press on that door unlock button. That's long. Nobody has time to stand in front of the door, go to the application and just find that door.

20:24 So one of the cool features is you can actually enable a hands-free Bluetooth, right? It would make more sense if I just show you the video. This has NFC, Bluetooth, application access, everything, right? So I'm going to show you how the NFC works. You don't even have to unlock your phone. You just simply go here and just simply tap your phone and unlock the door. Access granted.

20:45 Done, right. The other feature that we have is the Bluetooth. So I'm just going to quickly show you. I'm going to see if my Bluetooth is enabled. So right now we're going to go into Bluetooth, and then if you go near the door, you just simply shake your phone like this and it would just unlock the door in a minute. Right, you can see, access granted. It's done.

21:07 We do have an option for hands-free Bluetooth. So basically when you walk near the reader, you don't have to press any button, and just simply go near the reader and we just unlock the door, right? So I'm just going to walk from there and I'll just wave my hand here, and then you will see it unlocks the door right away. Going to walk from here. I come here and I'm just simply going to wave my hand here, and you can see, access granted.

21:37 So it's completely hands-free. You don't have to press any button or anything like that. So one of the things that I didn't mention about this reader is, let's say if you have a contractor that doesn't have a key, then from the application you can generate the QR code and send it to them via email or message. So when the contractor or cleaner or anyone comes here, all they need to do is they just simply go into their temporary key, and then all they need to do is just scan the QR code and then it will just open the door.

22:11 Access granted.

22:14 Ryan Grant: Access granted, screen, you can go in. Yeah. Wow, that's great. And that really cements the concept, right, of what we kind of covered there in the slides, showing all those different abilities for people to be able to gain access.

22:35 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then also, let's say again, we are keeping in mind that people don't have cell phones. There's a thing called a Bluetooth key. So even if you don't have a cell phone, you can have that Bluetooth key in your pocket and just walk near the reader and it would just unlock the door.

22:52 Ryan Grant: Okay. So it's similar to a regular kind of fob key that you would get in traditional systems, right? In a sense.

22:58 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. But the difference is you don't actually have to swipe it. You can only... in your pocket.

23:04 Ryan Grant: In your pocket.

23:04 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, exactly. I don't know if you noticed there, but you actually have to wave your hand. So meaning, just imagine this, if you're on the other side of it, right? And accidentally your Bluetooth connects to it. So now you're just unlocking the door for no reason.

23:20 Ryan Grant: Yeah. For everybody, right?

23:23 Subhan Vohra: So Bluetooth has to be detected, and plus the gesture movement has to be detected. Let's say you can wave your hand. That's one of the guests, and have your phone in your pocket. So now it will unlock the door, and it's just not randomly unlocking for anyone.

23:39 Ryan Grant: Right. Perfect. Okay. So yeah, if you're within proximity where it connects to your Bluetooth, and then you have to do a gesture like waving your hand like that, then that's almost like a two-factor kind of access in a sense, right, where it makes sure that if you're just standing close to the door that it doesn't just keep opening for everybody else, right?

23:57 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. And also you can set, let's say, for the same user they're only allowed to have access once in an hour or once in 15 minutes or 10 minutes. So what happens is, let's say there's a front door and there is a camera post, let's say somebody's checking their mail, they're going to spend like 10 minutes talking to another resident and the doors keep on just, you know, unlocking.

24:20 It prevents it, right. So let's say the same user, they can only open one door every 10 minutes or 5 minutes, and for a different user you can do 5 second, 10 second, custom, whatever you...

24:34 Ryan Grant: Yeah, whatever fits your needs, you know. You're able to cater it to all those. So yeah, a lot of people may not want the Bluetooth or something and then they go more traditional, right, and that's fine, right. And then others that have a use case that feel, oh yeah, this will be really helpful, then they're able to enable it. So at least it has the options there, and then people that have different security concerns can customize it to work the way that they need it to work, to eliminate any of those security concerns that they have with some of the other options.

25:13 Subhan Vohra: Yes, exactly, right. And then, so for the access control, and same thing with the video that we saw, that was an access control, right?

25:22 Ryan Grant: Yes.

25:22 Subhan Vohra: It has everything that the intercom has, just not the calling feature.

25:25 Ryan Grant: Okay, right.

25:28 Subhan Vohra: And then also I will show you the Face ID, how accurate and fast it works for the apartment, right?

25:35 Ryan Grant: Okay. Quickly show you the video and then you can sort of see how accurate that is, right? A live example of the Face ID, how quick that works. I'm going to go out of the screen and I'll show you how it works. Right now I'm just going to walk into the building.

25:49 – Facial Recognition Demo and Anti-Spoofing

25:49 Ryan Grant: I'm not even going to go closer to the intercom, because that's how accurate it is. So just watch this. So done. You saw that? That was less than one second. Wow.

26:08 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. So the face recognition is very quick. And I don't know if you noticed, but I was wearing a beanie.

26:15 Ryan Grant: Yeah, exactly.

26:15 Subhan Vohra: And when I registered the face, it was without it. So yes, have a long beard and it will still recognize.

26:22 Ryan Grant: It's still... yeah, it's able to have a little play with it. It's not so, just like, oh, if you have a hat one day and you don't have the hat the next day, it can't detect you, right? You're not going to run into two big problems, right? It has a general kind of analysis of the face that it's able to recognize.

26:40 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then also it has anti-spoofing. So I'm sure by looking at it, people would think of, oh, but I can just have a picture of any resident and just scan that picture, a video, if you're very smart, right?

26:53 Ryan Grant: Yes.

26:53 Subhan Vohra: It doesn't work that way, because it has to scan your 3D, like it would see it. It knows the face needs to be 3D, not a 2D image.

27:00 Ryan Grant: Yeah, exactly.

27:02 Subhan Vohra: And it's the same sensor the intercom has. It's like one of the iPhone... like you know we have iPhone facial recognition, the exact same sensor implemented into the intercom. So we have tried it a lot. Like, yes, you can scan your phone, whatever, it's not going to work. You have to be physically there. Have to be a person, because it has also a radar detection as well.

27:26 So as soon as you walk in, it detects it, right? So there's no... you cannot spoof the system. And then, let's say it's not going to happen, but if somebody was able to do it, as a property manager you have a log with their picture, so entering it, you can see it. Okay, this guy used the picture, right? But yeah, it's very unlikely. It's a very low chance that it's going to have any mistakes.

27:54 And then what we do differently with the gate control.

27:57 – Gate Remotes and Fob Management Portal

27:59 Subhan Vohra: So this is one of the greatest pain points, right? I've noticed so many buildings, they have just one complaint. The remotes are expensive, right? People keep on losing them and they have to pay $100, $120, depends on the model you have, right? And then you have to be really proactive, like you have to delete it. You have to find that missing remote and delete it from the system.

28:24 Ryan Grant: The time it takes from the building manager, or the council if they don't have a building manager, for that, right? Whoever the person is that manages the system, it can be very annoying when you have a large community especially, right? And then you have a million other things to do, and now you've got to be managing that system regularly which eats up your time, right? And you've got to hand those new fobs to people.

28:49 You know, that's taking away from your regular tasks that you could be doing that are, you know, more productive.

28:56 Subhan Vohra: Exactly, right. And then, yeah, I mean, one of the best things is the programming this system has is really user-friendly. So let's say I'm going to quickly show you the portal, how it looks like, because not every strata would have a building manager, right?

29:17 Ryan Grant: Yes, it's all volunteer. The council is volunteer. They're not going to spend an hour a day to just figure out where is the missing fob or remote or something.

29:26 Subhan Vohra: Right. So I will just quickly show you, let's say if somebody loses the fob, how easy that is to just delete it from the system. Okay, right. So I'm just going to quickly share my screen. I'll just show you. This is how the property manager or building manager portal looks like. So I'm going to show you the demo site that we have, right? And imagine if somebody lost the fob, you just simply go into the resident, right?

29:51 Imagine this 101 lost the fob. You just go into edit and you can just see it here, the RF card. So yes, you can just delete the fob. This is a demo site, so I added so many fobs. In the real case, you're not going to have this many fobs here, right? But let's say if you're only allowed to have two fobs and the resident lost one of them, you can simply go here and just delete it here.

30:19 Ryan Grant: Wow.

30:19 Subhan Vohra: And you're done. Easy. Easy. And then same thing with the facial recognition here. And if you want to add it, delete it. Done. Straight here, right. And it's a unit number based programming. So you can have all your unit numbers here, and then if you want to make any changes here, you just simply go into here. For instance, let's say this person has sold their unit, they have moved out and we want to program the new owner's information.

30:50 Then you just simply first name, last name, type their email address and mobile number if they have one. And then just simply hit save and you're done.

31:00 Ryan Grant: Wow.

31:00 Subhan Vohra: What that will do is this will delete the old tenant's information and it will just send an email to the new resident that this is the registration and these are your credentials, and they can have the application access straight from there, right?

31:14 Ryan Grant: And when you add...

31:17 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. And then when you edit the information it will delete all the registered fobs under this resident. So sometimes... not sometimes, all the time, people sell their unit, so they don't return the fob.

31:30 Ryan Grant: Yes.

31:30 Subhan Vohra: So when you edit it, it's all gone.

31:33 Ryan Grant: Like you don't have to manually mess around, right?

31:38 Subhan Vohra: And then yeah, coming back to the parking, right. So here, the other option is smart parking. You can add... so I'll go more in depth once we have the slide, but there's two options.

31:46 – Smart Parking and License Plate Recognition

31:51 Subhan Vohra: One which is the LPR camera, license plate recognition, right? And then you can add all your... let's say building, you can just add building, what apartment, this one, resident name, just type this, and then the license plate, you can just type their license plate here, right? And then just hit submit. If it's a long-term vehicle then you can just keep this as a default, but if it's for the contractor then you set a duration.

32:22 Ryan Grant: Oh wow.

32:22 Subhan Vohra: Time and time, right? And then as soon as somebody drives up with this license plate the gate's going to open.

32:33 Ryan Grant: Wow. So this is all to control those parking gates for the parkades, to allow people to get in and out of the building with their cars. And you're able to have temporary access basically for certain vehicles, right, and based on the license plate. So it's going to scan the license plate. You don't need a fob to be clicking or pointing at. It's going to read the plate itself.

33:00 Subhan Vohra: Yeah.

33:00 Ryan Grant: Wow.

33:03 Subhan Vohra: Going to read the plate. And then again, this one also has a two-way authentication. So like...

33:08 Ryan Grant: Yes. You pull up to that parkade, this one. Yeah. So let's say once we have the LPR camera, it recognizes the plate, it will fire up the gate and then you can just simply go in, right? You don't need anything, right? But again, let's say the question comes, what if somebody fakes the license plate? Okay, that's... I mean, nobody's going to do it, but let's say somebody does it, right?

33:35 Yes.

33:35 Subhan Vohra: So for this we deploy the long range reader.

33:41 Ryan Grant: Yes.

33:41 Subhan Vohra: And then on your vehicle you would have a UHF tag. So either you can stick it to your windshield or just keep it in your car. Yes. So now as soon as you just approach the gate, first of all, on here you can see the UHF card detail, right? Yes. So if you add your card here and hit submit, so now the system will look for the card.

34:06 It reads the card, that means it's a good card, and then it will see the license plate.

34:10 Ryan Grant: Yes.

34:10 Subhan Vohra: So in order to open the gate, the license plate plus your long range UHF card needs to be matched.

34:19 Ryan Grant: Plus that, right? So they'll put in their UHF card, right, and the license plate, and then they have that UHF card on their windshield, on their dash or whatever. And then the license plate combo. So it's two factor in that sense, right? Two options, two conditions, to make sure that this vehicle is authorized. It's not just somebody with that license plate. But obviously for the contractor, that's just a one-time thing.

34:45 No random thief or something is going to know that a contractor is going to be showing up. So the one access method, just having the license plate, is sufficient, right? It's very low risk that somehow a thief would know that that contractor is going to be showing up on that particular day, right? It's like impossible.

35:08 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And for long-term vehicles you can certainly enable this feature. But long-term vehicles, you can do two factor, like UHF card plus the license plate.

35:17 Ryan Grant: Yeah, so they have both, for extra security for residents, right? And then for contractors, one-off type things, just the license plate is pretty safe, right? It's almost impossible for someone to try and spoof that if they don't know the person.

35:33 Subhan Vohra: Exactly, right. And we have the timing as well, right? So we're going to... the duration is very granular.

35:37 Ryan Grant: Is going to show up at 10:00.

35:40 Subhan Vohra: Yes, on the 10th of May. Then you can just sort of select the date and time and yes, you need to approach between this time in order to open up the gate, right? So it's pretty secure, right? And then same thing, while we are here on the portal I will show you how easy it is for the building manager to just, you know, create a temporary code here.

35:58 – Contractor, Staff and Visitor Access Codes

36:04 Subhan Vohra: So you just go here, select the building, apartment, you don't have to worry about it. Name, let's just say WeTech Security, right? ID number, don't need to worry about it. Repeats, if you want to give them access daily, weekly.

36:18 Ryan Grant: Wow.

36:18 Subhan Vohra: It's going to do it one time for now. Start time, end time, validity, times per device, meaning how many times you want to have them access during that time. So...

36:27 Ryan Grant: Wow.

36:27 Subhan Vohra: Just say like 10. So, yes, times they can. And then send that like email. So if you just type your email here.

36:35 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

36:35 Subhan Vohra: And now as soon as you hit submit, and then you can just... doors that you want to give access to here.

36:43 Ryan Grant: Very important, right.

36:43 Subhan Vohra: Right now it's offline. So let's say front door and gate is good. And when you hit submit, now what that will do... I haven't selected the end time, but okay.

36:54 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

36:54 Subhan Vohra: But once you hit submit, that will just... adding succeeded. Now you will get an email. The contractor will get an email with the barcode.

37:03 Ryan Grant: Wow.

37:03 Subhan Vohra: Right. So as soon as they come here, all they need to do is just enter this key or scan the QR code to enter it, right? I already have the email. Yes, right. Same thing here. Delivery authorization is one time if you want to add it, right. And then visitor, staff. For the staff what we do is, let's say fire department, RCMP, you can just give them one code here, right?

37:32 And then you can just say, let's say, fire department, pin one two three four, RF card if you want to add the RF card, Face ID, don't need to worry about this. Accessible floors, if you have an elevator, but usually if it's an emergency just do all floors, right, and select the device that you want to give access to and hit submit. So now you have lifetime access to this building, fire department, RCMP.

37:58 Same thing, do it with other staff members as well.

38:01 Ryan Grant: Right.

38:01 Subhan Vohra: Yes. It's very easy. And once you have, let's say, you can see all the tenants that are creating QR codes and deliveries. So if somebody's misusing it, then you can just simply go here and just delete the temporary key here. Done.

38:16 Ryan Grant: Wow, right.

38:16 Subhan Vohra: So as a building manager you would have the last say. You can just delete it. If somebody's abusing the system you can restrict them as well. So let's say 101 is creating so many QR codes, then you can just say, allow user to create QR code, take that permission off. Allow user to register face, take that permission off, right?

38:36 Ryan Grant: So I mean, again, if someone is a problem then there are options available, right?

38:44 Subhan Vohra: And like when I was saying, the family member amount limit, if it's rental you're only allowed to have two people, then you can just hit two here. Two, yes, right? So it's completely customizable, right? Group call, sequence call, easy, everything just here. So this is call type. So as I was saying, if somebody doesn't have the smartphone you can just do phone, and that gives them... again, all this contact preference and everything.

39:13 The resident also has the access to that on theirs.

39:20 Ryan Grant: Okay, so they can also set up certain configurations without having to go and, you know, bug the building manager all the time, right? They can log in and they have certain, you know, access that's unique to just their unit, and they can configure it how they want, as long as those options are enabled by the building manager for them, right? So they can't just enable all of a sudden a bunch of other types of things that the council and the strata overall doesn't want, right?

39:53 So if they just... if the council says, well, we want everyone to have two factor, right, so have a pin plus Face ID when coming into the building, then that one resident can't just go and say, oh, you know what, I actually just want the pin, I don't want Face ID or something, right?

40:07 – Resident App and Self-Service Settings

40:09 Ryan Grant: Is that correct?

40:11 Subhan Vohra: Yes. So yeah, that is correct. You can definitely do it. And while I'm here I'll just show you, I'll share my phone screen, right? And I'll show you how easy the interface is. So this is how the application looks like. Right now we don't have any device connected, right? But as I was mentioning earlier, you can see all the activities. It's not online, but you typically see all the activities here, right?

40:35 Ryan Grant: Wow.

40:35 Subhan Vohra: Like who opened it at what time. There's a call history here. There's capture logs here, right? And then this detection logs is more of a property manager feature. And then here you can do everything. So let's say if you go into authorization, you can create temporary keys here, right? There's a Bluetooth unlock, and then as soon as you turn that on you can get, like, how do you want to... hands-free, tap as a card, shake.

41:05 Customize again, right? Let's say hands-free. The resident can also, let's say, add their facial data here, right? Right now I have already added, so that's why I'm getting this delete feature. So they don't need to go to the security room on the property and meet the building manager and scan their face, right?

41:25 Ryan Grant: Everything is just done on the user end, where if the feature is enabled then they use their smartphone to take a scan, and that data is then stored in the cloud.

41:34 Subhan Vohra: Right, exactly. Exactly. So you can do it from here. And then this feature, the RF card. So this one here is, let's say we have seven council members in a building, you can grant them access to just add RF cards for the tenants. So RFID cards, the regulars, right? Not everyone would have this feature, only the people that manage the building. So if you don't have a computer handy you can just use your application, add the RF and you're done.

42:09 Just code and then user, hit submit. Done, right. And then here we have family members. So in here you can just add your other family member: first name, last name, their email address, their phone number or landline, and hit submit. So that will just send them an email with their credentials, and then they can have the application access such as this one, right? You can add up to four family members, right?

42:43 If you want to add more than four, sure, there's an access charge, but definitely you can do it, right?

42:50 Ryan Grant: Do it. Okay.

42:50 Subhan Vohra: And then here we have the discover option. So actually you can add all your doors in CarPlay as well. So I'm going to show you a clip as well, how the CarPlay works for the gate and doors and stuff, right?

43:04 Ryan Grant: Perfect.

43:04 Subhan Vohra: And here we have the call setting. So the resident can actually select if they want the group call or sequence call. So in here you have two options: group call, sequence call. And then here's a call type. Do you want the call to go to the Smart Plus application, or do you want to do it as a phone, or do you want to do it as Smart Plus with phone as a backup?

43:24 This is the standard. First call you will get it on the application, and then if you don't respond it will go to the phone, right? As soon as you hit submit, it's done, right? And then here we have the notification setting, right? You want full screen incoming call, or you just want a banner like a notification, right?

43:46 Ryan Grant: Mhm.

43:46 Subhan Vohra: So again, it's totally customizable. Everything you can just do here, right? For, let's say, for any reason if you change your phone number, then you can just simply go here and edit your phone number as well. You don't even have to go to the property manager saying that, hey, can you help me change my number? You can just do it from the app, right? Same thing with the email.

44:09 If you want to reset the password, you can just do it from here, right? And same, everything you can just edit it. Certain things, the apartment number and first and last name, you won't be able to edit, because that's a property manager only feature, right? And if you're a property manager then you can actually link multiple sites as well. I will show you that, right. There is a very important feature, the help and feedback.

44:40 When we install the access control, this is the question that we get the most: how do I reset, or how do I do this? So it's a picture explanation.

44:48 Ryan Grant: Like a built-in help guide.

44:50 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. Help guide, everything. Because the first question people would ask is, how do I add more family members? Right here. How do I receive a call? Here. Everything is here, right? And there's YouTube videos as well for certain features.

45:07 Ryan Grant: Yes. So then residents can just kind of quickly catch up on their own. There's a nice little guide that the building manager can say, you know, download this app, and also if you want to learn how to configure things more yourself, you can do it, right? And the building manager can obviously configure all these things for the person too. But if they want to, you know, have more control themselves as a resident, then, you know, this is there for them, right, to be able to figure out how to manage their profile.

45:40 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then one of the things that we do, and we're very proud of that, I don't think any company does it, but there is a customer service here as well. And this is our email address and phone number. So if a resident is having any problem they can just simply call or email us. We are not going to make any changes upon a resident's request, because that's a security concern and it has to come through your council or the property manager, right?

46:10 Yes. We can basically guide them how to do stuff. We're not going to make changes based on this. But this is what we do that sets it apart from the other companies. What happens is, mostly this is how the channel is: the resident has a problem, they reach out to the property manager, property manager reaches out to us, we respond to the property manager, property manager responds to the resident.

46:33 Now you can imagine the time it will take to get a simple answer.

46:39 Ryan Grant: Yeah, right. And they're like, I need to get access to my home, I'm here, and you've got to wait for phone calls or emails, right?

46:46 Subhan Vohra: Yes, this is direct. This is direct. And then this email address, we respond within 24 hours.

46:54 Ryan Grant: Wow.

46:54 Subhan Vohra: Yes. Within 24 hours. You have any question, we would just respond right away, right? Phone number as well.

47:01 Ryan Grant: Specifically phone number. Yeah, if they need to, right? You know, sooner.

47:05 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, exactly, right. So this is how the application interface looks like.

47:09 – Multi-Site Management, Messaging and Cameras

47:11 Subhan Vohra: And then for the property manager, you can add multiple sites. So these are the sites that you can just click here. So different stratas or different buildings on the same strata or whatever, right? They can select their portfolio of clients, right, they can manage.

47:31 Ryan Grant: Exactly.

47:31 Subhan Vohra: You can just simply link your site here and you would have access as well. One of the things that I was going to show you, let's go back to the property manager portal. If you see this, there's an option that says messages.

47:44 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

47:44 Subhan Vohra: So this is basically, let's say you can actually, because now all the people have the application on their phone, right?

47:51 Ryan Grant: Yes.

47:54 Subhan Vohra: You can post them messages as well, right.

47:55 Ryan Grant: Wow.

47:55 Subhan Vohra: So let's say if you have something, a fire inspection or something.

48:01 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

48:01 Subhan Vohra: And then you can just post your content here. And if you want to, let's say if you have an indoor monitor or something, or just do the app only, and then you can select all the people as well. If it only applies to the first floor then you can just select the individual first floor, and if it applies to everyone then just select everyone here. And then as soon as you do this, now everyone would get the messages on the application, right?

48:29 Ryan Grant: Oh, that's cool, right.

48:32 Subhan Vohra: I will just show you. So as you can see there's 10 messages here, right? And then see, this is the message that we posted. So an announcement, the property manager can do it straight from the portal, and then everyone would get a notification, right?

48:50 Ryan Grant: Yeah, that's a really good feature. I know some of the management software solutions for managing complexes in general have that, but to have it right there on an app that gives a push notification right away to people that have the smartphones, right? And I'm guessing it can also send email as well. So maybe somebody that doesn't have a smartphone can then see it by email, or multiple ways.

49:17 Like you said, it's configurable, right? So that's really handy, because it's more than just the security and access control system. It's actually giving them some kind of management features, right, that are more from a property management platform perspective.

49:33 Subhan Vohra: Yes. And then, you know, one of the things, like, this is all integrated software. Like you said, it's more than just access control, intercom. You can add the cameras here as well. Let's say if you have 15 cameras, you can add all the cameras here. So, but this is only property manager... only they see these cameras, right? And then again, if you want to give access to a resident for a certain camera, certain people.

50:01 Ryan Grant: Yeah, exactly.

50:01 Subhan Vohra: You can just simply add it, like access to the camera, and then everything is totally customizable here, right? And you can see here, let's say, I will show you how... we have the third party device which is this camera, right? In here we have this option saying that, allow user to monitor this device.

50:24 Ryan Grant: Mhm.

50:24 Subhan Vohra: So if you want people to see that camera then you can just... yes, if not, no, right? You can select apartment as well, like what apartment needs to see that camera. Customizable, totally customizable, right? So what sets it apart in this one is, mostly the buildings would have multiple softwares. They have different software for the cameras, they have different for access control, they have different for intercom.

50:57 Everything is different.

50:57 Ryan Grant: Yes.

51:00 Subhan Vohra: But in this one, it just combines everything at once. All the security, cameras, access control, intercom, gate, elevator control, everything into one application, right? And then you don't need to be on site to manage everything. You can be anywhere in the world with an internet connection and you're good to go. You can just make any changes you like, or register, delete, add, whatever you want to do, right?

51:23 Post messages, everything is done remotely.

51:26 Ryan Grant: Which is really great, because I'm guessing some of the potentially common mistakes in stratas when they're looking at different solutions is that it's overwhelming to have, you know, to review and figure out what features you may need. And obviously there's limitations with other types of systems. While this one, even if they don't quite fully comprehend all the use cases of all these features right away, at least they're there in case they need them, right?

52:00 They're future-proofed, where eventually they may want some of these features, or all these features, in some way or form. And this solution provides that flexibility, right? So that way they can set up the things that they want, you know, the ones that they're familiar with, right away, get that done, and then the other features they can kind of take more time to review and understand, test, right, play around with, to see if it is something that they really want to implement in their communities.

52:31 Subhan Vohra: Yes. And then, yeah, I mean, as I said, this one is an Android based system, right? So frequently, like really, months, we don't actually upgrade the system. Whatever upgrade that pushes, if it's a major difference in the software, if we think that it's going to impact the resident's life significantly, that's the only time we upgrade the system, right?

52:57 Ryan Grant: Exactly. And then to upgrade the system, we don't need to be on site?

53:01 Subhan Vohra: No, we can just do it remotely, right? And then done. We could just set it up as a schedule, let's say 12:30 a.m., it's going to operate.

53:12 Ryan Grant: Exactly, right.

53:15 Subhan Vohra: So we don't even have to be on site to do any of it. Once the system is installed and online, we don't ever have to go back to the site.

53:22 Ryan Grant: Wow.

53:22 Subhan Vohra: The only time we visit the site is if there's vandalism, if there's physical damage to the property. That's the only time that we have to go on site. Otherwise everything is done remotely. There are so many little things that I haven't mentioned, and there's so many things, if we do it, it's going to be 10 hours.

53:44 – Mail Alerts, Intercom Ads and Custom Buttons

53:44 Subhan Vohra: So I'll just give you some examples. So let's say if you want the notification, you know, when Canada Post comes, they enter their key, all the tenants would get the notification that the mail has arrived, and they can... {R} Wow. {S} Do the notification like, hey, I want to receive notification when the mailman comes in, or I don't want to, right? So that's there. And then another one is, I can show you this picture.

54:08 You can actually post your ad onto the intercom screen. So if you're renting...

54:14 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

54:14 Subhan Vohra: Like look at this one, right? This is actually one of our buildings, the rental building.

54:20 Ryan Grant: Yes. {S} And they have a two bedroom available. You can create something like this, and then you're actually advertising now. Same thing, you can post an announcement like fire inspection or water shut off or anything, just post the announcement here and just make it a way that you touch to start, right? Yes, there's always an option as well. So, so many little things that we have not covered, but this generally gives you what it can do.

54:52 It's your cell phone. Yes, another thing that I will show you, you can add customizable buttons as well. Now in here you can see there's three options here: pin code, or call, or directory, or rental inquiries. You can have taxi here as well. You can just call a taxi straight from your intercom, and the taxi company would know actually where you're calling from. Whoa. So you can offer really neat services so that it's convenient for people that are at your property, you know, either residents or, you know, people that are just visiting.

55:34 They're able to then have some other kind of neat access features that can help them in their day-to-day life, right? Like you said, call a taxi.

55:44 Subhan Vohra: Crazy. Call pizza. We can add pizza here.

55:47 Ryan Grant: Yeah, right. It's configurable to whatever people want to put this. Wow.

55:53 Subhan Vohra: All we need to do is just add a phone number. That's it. And then it would just call whoever we program the phone number to.

55:59 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

55:59 Subhan Vohra: And one of the things that I didn't mention, this intercom does not require any telephone line. We are not going to pay monthly fees for the telephone line.

56:10 Ryan Grant: Yes.

56:10 Subhan Vohra: This works on a web line.

56:10 Ryan Grant: So they just need internet service. Basically it replaces, one for one, the phone line is just an internet service instead of a phone line.

56:22 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. Because I don't know if you know this, but Telus is trying to get rid of all the copper.

56:29 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

56:29 Subhan Vohra: So now, in order to have the phone line, you need to have the internet and then connect to the phone line. So you get internet and then phone line. So your bill would be, you know, much higher, $200. But yeah, this, you only need internet and that's the only thing you need here.

56:47 Ryan Grant: Wow, that's great. So is there any subscription with this overall platform as well, outside of the internet fee that they would have to get?

56:54 – Pricing, Licensing and Installation Training

56:57 Subhan Vohra: Well, that's the best part. To have this cloud, all the application, all the property manager portal, everything is just a one-time cost.

57:08 Ryan Grant: Wow.

57:08 Subhan Vohra: When we install it, there's a licensing fee for each unit. We add that into your one-time investment and it's done. After that, it's yours for life.

57:18 Ryan Grant: Wow, that's great.

57:21 Subhan Vohra: Right. So down the road, after three, four years, if something gets damaged, let's say in five years the intercom is vandalized or something happened, you don't have to buy these licenses again.

57:34 Ryan Grant: Yes.

57:34 Subhan Vohra: All they need to do is just replace the device and you're back in the game. You're not going to pay any monthly fee. When I say no monthly fee, it's just the internet, and that's Telus or whoever. Once installed, it's done. The only time we require the monthly fees is when you want us to program the system.

57:56 Ryan Grant: Okay.

57:56 Subhan Vohra: And we do it for lots of stratas, and that's because those stratas really have only one, two changes every month. We don't mind doing it. But if it's a rental building, if you have 30 changes every month, of course.

58:09 Ryan Grant: Yeah, you need to help, you know, pay a support team, right? It's a support contract.

58:13 Subhan Vohra: Exactly.

58:13 Ryan Grant: But for the stratas, I mean, it's not going to be like 10 home sales in one month. It's very unlikely.

58:22 Subhan Vohra: Exactly, right.

58:22 Ryan Grant: In most cases, the council or the strata manager is more than capable of doing that. Or, you know, building manager, or whoever, somebody they usually have to manage these things. And like you said, it's infrequent for the smaller stratas, and then the larger stratas will have somebody to help. But like you said, there's a lot of self-serve aspect, so this should theoretically reduce the time that those larger buildings have to invest in servicing this every month, with people coming, you know, needing different fobs and all that type of thing.

59:01 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. I mean, what we do is when we install the system we hold two sessions. One is in person. So we post an announcement saying that we're going to be on site, if you need help registering the application, if you need help with anything, and if you have any question you can come to us. And we'll actually have someone on site to answer all these questions right after we finish the installation.

59:24 Ryan Grant: Yes.

59:24 Subhan Vohra: And then we host another session online. So we do a Zoom call, we invite all of them, people, to ask us questions or if they need help registering it, right? But most of the time people figure it out by themselves. Like this property manager in the recent buildings that we did, once we give them access they just figure it out by themselves. It's very easy to navigate.

59:47 So it's very little things. I mean, the traditional access control system, I feel like they made it in a way that it's hard for people to understand. Because every time, I used to work for companies, right, I'm not going to name it, but I used to work for companies, and most of my service calls were for, like, add the unit number.

1:00:10 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:00:10 Subhan Vohra: So imagine, I'm driving hours to the building just to add one phone number. And that's like, we started this, right, that most of the time we would just drive there to delete the fob or add the fob.

1:00:28 Ryan Grant: So, you know, this makes it so much easier. Such a trivial thing that was just so hard prior, because of those offline kind of systems, and not self-servable too, right? A combination of some, or most, were offline, and then the ones that were online, they may not allow the resident to change it and they may need you to remotely always be engaged, or the building manager or whatever, right?

1:00:55 So you're solving a lot of those problems, pain points, for people, right, where they don't have to worry about little changes. They can do it easily from the comfort of their home, and the resident can configure things that they want to configure themselves so that the building manager doesn't get interrupted. You know, all those flexibility options are there for those who want it, right? It's all configurable, which is way better than the traditional systems.

1:01:23 And like you said, if they really want to not be in the cloud, then they have the option of the on-prem solution, which can be accessed, I'm guessing, securely still through maybe a VPN or something as well, to give people that kind of semi remote access, right, where it's not available in the cloud to anyone easily, right? They can use a VPN to connect on-site to manage it still remotely.

1:01:50 So you still don't have to be remote if you really want to be able to have something more on-prem, but with that VPN kind of access.

1:02:00 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. I mean, when we talk about the server, it's basically a computer that stores all the data, and we can have it here on site and you can just access it. All we need to do is just give the high-speed internet to the computer. Every time you use your application or you push any updates, it just goes through that home server, right? So, but yeah, we have options.

1:02:23 We have available options, but most of the time we just don't see the reason to, because of the cost, right?

1:02:31 Ryan Grant: Like yeah, you have to manage it. The cloud is so secure in general, right? Like you said, they're using AWS as the cloud provider and they have security in place. So for 95% or more of the communities out there they probably wouldn't ever opt to do on-prem installation.

1:02:53 Subhan Vohra: Even the banks, the Canadian, their data is also on AWS. So exactly, you know, you can imagine the security level of it. So it's not a problem. Because if we install an in-house server then we're just simply defeating the purpose of having the system, because why we need the system is to be able to do everything remotely and not have to manage anything on site.

1:03:15 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

1:03:17 Subhan Vohra: When you do this you have to maintain the server.

1:03:19 Ryan Grant: Yeah, you have a lot more, right.

1:03:22 Subhan Vohra: So it's just better with the cloud server, right?

1:03:24 Ryan Grant: Yes. Yeah. And then coming back to the gate part. Yeah, I think you had a video, right?

1:03:32 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, there's a... so I'm going to show you a quick video.

1:03:34 – CarPlay, Shortcuts and 55+ Building Case Study

1:03:34 Subhan Vohra: So if you have your CarPlay, and then let's say of course the license plate and everything would just work, this is just an additional thing. So you can have your CarPlay open the gate for you. So I'll just quickly, you know, pull up that video. So we just installed the smart intercom system here in White Rock, which also comes with the gate control, and you can open the gate from your CarPlay.

1:03:57 So you'll see in a minute, if you have a CarPlay like this, you can just say, hey Siri, open the gate. Okay, done.

1:04:15 Ryan Grant: Wow, that's cool.

1:04:21 Subhan Vohra: And then we can go in. Yeah. So, and don't worry, the remote's still going to work. So yes, that's just one feature, right?

1:04:31 Ryan Grant: One of the potential features people could use. That's really cool.

1:04:35 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. And then there's an application, an in-built application in Apple. I don't know if people have heard about this. It's a shortcut.

1:04:44 Ryan Grant: Oh, the shortcuts.

1:04:47 Subhan Vohra: Yes. So with the shortcuts, the possibilities are limitless. Like you can set it in a way... I'll just give you an example, right? Just have a shortcut. You can have automation, so you can set, when this happens then I want to do this, right? This is basically an automation. So what happens is, let's say you live at 15 whatever street.

1:05:09 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:05:09 Subhan Vohra: You can add that as a home, and then you can set the automation on your shortcut application saying that when I reach home, you ask me if I want to open that gate.

1:05:21 Ryan Grant: Wow.

1:05:21 Subhan Vohra: So when I reach home, on the CarPlay I would have a notification saying, do you want to open the gate, and you just press yes on it. Just like you have, you know, on Google Maps you have, like, the police is still there and you just press still there, trigger notifications. It would just open the gate, right? Same, so many things you can do. I'll give you another example.

1:05:50 Let's say you don't want... let's say if you're a property manager, right. On the shortcut application, actually if I show you it will be better. So this is the shortcut application, right? Yes. And then we added this test door, right? So you can set an automation saying that, let's say for example, when I get a text message from a sender, you choose it, like an elevator company or a cleaning company or something.

1:06:20 But for the example I'm going to add just one of my friends here, and the message should contain, let's say, one two three four. You can have anything here.

1:06:31 Ryan Grant: Yeah, right.

1:06:31 Subhan Vohra: So let's say here, and then you just say, run after confirmation or run immediately. So if you just want to open the door immediately, or if you just want to open the door after the confirmation. But for the sake of explanation let's do run immediately, right? Next, when I get a message from this person and if the message contains one two three four or whatever you set, what I want to do is I want to open my front door, like test door.

1:07:00 Now it's done. So next time, if you're a building manager, if you get a message from this person and if the message includes one two three four, open the front door.

1:07:13 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:07:13 Subhan Vohra: The front door gets open right away. Right away when I get a message, do this. So you can sort of imagine the possibilities with this, right? And same thing, you can even do an email. It doesn't have to be a text message. You can do, if I get an email from this person, if the email contains this information, then I want to open this door.

1:07:38 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

1:07:40 Subhan Vohra: And as I was saying, this one here, when I arrive at the gym, so location, I'm going to, let's say, do it whatever location. Right, done. And then any time, or you can do a time range as well. So it's not just... you can just select the time immediately. Do, when I open that door, what I want to do is open the gate. So I'm going to quickly go in here and just select the... this is just a test door, but you can add another door, but you can just do it here.

1:08:17 So for this one, what we're going to do is run after confirmation, right? So when you reach the gate and you mark the location, when you reach here, it will ask you to open the gate, and that's after the confirmation, right? So you can imagine the possibilities with this, right?

1:08:41 Ryan Grant: Yeah, there's so many things you can do with the automation.

1:08:45 Subhan Vohra: And all this, open the door and everything, you can just add it on your home screen like this. Yes, add icon, whatever you like. Rename it. You can play around with it, right. And also one of the things is, this application, Smart Plus, has full compatibility with the shortcuts. You can have it on your home screen as well, right? Or the doors that you use frequently, you can have it on your home screen.

1:09:16 So like front door and gate, that's the door that I use the most. So next time you go to the door, you don't actually have to go into the application. You just simply press this shortcut.

1:09:24 Ryan Grant: Exactly, right. So there's so many things you can do. And that's exclusive then to iOS, for that particular shortcut application, right, for setting up those things. So it's not part of your platform that you're installing, right, that you're providing. It's rather something from Apple that allows your platform to interface with and create shortcuts.

1:09:52 Subhan Vohra: Exactly. Yeah. So the application is shortcut compatible and now you can do your thing. You can just generate all the automation and then you can sort of go from there. I think Android has a third party application and then you can customize everything.

1:10:08 Ryan Grant: Yeah.

1:10:08 Subhan Vohra: So it's just totally... everything is just... right?

1:10:15 Ryan Grant: Yeah, that's pretty cool. Let's see here now. Did you have more slides that you wanted to show, or do you think that was...

1:10:24 Subhan Vohra: I think we already covered everything. It was longer than we expected, right?

1:10:31 Ryan Grant: Yeah, there was a ton of things to go over. Yeah, it's really showing people just the potential and possibilities that are available out there. And especially this system is more cutting edge than the majority of systems available. Is that correct?

1:10:47 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, one of the things is, let's say what happens is when the strata or the rental management decides to, let's say, upgrade the access control system.

1:10:59 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:10:59 Subhan Vohra: Or the intercom system. One of the things that happens is the end user, the resident, the ownership, they don't get to feel the difference.

1:11:09 Ryan Grant: Yes, right.

1:11:09 Subhan Vohra: You upgrade the access control. You were swiping the fob to get into the building.

1:11:13 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:11:13 Subhan Vohra: After spending 100,000, you are still swiping the fob to get in, and they're like, what's the difference? For a long time they have not experienced... it doesn't matter if they spend whatever amount of money, they are still swiping the fob, they're still the same old features, versus this is actually, you know, something.

1:11:37 Ryan Grant: It is an upgrade. So it's not just that they had to replace a 30-year-old system. They're actually getting some major value, potential, if they want to enable that stuff, right? So, you know, it's all limitless potential with high value, right? So they're not just upgrading the system because it needed to be upgraded. They're upgrading it and getting a bunch of features.

1:12:04 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And then also, you know, one of the things that could happen is, when you have a system like this in your building.

1:12:11 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:12:11 Subhan Vohra: It definitely affects the property value as well. Because just imagine if you're selling your house, and there's a potential buyer with me, I'm going into my building.

1:12:24 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:12:24 Subhan Vohra: Imagine this. You're using your Face ID to go into the building. Boom, the first impression. You can sort of... versus, oh yeah, my key, playing around with it, and open it, right?

1:12:35 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:12:35 Subhan Vohra: It makes a good impression when you're selling your house. Yeah, that's what happened. I mean, I've heard this from a realtor. So that's why I'm just pointing it out.

1:12:49 Ryan Grant: It really adds value to the impression. So even, let's say, people might say, oh, it's not going to add monetary value, which is debatable, right? But it's more so that experience when they first... they're checking out different homes, and if they're looking at your home and kind of comparing to the other one, and if this was basically one of the only, you know, big differentiating factors for the difference, they might end up choosing your property to buy, because they're like, yeah, this one had a lot more convenience built into it, right, than the other one.

1:13:26 Subhan Vohra: They do use these features. I've seen it. Matter of fact, I will show you one of the sites, like a live example, and you will see how many people are using the facial recognition, how many people are using the RF card. I'll show you. I'll share my screen. And please note that this building is 55 plus.

1:13:42 Ryan Grant: Wow.

1:13:42 Subhan Vohra: So it's not a younger crowd. It's a 55 plus building.

1:13:46 Ryan Grant: 55 plus building.

1:13:49 Subhan Vohra: I will show you the stats, like how many people are using the facial recognition versus how many people are using the fob. So just a case study.

1:13:57 Ryan Grant: Yeah, a good case study, right.

1:14:00 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, let me know if you can see my screen. So in the last 30 days, you can see 465 people have used the facial recognition, versus 234 people have used the RF card, which is your regular fob. And 77 people have used their pin code, right. So these are the... and then 89 people, 56 people have used the application. So you can see the stat here, right?

1:14:31 Ryan Grant: Yes.

1:14:31 Subhan Vohra: The facial recognition at number one, right? And then there's RF card which is 234, and there's pin code, and then the application.

1:14:39 Ryan Grant: Wow.

1:14:39 Subhan Vohra: So this is, again, this is a 55 plus building. This is not your average building, right? Average building. People are using this feature and we have heard great things from them.

1:14:53 Ryan Grant: Wow. Yeah. It must have really been like, at first they didn't probably realize how it's going to change their life, and then now they might not be able to see themselves not really having that, right, where they're like, oh yeah, if they go somewhere else they look for it, right? They're like, oh, I'd really appreciate to have that system and those features.

1:15:15 Subhan Vohra: If you use it for three months you cannot imagine your life without it. That I tell you for sure.

1:15:19 Ryan Grant: When you go somewhere else you'll be like, wait a minute, I have to do that old archaic way of getting into the property, right?

1:15:27 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, that is. Yeah. But yeah, overall in Vancouver we have seen so many buildings that have had recent upgrades.

1:15:39 Ryan Grant: Yes, still stuck on the same technology, right? So yeah, where it's just like a one-to-one upgrade of old features to the same old features, just a new system that basically makes sure that the system is going to be around for another 15, 20 years, because the old system was coming of age, right? They're worried of it breaking down and that's why they replaced it. Versus this, you know, they get it and they get tons of features plus that feeling, right, knowing that, oh, we're good for 15 years again or 20 years, don't have to replace this system for a long time, right?

1:16:20 And we get all these benefits.

1:16:22 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. And it's not something that just came out. This technology, I think 2013, 2012.

1:16:27 Ryan Grant: Wow.

1:16:27 Subhan Vohra: That they started doing all these different features.

1:16:32 Ryan Grant: Yeah, right.

1:16:32 Subhan Vohra: But in Vancouver, every time we present it to the council or manager, it's jaw-dropping. People are like, oh. So it's not that they don't want this system. It's just, you know, they haven't been educated.

1:16:46 Ryan Grant: Yeah, they haven't... they don't know what's available.

1:16:51 Subhan Vohra: They have no idea what's available in the market.

1:16:52 Ryan Grant: So yes. And for the traditional tech, they're still around because it just sells, right?

1:16:56 Subhan Vohra: Yes. But yeah, this is what we have noticed, like every time we present it, not one strata, not one building has said, oh yeah, we have seen this, right? So it's not that people want the traditional system, it's that they're not educated or they don't know that this...

1:17:14 Ryan Grant: Yeah, they aren't aware, right? They're not informed. And that's what we're trying to do here with the B.C. Strata Tech podcast, and what we do in general with our initiatives, is we try to showcase real high value solutions to people, and the local contractors and businesses and startups that have different solutions that cater to the strata kind of needs, right? And I'm sure your solution in general can be used at any type of property, but specifically for stratas, I see so many of these features being very useful.

1:17:45 I'm glad that we were able to bring you onto the show and cover such, you know, technology.

1:17:52 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. You know, I really appreciate what you guys do, and I think this is exactly what the people need in Vancouver. Because I've been to Ontario, I've been to New York, I've seen the technology. I mean, I've seen the access control, it's crazy over there. And in Vancouver, it's lacking. So I mean, I really appreciate what you guys are doing. You're just focusing on technology, right?

1:18:19 It's really interesting.

1:18:22 Ryan Grant: Yes. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks, you know, for coming on the show. And we want to also tell people where they can kind of get more information and get in contact, you know, maybe have a chat with you. You know, we'll post your information on our site as well, but where could they go to find you?

1:18:40 Subhan Vohra: Yeah. So you guys can go to our website. On our website there's a gallery option. So there you would see all the projects that we did and all the new features that we do, right? And the website address is wetechsecurity.com, right? And yeah, you would have all the information. We update the blogs, we update all the recent projects. So you would have, like... and we believe in videos, so you would see all the cool videos in there as well, right?

1:19:09 And yeah, you can reach out to us at 778-956-2786, and yeah, we'd be happy to chat more.

1:19:20 Ryan Grant: Perfect. I know you're also on LinkedIn too, and you guys post a lot of updates. So I've been, you know, following you for months and see those updates. And maybe property managers and whatnot would want to also follow you there. So they can just kind of see more projects that come out or whatever, right, to keep it on their radar. So that's great. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show there, Subhan, and we'll definitely stay in touch and maybe follow up in the next year or so to see how things have been progressing.

1:19:50 Subhan Vohra: Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you.

1:19:52 Ryan Grant: Yeah, no worries. I'll end the recording.

0:00 – Introducing Use Amelio and Hani Faraj

0:02 Ryan Grant: Hello, everyone. It's Ryan Grant from B.C. Strata Tech. Today we're covering a realtor solution called Use Amelio. Its founder, Hani Faraj, will show us how realtors are using his service to streamline the open house process. Let's bring in Hani. Hello, Hani.

0:21 Hani Faraj: Hey, Ryan. How are you, buddy?

0:23 Ryan Grant: Pretty good. Welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time today.

0:26 Hani Faraj: Yeah, absolutely, man. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

0:29 Ryan Grant: So everyone's going to be wanting to know, why should they be using Use Amelio, and what is it? But first we want to know: who is Hani Faraj? Let's get a background as to who you are and, you know, how this came to be.

0:41 Hani Faraj: Yeah, man.

0:43 – Hani's Background in Real Estate Tech

0:43 Hani Faraj: Absolutely. So I'm a local realtor here in the greater Vancouver area. I started in real estate in 2014. I'm a dad of two, a husband, and I'm a big nerd when it comes to technology, different types of technologies and stuff like that. But yeah, you know, so that's pretty much me. I've been in real estate. Before that I did mortgages for a little bit, here in Ontario.

1:08 Before, in Ontario, you didn't need a licence to become a broker unless you were under somebody. So I moved here in… and a couple of years later I became a mortgage broker and eventually got into real estate. But I really love the real estate business, and I'm a big proponent of technology that helps realtors improve their business.

1:29 Ryan Grant: Great. And what year did you create Use Amelio? When did it come to be?

1:34 Hani Faraj: So, to be honest with you, man, I've always wanted to create some technology, and it took me a long time to finally kind of… I failed many, many times. As you know, I'm not technical. We've had this conversation before. But something happened. I'm sure you guys know the guys from Eli Report. So they kind of said, hey, can you help us? We're doing outbound, or at least reach out to some offices and stuff.

2:00 And, you know, before that I didn't really have the confidence and stuff, and I helped them out a lot with that. And they kind of gave me a lot of attaboys, like, hey man, this is awesome. They started signing up some offices and stuff like that. And I caught the bug, as they say. I was like, wow, I actually have a lot of friends, and this is not hard, to just call people, hey, try this out or whatever.

2:23 So that's when I started developing the idea. It didn't go anywhere. I failed a bunch of times, lost a bunch of money. But really, we got serious, I would say, during, like…

2:37 Ryan Grant: Oh, perfect. So it's been around at least a few years out in the wild, right? Now it's, you know, production ready and people have been using it regularly, right?

2:45 – The Open House Lead Capture Problem

2:51 Hani Faraj: Absolutely.

2:51 Ryan Grant: Awesome. So I guess now you can kind of explain to people what really is Use Amelio, and why should they be using it, right?

3:01 Hani Faraj: So here's the thing. I learned this because I worked for a startup many years ago. And a lot of big brands, let's say Le Château, Aldo's, whatever – the biggest problem is that when somebody comes into your store, they have no way of tracking them. There's no way to keep in touch with them or whatever. And I realized in the real estate business it's the same thing.

3:19 Many, many realtors, I love them to death, but they have an open house. People walk in, and they're like… Oh, I just reduced the price. Oh, crap. I reduced the price and nothing happened. All those people that came to your open house, you've lost them. You don't know who they are. You didn't make them sign in or whatever. So I was like, what is an easy way to get people to sign in without any friction?

3:41 And I won't lie to you, what helped was QR codes. They've been around for a long time, as you know, but they became popularized during COVID. And our local board, the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board, they came on. They said, look, any time somebody comes into the open house, you've got to make them sign in that they're not sick. I'm like, well, how am I going to do that?

4:01 There's a lineup, and it was busy, as you know.

4:03 Ryan Grant: Yeah, very clunky.

4:05 – First QR Code Open House Results

4:05 Hani Faraj: I'm going to have to wash their pens? Oh my God, this sounds crazy. So I literally went and got a QR code redirect, got a landing page, got a URL, got all these different tools. That's like a hundred dollars a month. And I said, I'm going to do this QR code. It's going to go to a landing page, and we'll see what happens. And sure enough, I remember I did it through this place in North Van.

4:27 My first open house is a condo, which is why we created it. What happens is you end up with a piece of paper like this and it says, scan before you enter. So it could be used at a townhouse complex, at a condo complex. And I remember, before anybody could open the door, I remember my phone pinging saying, you got a new lead. I didn't have to tell anybody.

4:47 I didn't have to sell a single soul how to use it, which is, as you know, in technology, called end user adoption. And sure enough, it worked, and it kept happening. A hundred percent of the people that walked in had done this before they opened the door. And I was like, this has got to be a fluke. And I did another open house, and another open house.

5:04 And then obviously, I ran a team of eight realtors at the time. I had a little bit more – I think we had six at the time. I gave it to them. One girl had forty people sign in. It's unbelievable. And then I was like, okay, that's cool. And then Monday came. We had offers, and only had one. One person had expressed that they want to make an offer.

5:25 So I ended up calling the rest of the people and said, hey, by the way, you came to the open house. Are you interested in making an offer? And sure enough, man, they're like, yes, we're interested. So I ended up getting two more offers for my clients, because I had people's info. Like, oh, is there an offer presentation today? Oh, crap. Let me call my realtor. So I sold that place multiple times.

5:46 And it has continued to improve. Like I said, the thing is proven from an end user standpoint. So that's how the idea came about. And then I did some user interviews and talked to realtors and said, yeah, this sounds cool. And here we are today. Eventually a friend of mine joined me as an investor and we built it. And here we are.

6:09 Ryan Grant: Wow, that's great. And now, for people that aren't realtors per se, how do you find the difference of using Use Amelio versus the old practices?

6:12 – Buyer Experience and Sign-In Privacy

6:25 Ryan Grant: Does it really improve the experience for that buyer that's coming through the door? Did you find that they really showed the emphasis that they truly enjoyed that process, or like, wow, this is so easy for us to get in here, right, and move along and make the process quick?

6:43 Hani Faraj: There's a couple of… Well, first of all, I used to make people do… Honestly, I'll be honest with you. In the beginning I used to be like, you can't get in unless you sign in. But what's nice about it is that people are using their own phones, which is nice. Second of all, what I learned from some female realtors: they said some people, especially young women, they don't want to sign in through a pen and paper, because let's say there's some weird guy or girl or whoever is behind you, they may pick up your number.

7:10 Well, that's a privacy issue, right? Also, you want to make sure you capture everybody's info, especially if it's a luxury home and people have valuables. Again, you're trying to protect your sellers, honestly. When it comes to the buyers, I don't know if you know, most of us have autofill on our phones. So it's a really easy process. Name, phone number, email. We ask some questions. Hey, do you have a realtor?

7:32 Do you want to be updated if offers are coming in? And then we can even follow up. Yeah, exactly, they can opt in essentially. So that's really… But yeah, buyers have told me they love the idea, especially some that are, you know, they want to be contacted. They don't have representation. And also they want to be notified if that property, you know, lowers the price or gets an offer.

7:56 They want to be notified.

7:57 Ryan Grant: So they don't have to worry about getting business cards and stuff per se anymore. Just like, oh, I'm already going to be contacted.

8:04 Hani Faraj: Right. Yeah. And some of them, honestly, we tell them, if it's not you, no problem, just put your realtor's info, number, in there. I don't care about that. I just want to contact somebody on your behalf who's interested.

8:14 – Product Walkthrough: Setup, Signs and CRM

8:14 Ryan Grant: Yeah, perfect. That's great. I guess now, did you want to show a little bit more about the website, or do you want me to bring…

8:24 Hani Faraj: No, absolutely, I'll explain it. Anybody who wants to sign in, they can go to this website, UseAmelio.com. They can sign up. There's no iPad that's required, although there's iPad mode. Basically the user, which is your visitor, needs just a phone to sign in. This is the process. It's really simple. Basically you enter open house information here. It auto-populates, you upload one picture. Then we already have some of what we call stock.

8:56 We've tried many different questions. So far we have some stock questions that we can ask. I've had people add their own. Ideally you just want to have three questions, no more. That becomes too much. And then, you know, as I showed you, we have these little open house signs, and there's multiple brands that represent, let's say, your HomeLife, RE/MAX, whatever, a private company. There's different colours that represent you.

9:23 And this is what kind of gets spit out. And then you just put it on the door like this. And if it's a strata, again, it's really important. It's most useful, honestly, for a strata, because sometimes stratas don't allow you to just let people in. You've got to accompany everybody. So while people wait, they can sign in, which is awesome. The user, the visitor of the open house, they scan the QR code, and then it takes them through this journey of answering some questions.

9:50 And once they get in, the realtor can either send them to the single property page that we already have built in already for them, or they can send them to their own website, which I highly recommend. And basically the realtor gets an email like this. Hey, it's Hani, he just signed in. And by the way, he has no realtor, or he does have a realtor. So, you know, you want to be very careful, if they have representation, not to ask them, you know, personal questions, or what we call motivation questions.

10:18 And that's it, man. It's really simple. There is a CRM, in case you do want to contact people. So that's pretty much it, man. It's really simple. Within three minutes you can create this. To me, honestly, this is so funny, that I used to make this and it wasn't this pretty, it was pretty ugly, for every time I hosted a condo open house. But now it looks pretty good, so I'm pretty proud.

10:42 Ryan Grant: Yeah. You have a whole bunch of templates, don't you?

10:45 Hani Faraj: Right. Yeah. We have multiple templates for different colours and all that stuff. And we have one that's like this prominent big picture one, where the QR code is a big picture. And honestly, some people can just download the QR code and use it on their own piece of paper if they want to make their own design, which is useful.

11:04 Ryan Grant: Wow. Yeah. Well, that looks great overall. It seems to streamline the experience for the buyers, and the realtor gets to capture that data. Right, that important data, that leads potentially, makes it nice and easy. No more papers that they have to go and collect, or pens that they have to buy and hand out to everyone. Right. And just streamlines the overall experience for both parties involved.

11:37 Hani Faraj: There are some open house applications out there, and some realtors have told me they've had some stolen, broken. One lady told me she had an iPad, somebody was using it and they dropped it and broke the screen, hundreds of dollars later, stuff like that. So again, you still have to print something, or even display this on your computer and people can sign in once they're inside. So I've had multiple people do different things with it, which is kind of cool.

12:04 Ryan Grant: Yeah. Yeah, whatever works for them, right?

12:06 Hani Faraj: Definitely.

12:09 Ryan Grant: Awesome. Now, I guess, you know, what's next for you and Use Amelio? Is there anything else that you've got in the works now?

12:19 Hani Faraj: To be honest with you, like, as a person, after spending a couple of years building this, I'm honestly looking for a technical person who loves real estate, or maybe doesn't love real estate, but they want to partner with a guy who is like myself, a sales guy, you know, business development person.

12:21 – What's Next for Use Amelio

12:36 Hani Faraj: That would be the ideal situation. And the second ideal situation would be for us to kind of join a company that's in the real estate vertical, to help them with sales or marketing. Because, you know, there's nothing… I mean, I know a lot about this business. I don't know everything, but I know quite a bit, just from years and experience. So I'm excited about anybody who's building technology for real estate, because I know what works.

12:58 I think, you know, I've used a lot of technology, right?

13:03 Ryan Grant: And you're innovating. I mean, you created Use Amelio, right?

13:08 Hani Faraj: Yeah, man. And many people told me I would not be able to create anything as a non-technical person. But, you know, it's okay. Like, just making it was awesome and a lot of fun. I loved the learning experience, for sure, you know?

13:21 Ryan Grant: Awesome. So I guess people can get started with Use Amelio just by going to UseAmelio.com. Is that correct?

13:28 Hani Faraj: Yes. And then they just sign up and it's quick and easy, pretty, you know, self-serve.

13:33 Ryan Grant: And, you know, if they need any other guidance or advice or anything like that, how can they get in contact?

13:43 Hani Faraj: We have a support chat once they're in, so they can reach out that way. My phone number is on there. Honestly, they can reach out to me. I'm pretty easy to find. If you just Google Hani Faraj, I have to be found. So I'm easy to find, honestly. And if they need any mentorship or coaching, again, if they're in the Vancouver area, I'd love to help as well.

14:03 But yeah, I'm pretty accessible, I think.

14:07 Ryan Grant: Awesome. Well, then I guess, thanks for coming on the show there, Hani. Really appreciate it. And we'll get this out to our membership to show realtors and the sellers how this can really improve their experience.

14:23 Hani Faraj: Absolutely, man. Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you inviting me.

14:25 Ryan Grant: No worries. Take care.