Innovating the strata resident experience

0:00 – Resident Testimonial and FabricApp Intro

0:00 Ryan Grant: So now we've got Ioana Hastings from FabricApp. It's a communications platform that enables self-managed communities and strata managers and landlords to streamline communications with residents into one easy to use mobile app. So we'll start now.

0:20 Josh Kasahara: My name is Josh Kasahara. I'm the strata council president of a condo building located in Vancouver. One of the pain points that we had as a strata council was getting timely notices and announcements out to our residents regarding various things happening in the building. Using email was awkward because people wouldn't check it often enough, and using the WhatsApp group also created a lot of noise and didn't really meet our needs either.

0:46 FabricApp was a great solution because it allowed us to get those announcements out in a timely manner, and also it provided a clean and easy to use interface for all the residents in our building. I would highly recommend FabricApp to any strata council or property management company looking to streamline communications in their building.

1:10 Ioana Hastings: Hi everyone, welcome to Saturday of the BC Strata Tech conference. My name is Ioana Hastings and I'm the founder of FabricApp, which is a communications platform that makes it super easy for property managers and councils and residents to streamline all of their communications and access to information into a user-friendly mobile app. So let's get started. Okay, so here is an outline of our presentation for today.

1:47 So first of all I'll go through a high level intro into the FabricApp product, then we'll take a look at what the current situation is, taking a look at the problem that we're solving, and we put that into context to what's happening in the overall market.

2:06 – Manager Hub and Resident App Overview

2:06 Ioana Hastings: Finally, I'm going to show you two quick wins using FabricApp that will help you improve the resident experience while reducing your workload. So, what is FabricApp? Well, it's a platform to streamline communications and information sharing into a mobile app for residents. There are two parts to FabricApp. The first is the manager hub. So the manager hub is used only by strata managers, council members, building managers, or anyone else who is responsible for sending out communications to residents.

2:47 In the hub, managers can actually launch a resident app, they can send announcements, memos, group specific messages or unit only messages. They can also publish docs to a knowledge base. The second part is the resident app, and this is what the residents will be using. So residents can be renters, they can be owners who live at the property, or they can be owners who rent out their units and they're not on site.

3:18 They can all receive real-time updates and have easy access to building information and services.

3:30 – Strata Manager Email Overload Problem

3:30 Ioana Hastings: Now let's take a look at the current situation, the problem that FabricApp is solving. So the reality is that many stratas feel that they're not getting a good level of service from their strata managers. And that's not the strata manager's fault, they just have way too much on their plate. They're just spread too thin. On average a strata manager gets 4,000 emails per month, and that's really what's causing that poor level of service that some stratas might be experiencing.

4:07 And it's a vicious cycle, because the more upset that residents are getting about the poor levels of service, the more emails, the more calls that strata managers are getting. And it's really a vicious, never-ending cycle. So to put this into perspective, let's take a look at some stats. There really are not enough strata managers to go around in BC. The average portfolio size for a strata manager is 16 properties, which is actually a massive portfolio size for just one person.

4:49 If you break that down on a weekly basis, that only leaves around two and a half hours per week, or 10 hours a month, and that's just not enough time. Really, there just aren't enough licensed strata managers in BC, and there's less and less people that are going into this profession.

5:14 – Market Trends and Resident Expectations

5:14 Ioana Hastings: Now let's take a look at two big things that are happening in the market. Number one: in the last five years there's been a substantial increase in new multi-family development. There's a lot of new condos, a lot of new stratas that are coming to market, and this could be a great opportunity for property management companies, but not if they're at max capacity. Number two: customer needs and expectations are changing.

5:45 Residents want a modern experience, they want to interact with their building in the same way that they do with their favourite brands, which is on their phone and on their own time. Looking at the demographics, we have millennials and Generation Z that are making up the majority of the population. And something to note about Gen Z is that they are the first ever in history digital natives, meaning they grew up using digital devices.

6:17 Basically they were born with an iPhone in their hand. So companies and organizations across all different industries know that they need to adapt in order to stay competitive. So let's recap and take a look at what the facts are. What do we know? So we know that managers are overwhelmed, there's not enough of them to go around, they're getting around 4,000 emails a month. We know that condos are coming to market, which is a potential opportunity for property management companies.

6:55 And we know that the resident wants a modern experience, they want things instantly and easily accessible on their third limb, AKA their mobile device. So this begs the question: how can managers improve the resident experience while reducing their workload?

7:21 – Quick Win: Real-Time Elevator Announcements

7:21 Ioana Hastings: So today I'm going to show you two ways that you can do that using FabricApp. Quick win number one: send updates in real time. So to illustrate, I'm going to share a story of something that recently happened to me. So it was morning and I go to the elevator to take out my dog, and guess what, both elevators are down. So I call the building manager, who tells me that the elevators have been down since the previous evening, but there was no way to inform everybody.

7:59 The typical method would be posting a sign up in the elevator, but with those down, well, their hands were tied. So I still had to take out my dog, so I venture down the 29 flights of stairs. And upon my return I bumped into the building manager and she was frazzled. She had spent all morning taking call after call from residents telling her that the elevator is down and wondering what is happening.

8:31 So all of these repeated requests are taking up hours of her time, and it's also putting her in a very hot place of mind for the day. Our strata manager Mike was experiencing something similar over email. Out of about 120 in the building, he got 30 or so angry emails in the morning about the elevator situation. That is not a great way to start the day, and it's also very time consuming.

8:59 It takes away from actually solving the problem at hand, which is fixing the elevator. So now let me show you what you could do in this situation if you had FabricApp. On the left hand side right here is the FabricApp manager hub. So this is where your strata manager, council member, building manager, anyone who's managing communications for a property, would operate and send out those real-time announcements to residents.

9:30 Now I have to say that residents do not have access to the manager hub. On the right hand side this is an actual projection of my iPhone, and you can see that the FabricApp resident app is sitting right there. So I'm going to show you how we would have dealt with this elevator situation if we had FabricApp, to send that real-time announcement as soon as the elevator problem arose.

9:58 So first we're going to go into the To section and select all residents — of course we want everybody to know what's happening — and the subject line, elevators are down, we're working to fix that. And you can fill in the body of your message. You could also upload a PDF or an image attachment here if it was appropriate. You can also have a link to anything in here and do some basic formatting.

10:25 Now right here we're saying, if anyone needs assistance please click the reply button and we'll respond right away. So by clicking this allow responses button, this is what's going to enable residents to actually click that reply button within their resident app and reply directly to this announcement. So I'm going to send this and we'll see what it looks like. Okay, so I get this push notification here on my phone, and I open it up and I can see the message in full.

11:01 And if I want to respond to this message I hit the reply button, and it pulls up directly to my email, pre-populating with the name of the resident, the unit number and the subject line. And that makes it really, really easy for that strata manager, building manager, to identify who this message is coming from and what the subject of the message is. So by being proactive and updating everyone right away, the building manager and strata manager can deflect these repetitive, time consuming calls and emails and actually focus on solving the problem, which is fixing that elevator.

11:48 – Why Portals, Signs and Email Fail

11:48 Ioana Hastings: What about the portal? Well, the portal is not designed for real time communication. The value of a portal is as a store of record, for things like your financial statements, your AGM and other official building documentation. Usually only one resident, and that has to be an owner, can have access to the portal. That means that your renters and your co-occupants don't have access. Also it's browser-based, so it's not easily accessible on your mobile device.

12:26 There's a high friction to sign in and actually access all of that information. And signs, well, they're not real time, and it takes a lot of work to create and print them, and you can only see them if you're physically there. Well, what about email? Well, email is interesting. The average person gets 90 personal emails a day, and that's not including your work emails, and only two percent of those emails are actually opened.

13:00 So emails get lost in the noise. So here we are with a two percent open rate for emails. Now, in-app messages, they have a 75 percent open rate, and that's by a study that was done by Reckless agency. And it also confirms the data that we have with our app: we have around a 70 percent open rate for in-app messages. So by being proactive and updating everyone right away, the building manager and the strata manager can deflect these repetitive, time-consuming calls and emails and actually focus on solving the problem.

13:34 – Quick Win: Knowledge Base Self-Service

13:42 Ioana Hastings: Quick win number two: enable self-service with a knowledge base. So for those of you that don't know what a knowledge base is, well, it's basically just a collection of documents or articles that is addressing commonly requested information, things like, how do I rent out my unit, what's the pet policy, how do I set up my buzzer, what's the policy for renovations. The normal way of getting these things answered is maybe through digging through your bylaws, if you have access to them and if you have the patience to do so.

14:27 But most of the time what we do is we email our building manager or our strata manager, and then you wait. Then your strata manager, who is overwhelmed already, needs to manually send out this information every single time someone asks for it, and it's a repetitive and time-consuming task. Especially when you have 16 properties to look after, you can imagine how many of these requests you get every day.

14:59 And these are all things that can be templated and pushed to self-service. So now I'm going to show you how you could handle this using FabricApp. Okay, so on the left hand side again we have the FabricApp manager hub, and on the right hand side is the resident app. So for uploading documents to the knowledge base, you would go to the documents section of the FabricApp manager hub, and you can easily add new documents.

15:38 So I've added a bunch of things in here, like frequently asked questions, your building rules, strata bylaws, insurance coverage and renting out your unit. So let's say that a resident wants to know, okay, well, how do I rent out my unit? So they could navigate over to the documents tab over here on their app, and click on renting out your unit, and they can read the instructions, and they can even click on the Form K, which will take them to a document that they can fill out.

16:16 So that makes it super easy to deflect all of those repetitive, time-consuming tasks over to the resident app for resident self-service. In fact, according to a study that was done by Microsoft on the state of global customer service, customers actually prefer to find answers themselves before calling or emailing.

16:50 – Time Savings Math and Summary

16:50 Ioana Hastings: So you are reducing your workload while you're improving the resident experience. You might be thinking, how much time does this actually save me? Well, if you're getting 4,000 emails per month, let's say five percent of those, so one out of every 20, is a repetitive type request like one of the examples that we saw before. So if you spend maybe 10 minutes on each of those emails, which is conservative, it probably does take longer, that comes out to be a whopping 33 hours per month that you're spending on things that could be templated and pushed to resident self-service.

17:39 That's almost a week's worth of work, and that's a big number. Think about all of those things that you could do with 33 hours extra. You could focus on higher value tasks that make a greater impact to the properties that you manage, to your organization and to yourself. So in summary, we've seen that real time in-app updates are one of the most effective communication tools, residents prefer self-service to find out answers, and both of these things contribute to a reduced workload for managers.

18:20 Thank you so much for listening to our presentation, and if you want to see a full demo of FabricApp please email me at ioana@fabricapp.ca. Looking forward to it, thank you.

18:39 Ryan Grant: Hello everyone, that was just great. I love the app there, and especially it's going to save time for everybody. That seemed like an amazing feature, just being able to have an app that'll instantly message you, right, so you don't have to go to the website or anything, you just get an instant push notification like you said. So it's very fast and easy to use for the property managers or for the councils, right?

19:07 Ioana Hastings: Yeah.

19:07 Ryan Grant: Which is super awesome, that the councils can be engaged and help with managing, which is really cool. So we do have some more questions here, but before we get into them I wanted to try and go over the raffle again, just to remind people that we do have a raffle and giveaway. So the giveaway for FabricApp is going to be the three months, you guys are giving away three months of your service to the stratas that have registered here for the conference, so we thank you very much for that.

19:43 Which is going to be really helpful to everybody, to just try it out and get into it, right, and have no pressure of having to pay up front.

19:55 Ioana Hastings: Exactly.

19:55 Ryan Grant: Yeah. So we have some questions here, let me see. Okay, so I'll start with this, this is a good one.

20:04 – Q&A: Setup and Resident Onboarding

20:04 Ryan Grant: So what's the process of getting this set up, how long does it take?

20:10 Ioana Hastings: The process is actually super simple. You can actually do it yourself in FabricApp, where you can upload all of your units and set up your property, but what we like to do is make it even easier than that. So what you would do is send us a spreadsheet that has all of your unit numbers in it, and that's all we need, and we upload that into FabricApp.

20:35 And then after that you can plug in all of your documents, or whatever kind of knowledge docs you want to put in there, and other information that you want to be visible on the app to residents. And then you can go live with the app. And doing that is super easy: all you have to do is basically you put up a sign with a QR code, and residents scan that, and they have a code that's specific to your building.

21:02 And after they've signed up, the property manager or whoever is taking ownership of the manager hub will approve the resident, and then they have access. And that's something that we found has been the best way of doing the onboarding for residents. And actually in one of the buildings that we're in, 83 percent of residents actually downloaded the app within the first two weeks, and we think it's because of that method that we use to make it just super simple.

21:29 – Q&A: Devices, Seniors and Adoption

21:39 Ryan Grant: Yes. So we have a question. Okay, so: love it, looks coherent, user friendly. Communication within a strata does seem troublesome, yet is the community builder. Is the app available on any type of system, phone or computer?

21:54 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, so the app is available on Android and iOS, and it's a native app, meaning that it was designed to operate on a mobile device first. It's not just a web page that is being rendered into an app. The manager hub is only available through a web portal right now, but it is fully mobile responsive, so you can still use it on your phone, and you can actually just bookmark it and it will keep you logged in, so you can quickly go and send out those announcements.

22:31 Ryan Grant: So what about people who don't have cell phones, or have cell phones that talk and text only?

22:37 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, so this is a common question that we've had. There are some older people in buildings that don't have cell phones, and they're not equipped to do this, so we do have to take that into consideration. And that's where the things like those physical signs, they're still going to have a big play, because that's how people that aren't that exposed to technology are going to be receiving those types of updates.

23:08 So we just have to build in a process, basically, when we onboard a building, understand who the demographics of the building are, and then we create a plan around that to basically accommodate those people. But what we found was, even people that aren't very comfortable with technology were able to download the app and to use it. And in one of our buildings we had a seventy-year-old woman who went through the app and left feedback through the app, actually saying how user-friendly it was.

23:42 And she doesn't know how to email, even, so the president of the strata council actually goes and helps her with her emails, but she was able to download and use the app.

23:53 Ryan Grant: That's amazing. Okay, so what else here? Let's see. I like the templates you showed for the knowledge base, do those come with the app?

24:07 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, absolutely. So those templates are available to you, they're included in the whole package. And we can actually put together templates for you: if you give us the content that you want, we can look at the content and optimize it so that it's super user friendly, easy to read, and you can have all those linking out things to different forms or whatever else you want. So we can totally help you with all of that, or you can just do it yourself.

24:33 We'll give you the templates and you can just fill it out yourself.

24:39 Ryan Grant: Okay, do residents actually download the app and use it, because no one uses our web portal?

24:49 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, so we found that the majority of buildings actually do download the app, and they do it quite quickly, like I said, in the first two weeks is typically what we see with the resident onboarding. And we have about 80 to 90 percent of buildings, or residents in these properties, that are downloading the app and using it. And the other kind of 10 to 20 percent, usually those are people that don't live in the building and they just don't really feel like they have a need to download the app.

25:14 – Q&A: Pricing and Data Hosting

25:26 Ryan Grant: How much does it cost?

25:30 Ioana Hastings: So it really depends. If you're a self-managed strata, the cost of it is twenty dollars a month plus a dollar a unit. So if you're a 60 unit building then it's eighty dollars a month. If you are a property management company the pricing is a little bit different, because we look at kind of the whole picture and the total number of residents that you have that will be using it, and also looking at the type of requirements that you might have, to build in there any customizations that you want us to do, and that kind of thing.

26:07 Ryan Grant: Okay, so: FabricApp appears to seamlessly incorporate operations, governance and community communication all in one. How has the reception been, and how can people spread the word about the app?

26:20 Ioana Hastings: So, spread the word about the app within your own community: actually the app has a share app function, so you can click on that and it basically invites your residents, or other residents, to use the app. And it just makes it really easy to grow that adoption, by putting that on residents to also share with their neighbours or other people.

26:45 Ryan Grant: Do you host the data on your servers?

26:48 Ioana Hastings: No, so we don't have our own servers, we use Google Cloud to host the data. So Google Cloud has SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3 compliance, very strict privacy and security regulations with Google Cloud, so that's what we use to host our data. And you can actually choose where you want the data hosted. So if you want it to be hosted in BC we can host it in BC, otherwise it would be hosted either in Toronto or in the US by default.

27:19 But we're finding that most people do want to host it in Canada because of the regulations.

27:26 Ryan Grant: Awesome. Right now it looks like that's it that has come in. Let's see, oh: our strata is self-managed, can we use FabricApp?

27:35 – Self-Managed Stratas and Company Origin

27:38 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a couple of self-managed stratas that use FabricApp, and they use it in the same way that a property manager would use it. So whoever is responsible for those communications, usually it's the strata council president, they would be the ones that access the manager hub, and they can go in there and send out communications, publish documents and that type of thing.

28:04 And you can also invite other people to use it, so you can invite other council members that you want to maybe tag in to do some of the work, maybe you're on holidays or something, you want a backup, you can invite those people as well. And what we've seen is, there's a few stratas that we work with that are partially self-managed, meaning their property manager does all of the regulatory compliance stuff, like the meeting minutes and financial statements, but they do all of the day-to-day communications and they don't have a building manager, so it's the strata council president that does that.

28:44 So they've also shared access to the platform with their property manager as well, so that they can also see what's going on and help out at times.

28:58 Ryan Grant: Okay, I think that's… looks like there was one more about your business, they wanted to know when you created it.

29:10 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, so I started this company… well, the idea for this actually came up two years ago, when it came out of a personal frustration of mine. I was noticing, in my building everything was really difficult to do. We had this portal that I didn't even know about for five years living there. It was hard to get information. You had people knocking on your door being like, oh, it's time to do the fire alarm inspection, and I'm like, what, I didn't know this, right?

29:37 So I started to dig into it a little bit more and discovered that really there is no native mobile app available that included these real-time updates on your building and gives you a knowledge base for all those questions that are requested commonly. So after a bunch of research we started building the app out, and we've been launched for about eight months now. So yeah, that's the story of how it was created.

30:07 Ryan Grant: Awesome. They have one other one, but I think it's more for property managers to maybe answer. Let's see, it says, is the Strata Property Act evolving in the same way, by identifying emails or phone numbers for owners? If not, is there any way to advocate for legislative changes for better digital services and modernization? I don't know if you know the answer to that one, but if not then I'll see if maybe Craig would know.

30:36 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. I mean, definitely the Strata Property Act has been evolving to accommodate more digital channels. Now it is allowing people to have their meeting minutes, financial statements sent to an email if you choose that. Before it was just everything had to go to physical mail. So definitely that is evolving.

31:07 Ryan Grant: Great, and looks like Craig is here, so I'll just bring him in and maybe he can help elaborate on that question. Yeah, hello Craig.

31:15 Craig Moore: Hey Ryan, hey guys, hi Ioana. Okay, that's a loaded question Ryan. I'm a strata owner. Do I want my email and phone number out there? Generally no, I don't. I'm going to communicate with the property manager, and they have strict rules about what they can do with my information. And advocating for that, to be quite honest, there's a lot more important things to advocate for with regard to strata, and access to records.

31:45 Owners have access to records now, it's just not the most simple way to get at them. It has to be a request, and it has to be filtered through the channels, and potentially they have to pay to get copies of the records and whatnot. So there's more there that can be done to provide access to information for owners. But the process exists now. But as a strata owner I can tell you, I want to keep that information close at hand.

32:18 And I do know a lot of communities that release an owners' list with emails and phone numbers for those who want to be on it, so that's great. There's lots of people who do want to communicate with others and have their information out there, so it's good for them, and there'll always be a subset of those people within each community.

32:38 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, exactly. And with FabricApp it's an opt-in type of thing, so if you don't want to download the app and use it you don't have to. You're not putting in personal information into the system first, you are putting it onto the resident to download and then provide their information and give consent. So we always put that consent piece onto the residents, so they have the choice if they want to share that.

33:09 Ryan Grant: Perfect. Looks like we're out of time, so we'll just be going over to the next presentation now. But thank you so much for coming and showing everybody about FabricApp, Ioana, that was really great.

33:22 Ioana Hastings: Yeah, thanks so much you guys, that was great.

33:25 Ryan Grant: Awesome, thank you, and bye.