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17th Annual LD Micro Main Event Conference

Oct 30, 2024

Speaker 4

Canada would recommend their company that they're actually managing their properties for somebody else. That's called an NPS score. Proud to tell you, we hover around the 80 %+, our company, and we do it with technology first. So this is kind of going to take you on a journey of why this is arguably the biggest industry that you have not thought of as an investor or somebody who takes interest in public companies. We are a company trading on the TSX. We're obviously going after a big industry. I spoke a lot about HOA, but actually, believe it or not, 50% of our business is actually now coming from rental properties as well. We are a unique company in Canada and arguably in the U.S. by way of being the company that actually has technology that solves problems for those types of assets.

We actually service other assets, residential assets. I'll be explaining that in a second. We've had a strong financial performance, and we're a Fast 50 company in the technology space for three years in a row now. Proven acquisition track record. So we go buy traditional property management companies and roll them into our ecosystem and digitize them and make them more profitable. We have an experienced management team, and we lead with our technology, as I mentioned earlier. Market cap is a little outdated here. It's about CAD 15 million. Still an absolute steal as you learn more about the business. So to give you a perspective, when you think of residential, you think people live in either a condo, single-family home, or obviously a rental building. Actually, we service a bigger MDU market than that. We service what we call Strata Condo HOA, multi-family rental.

These tend to be buildings owned by family offices, some developers, or REITs. A lot of REITs that you probably are aware of don't manage themselves. They actually allow the management to occur with a third-party company. Single units, if you, anybody here's ever been to Vancouver? I know some of you are from Vancouver, but yeah, so if you ever take a boat out at nighttime, it's like an interesting exercise, and look at all those big towers. You'll see actually that about maybe half of them are dark at night. And that's simply because of foreign ownership, so a lot of these units actually are available to be rented out.

So in the last two, three years, our government is like, "We have housing problems, so we need these units to be rented out." So we have actually a technology platform that allows people in the buildings that we manage to actually go out there and actually with a click of a button, and we actually rent these out for them on their behalf, and we clip on that. Commercial real estate, we're not really a commercial real estate property management company, however, because the way people are building communities looks different. If you're familiar with a lot of the new developments in the neighborhoods that you may have visited, they've taken a whole bunch of single-family homes, got rid of them, and actually built this kind of community.

And these communities tend to have a little bit of retail, a little bit of commercial, could even be some family offices, and they'll have some even rental as well as maybe condos. So we actually are a one-stop shop that actually has solutions for all these types of places. And then not-for-profit, which you may not know this, but so many cities own residential homes or residential buildings that they manage. And there's a whole world of not-for-profit organizations that are actually involved in that that we actually manage for as well. So when we say we're a tech-first company, we actually literally started as a technology company. We actually built our software to help people that live in these HOAs. And in 2018, we started to have quite a bit of traction on the software.

So we actually got to watch how people, especially property management companies, use our software in their ecosystem. And it was very evident to us pretty quickly that we have a massive opportunity to not just license our software into these communities, but to actually become the property management company. So we piloted in 2018, literally January 2018, a solution out in the market out of a little downtown core of Vancouver. So we literally had zero assets under management in 2018 in January. And today we're grown. We're the fastest-growing property management company in Canada. And I'm not playing words. This is the fastest-growing property management company in Canada compared to the traditional ones. And we have about CAD 41 billion-CAD 42 billion of assets under management. The way we do it is we go to developers and we give them pre- and post-occupancy solutions.

It's a fancy way of saying, think of all the different stages a construction, condo construction is going through, or a rental building going through. We have software that helps the developer navigate through all the deficiencies as it completes. Building is completed. About 100, 200, 300 people are about to move into the building. Actually, our application morphs into a walkthrough application to allow you to check out and quality control your condo. It has a whole back office for things like warranty items, replacements, so on and so forth, then you move in, and the same application that you've downloaded becomes your home manual and your floor plan and all the documentation for closing, so everything associated with the building. It also has your information about your concierge, if you're lucky to have one, people that work in the building, your property management company, permitting, documentations, everything.

And then in addition to that, we have an AI platform for buildings that are actually five years or older that runs on top and actually benchmarks the performance of your building. So if you're ever part of an HOA, and if I said to you, "How is your building managed?" it's usually a binary answer, terribly managed or greatly managed. So if you said to me, "Greatly managed," you don't really know how to compare it to somebody else because you don't have the way to benchmark that. So we actually generate reports on our platform that allows you to know that the spending of your building through HOA fees is how it benchmarks against buildings that are very similar, not just the population, just very specific buildings similar to yours. So we can actually identify the outliers. Our building is spending too much gas.

Maybe it's time for us to contemplate what we're doing for heating. It's spending too much electricity, whatever the case may be. So we've got a long list of these types of items. We do the actual property management work. And for those that aren't familiar with the space, property management does not mean we are the ones cleaning the carpet. They're not on our payroll. We're not the ones doing the plumbing. It actually means utilizing our back office. We actually hire the third parties that actually go out and do that work. And then we have the residents' app. This is the app that you have as a homeowner for your perhaps voting, proxies, connecting with your neighbors, and also getting a significant amount of information about the neighborhood. It has a great social layer. I can only imagine what it would be like around election time here.

But in stuff like World Cup and events like that, it's a social layer that allows people to connect, maybe book the party room downstairs, go watch a soccer game together, these types of activities around. And then most importantly, we have a really, really comprehensive marketplace. A marketplace because of the amount of data we have about everybody that lives in our buildings that curates the best services and leverages our group buying power and puts that in front of you as a homeowner. It's complicated. Running a building is very complicated. It's shocking that digitization has not penetrated that space yet. But when you start building software for it, you understand why it's so difficult. We've been at it now for multiple years, and we keep adding feature after feature after feature. And we're still scratching the surface in terms of opportunities.

The biggest issue with the space and the reason there's, if I said to you, "Name me the big player in this space," you couldn't name one, not because you're not very bright or you're not familiar. It's simply because it hasn't been disrupted, simply because it's complicated. There's guys that build bits and pieces of this. Nobody's taken a holistic approach yet and made that investment. And certainly, I mean, the reaction from the market has been amazing for us in terms of the usability and the amount of people that are interested in our solutions. We make money two ways. It's a kind of a tricky way for me to hide a whole lot of slides with tens of items of revenue streams. So we just put them into two big buckets. One bucket is recurring revenue. That's our what we call MRR, monthly recurring revenue.

We charge an HOA a monthly fee, and we also charge a big REIT or a big rental community a percent of the rent. That's how we get paid, and that's just recurring, and the reason it's recurring and the reason we never have receivable problems is because we control the bank accounts, so we pay ourselves at the first of every month. On the transactional revenue, that's in-app purchases, so if you think of we have almost 103,000-104,000 people in homes that manage our communities that utilize our technology, think of them interfacing with us. We have just obtained opportunities to sell products and services to them that are not just high-margin products and services. It's actually very specific to the market. We also have financial services, so this is an interesting one.

If you live in an HOA, you own an HOA, this might get your blood boiling a little bit. If you go back and you actually took the budget and you actually looked at how much you spent on banking fees for the community, you'll be shocked. In our case, banking is actually free for all of our communities. We took that group buying power. We negotiated right across the country. In the case of ours, Canada, we have five banks. We negotiated that. We got the best rates. Not only that, but your building is actually better managed in our communities. This is, on the left-hand side on the top, a traditional property management company in Canada. They charge approximately CAD 20 per month per door, CAD 2 transactions, and 30%-35% of gross margin.

As of last quarter, we're running at about a run rate of about CAD 39 per home and CAD 9 additional transactions with 42% gross margin. When we calculate our gross margin, we actually in our cost of goods, we actually put all of compliance. We put all of our technology. We put all of our accounting services. We put all of our accounting property accountants and property managers as well. The reason this is important is because your instinct might tell you, "We charge more." That means the buildings that we manage spent more money monthly. Or you as an HOA owner or homeowner, you're spending more. You're not. In the buildings that we manage, they spent less per square foot on a long list of items than a traditional high rise or a building that's not managed by us.

So really, at the end of the day, you're not waking up going, "Oh, I'm paying Tribe CAD 39," or CAD 20 in case you have a competitor of ours. You're really just worried about how much maintenance fees you're paying. And our buildings are significantly healthier. Here's some data. I could bore you to death with information we have. We just chose four categories. In yellow is Tribe, high rises in Canada. In black, the population. Okay? So you'll see energy per sq ft, our buildings are lower. Insurance premiums per sq ft, significantly lower, 20%. And just to give you a perspective, most buildings are running at about close to CAD 150,000-CAD 200,000 premium a year. So that's a massive saving for them.

And that's a function of the amount of data and technology that we have that allows the underwriter to get a lot more comfortable with the building that they're managing or they're about to write up. Look at our revenue from reserve funds per square foot. It's a fancy way of saying we manage about CAD 380,000-CAD 400 million annually on behalf of our communities. We go out there to a bank, make that capital available to them. And then in return, we actually generate a lot more revenue for our customers. And look at our admin costs per square foot. That's a function of if you have three shifts of concierge. With our case, you can go to one and a half.

If there's no paper, there's no packages, there's no AGM fees that we charge, all the stuff that you may be accustomed to here, we completely take it away because we're quite frankly and simply running digitally. Long list of clients, customers, REITs that we work with in Canada. Not to impress you, just to impress upon you two things. One is our broad reach. And the second thing is this isn't a solution for really high-end buildings. This isn't just for the Shangri-Las or the PacRims or the ones that you may recognize. There's also buildings that are in our mids that are CAD 150,000-CAD 200,000. Actually, it probably doesn't exist anymore, but close to CAD 400 a sq ft, CAD 500 a sq ft. So it's not really a privileged platform or a solution of ours. We actually do this for everybody.

It doesn't matter how many amenities you have in your community. Everything is fair game for us because all we want to do is just make sure that we lower your operating expenditure. This is our revenue for the last few years. You'll see that we're well on our way. This includes organic and non-organic, which will be the acquisitions. And then because we are the little engine that could, remember, CAD 15 million market cap, we needed to go out there and compete against two larger companies than us in Canada. First one is FirstService, CAD 11 billion market cap. And the second one is Associa, approximately $4.5 billion market cap. But we need to compete with them in Canada. This is us building an infrastructure and expediting our EBITDA journey to positive ground. We're very, very close. We're weeks away from achieving the goal.

The good news with us is we don't have spikes. This is a case of just keep building on the base and keep growing it. Now your infrastructure is built across the country. Now you can go out there and everything else on top of that is additional. Is the key between you and the other two competitors your software? Yeah, we're software first. To give you an example, because they published that and one of them is a public company, they boast about their software platform. And they say that they've moved it from 11%- 13% penetration in the last year. And we have penetration, meaning their software is deployed in about 13% of their population. And that's how they interface with them. In our case, it's approximately 78% as of the last quarter.

But on the year, it'll be about 80%. And the other key, since you've asked a good question about differences, the other key is we monetize the data that we accumulate by actually providing further services to the community by way of either partnerships or what have you. And it's all services that lower the operating expenses of the building. And it's not a crazy idea. It really is just a whole bunch of data that gives us insight into what the building needs are or the homeowners' needs are. And we just curate products and services for them in the market. This is just a quick snapshot on our last quarter significant improvement. We do anticipate to be EBITDA positive. We hit that mark by the end of this year. We just made an acquisition out of Toronto. It's a company called DMS Property Management.

It is the company that allowed us to expand our geographical footprint. We were players in that market, but we had very little concentration, but they added closer to 19,000 homes in that market, and it's an accretive transaction. Overwhelming majority of acquisitions that we look at are accretive. We usually take them in this particular case. It's a very profitable company, so we're very proud of that transaction, but most companies that we look at tend to be around the 7%-8% EBITDA, and we can turn them into 14%-15% EBITDA with our digital strategy and some of the solutions that we deploy. Some examples of the acquisitions that we've made, and I mentioned earlier that we have quite a bit of interest in the U.S. market. In case you're curious about the difference between Canada and the U.S.

In this space, I'll tell you, as a Canadian, we usually look up to the U.S. for everything they do, essentially. You're way ahead. Vancouver adopted Uber, this crazy thing called Uber four years ago or three years ago. Still doesn't work that well here. But so we're usually looking up to that. It is weird how HOA is a little bit ahead in terms of regulation and the processes. And that probably is mimicked in the frustration everybody has with their HOAs here. The regulation, it's a four-letter word. Most people don't like it. And I get that. However, it is really required when you contemplate this. I remember in Vancouver where a condo was CAD 45,000. Like, this is real. And I'm not 100 years old. I look like I'm 100 years old, but I'm not. But I remember that. I remember.

You actually walk around and you're thinking, "Okay, well, if the maintenance fee is CAD 75-CAD 100 a month, it's kind of manageable." But when things started to go in the exact same condo, and I'm not exaggerating, the exact same condo is probably closer to CAD 600,000-CAD 700,000 now in the span of 20-plus years. We needed our regulation to increase because the dollar amounts to maintain these communities increased. So the government had to step in and go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Are you licensed? Do you know what you're doing? Are these communities going to be okay?" We had a funny incident in Vancouver. They discovered that it rains and that a lot of our condos start leaking. I'm being facetious, but it's a true story. And actually, a ton of our condos start leaking.

So this became a massive problem because a lot of developers washed their hands. There were no warranties. You couldn't insure them. So this actually accelerated the government's involvement in saying, "Well, hold on a second. This class of living, it's no longer 10% of the population. It's becoming the norm, especially in a market where things are getting that expensive." So when you go to Miami and you're seeing this incredible development, take Chicago, take Chicago and New York. They're ballers. They've been building high rises for a long time. And the mafia has got a good handle on the property management there. But everywhere else, including downtown LA, San Francisco, all these new communities are still catching up in terms of regulation. So I would tell you with confidence that Canada is actually exporting its expertise to the market. This is not only happening to the U.S.

It's happening in Dubai, Abu Dhabi. It's happening in the northern part of the Middle East. And it's happening to a lot of parts of Europe as well. So I share that with you because we have aspiration to have presence in the U.S. And I got to tell you, it's the biggest market. I'm telling you with absolute confidence. It's the biggest market you have never thought of because it's about $120 billion annually spent on just maintaining the communities that fall under the categories that we manage. And you don't have to be in every state. You don't have to be in every city. This is really a handful of spots that has all the concentration and the density. A little bit about our market cap. Tightly held company, 33 million outstanding shares. 29% represents the float. 25% is PROPELR.

PROPELR is one of Canada's largest growth capital funds. They've been with us for three, four years now. They've re-upped in every transaction, including yours truly, and many of our shareholders. And we have founders and directors about 13%. And the industry and strategic investors are about 33%. We'll circulate this deck as well for those that are interested. Very, very strong management team, plus myself. Angelo Bartolini, our CFO, was the ex-CFO of Altus Group. And Altus Group was arguably the most successful prop tech company on the TSX for the last 20 years. Scott Ullrich, Executive Vice- President. And we have Danielle Riddick, Corporate Secretary, and Jennifer overseeing all of our marketing communication. Why Tribe? Well, because you couldn't name another company that's disrupting the space and we're first to market and we've expanded quite a bit. Technology first. Gross margins continue to improve.

We have unlimited amount of revenue streams in an industry that continues to grow. I mean, listen, maybe some of us live in single-family homes. 10 years, it's going to be different. Your kids are likely going to be living in condos. They're going to be living in townhouses, or they're going to be hopefully renting luxury if that's the choice they make, but that is going to be the future. It's not going to be single-family homes. That's the size we've got. We have a very aggressive M&As who have organic and non-organic growth with a very experienced team, and we're constantly adding catalysts, so I just say, have a look at us, take a flyer, put us on your watch list. We continue to hum along. We're going to do about CAD 26-CAD 27 million this year in recurring revenue.

Next year, without any further acquisitions, if we don't make any further acquisitions, we'll be around the 32, 33. So steady growth in an industry that needs it.

Speaker 5

Okay.

Speaker 4

Bless you.

Speaker 5

Any questions? Yes.

Speaker 1

You talked about monetization opportunities with other entities. Who do you work with? Is Bilt Rewards on your radar? Who? Bilt Rewards.

Speaker 4

Oh, Bilt Rewards. Yeah. So we work with a long list of players. I'm going to put them in categories. So you got consumer products. We've got grocery delivery guys. We've got those types of guys for the home, right? We have some really unique products, like insurance products. We can actually go get you underwriter quotes, three or four of them, and you can choose from them. Then we work with building infrastructure players. So this building is old and requires some new access. So we'll bring that.

Vancouver is having this, or not Vancouver. Actually, I should say British Columbia is having this injection of electric vehicles. Buildings are not ready for electric vehicles. So we actually brought in a solution that's really unique that can actually bring in and get the building ready for that. And we just keep clipping on that. We essentially keep getting revenue share from that. Yes. Any question? Yes.

Speaker 2

As investors, what are the KPIs we should be watching?

Speaker 4

Yeah, great question. So what are the KPIs? Sorry, I forgot that I have to mention that again for the camera. But what are the KPIs that you should be watching for? I think in our case, revenue per door, number of doors, obviously. So, on the gross margins, these are kind of critical ones.

And the transactional revenue that we generate that kind of accompanies our performance on the revenue per door. So revenue is the contracted, recurring, and then how our platform is performing in terms of adding more revenue per door on a monthly basis. And those are KPIs that we tend to put out every quarter and speak about. Thank you. Any more questions? Yes.

Speaker 3

Would you show some of the statistical differences in what you offer and how you empower your customers? The insurance, is that an apples-to-apples comparison because it's just such a large differential?

Speaker 4

The 20% decrease?

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Is that much?

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Anything left to be negotiated? What's the data set that you have?

Speaker 4

No, that's. Well, so our data set would be all of our policies for the last five years for every single one of our buildings. That's our data set.

And it gets compared to other buildings similar to the same size. And they look per sq ft. So they actually compare apples to apples. But the reason it's a great question, by the way. I love that question because it really makes you realize how primitive the industry has been. Underwriters, when they come in and look at a building, it's a CAD 200 million asset, just as an example, right? And they're going, "Okay, we're going to insure it." They really don't have much in terms of history. When was the last time there was a leak? How fast is the response time? Because if it starts leaking in floor number 14 and we don't catch it and jump on it for three hours, that could be CAD 400,000 damage, right? So when we come in and say, "Look, we've got communication alerts. We've got the ability.

We've done all the work. Look at the history of that building," and by the way, they haven't had a case for the last three, four years. So you shouldn't be treating them the exact same way as next door. That can't prove that. That's how the principles come down in our case. Thank you so much. That's all the time we have for today. All right. Thank you, guys.

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