Welcome.
Thank you.
Great to have you here. We're finishing up the conference. Hard to believe four days of extremely busy, you know, conference activity. My name's Rod Hall. I cover hardware technology, but also really infrastructure technology and consumer systems for Goldman Sachs. Very pleased to have SmartRent here. Lucas Haldeman, the CEO and Founder of the company. Lucas, thanks for coming. Really good to have you here at the conference.
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you for having us.
Yeah.
It's been a great conference.
Yeah. I'm really looking forward to this conversation because, you know, we get to dive into the real estate market a little bit, which is something we don't get to do too much on my team.
Yep.
I'm very interested in that market, so.
Yep. It's an interesting market.
I thought that maybe the best way to start this would be to have you give an introduction of yourself and the company. Just kind of explain what SmartRent does for investors that might be listening in or watching who aren't as familiar with the company.
Sure.
Could start there.
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks everyone who's here for coming, and we're excited to be here. We started SmartRent really as frustrated real estate operators looking for a technology platform that we couldn't find, and it was really around harnessing the power of smart hardware, smart technology. What we found as operators, what was missing was there was really no enterprise management of these systems. There was lots of good devices, and they were great for your house or my house, but no one ever thought about, well, how do I manage 50,000 or 100,000 or a million of these?
Right.
At its base level, that's what we created SmartRent to do, is to be primarily hardware agnostic, work with lots of great brands of smart hardware, but tie it all and harness the power so that owners can actually benefit. Real estate owners can benefit from the data and actually make things actionable. Then, sort of dovetailing off of that thesis was around we also have our own hardware division where we build some of our own hardware. So we were hardware agnostic, but there were gaps in the product line, and we needed to go build some of that. We do that.
The last piece of our business, we know from being operators you can't mail a box of smart home stuff to an apartment and expect anything to happen with it.
Yeah.
Other than it becomes a door stop, maybe. We have a large professional services, field services team where we do the installation and the training.
Yeah, it's like most businesses, you as an analyst, you start hearing about it and you think, "Boy, this is awfully complicated." You know, kudos to guys like you that go out and do this from scratch. It's kind of unbelievable the length of time to make it happen.
Yeah.
The other thing I'd say is that hardware agnosticism, we've always thought was a great idea. You focus on what you're good at and let the hardware guys design the hardware.
Yeah. I mean, we get to benefit from every major consumer brand, you know, from Amazon to Google to Honeywell to Yale. We benefit from all of their R&D.
Right.
We felt like, you know, others have taken the opposite approach of being a very closed system, and we just we feel like philosophically, that's the wrong approach to take in this day and age.
Right. Yeah. We tend to agree with that. The value proposition to the operator, can you talk a little bit about that? What, why does somebody who's running a multi-tenant, you know, sort of a building wanna work with SmartRent? What is it about this that appeals to them?
Yeah. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of this business is there are so many different ways you can get ROI. It kind of goes to both the P and the L side of the P&L. On the revenue side this is having a smart apartment is something that residents want and will pay you more for. Just like if you have hardwood floors or a granite countertop or a view, you get more in rent, and this is an amenity that residents want. That's the easiest one to kind of describe is hey, your residents will just pay you more rent. We have some great public companies that have come out on their earnings calls and given us that data.
We have real data we can point to that says you're getting $35-$50 a month rent bump per unit, per month. That's the one side. The other side that I think is more impactful but harder to underwrite is around how smart devices can better protect and better control our assets. If you think about leak sensors, if you don't spend a lot of time in multifamily, it may not be intuitive, but 70% of the damage done to apartments is caused by water.
Mm-hmm.
It's not like, oh, that's a trivial little thing. Like, that's the number one, two, and three reason that apartments get damaged. Putting in leak sensors and writing an emergency work order when that gets wet, that has real substantial savings to the owner. The other thing I'd touch on is, before SmartRent, I came from the single-family rental side, where we pioneered this idea of a Self-Guided Tour where you could pre-qualify yourself and go visit a home without meeting a leasing agent, without meeting someone. We've now seen the multifamily industry really embrace that.
You know, COVID was actually a great catalyst for that, where people who had been doing business one way for a long time suddenly said, "I can't just keep doing business the same way," and opened their eyes to these new things. We're seeing some owners that are saving 30, 40, 50% of their labor cost by embracing technology.
Interesting. What would you say the biggest challenge to getting people to adopt this is in the industry?
Well, I would have a different answer before we had the supply chain issue.
Right. Like, let's say supply chain was normal.
Yeah.
What would the
It really, I think what we fight in the real estate industry in general is just inertia.
Yeah.
It's trying to get someone to think outside of the way they've always done business. It's not an industry that likes to be a leader in innovation. It's a follower.
Right
If we can sit down and actually go through the value with people, it's a very easy conversation, but initially, it's a little shocking to say, "Well, I've always done it this way, and why would I change that?
You've done it smartly, partnered with some big developers, you know, big operators, developers that I think probably helps with that as well. You get kind of some scale adoption within those.
Very much so. When we came to market, we targeted the largest real estate owners first, for one obvious reason, which is they have scale. If you own 100,000 units, that's a great account to get. The other thing that isn't as obvious is the top 15 or top 20 real estate owners in multifamily are really on the leading edge, and they're a great marketing tool for us.
Mm.
Where we actually say, "Don't take our word for it. Look at UDR." "Look at Essex. Look at MAA." You know, these companies are a great source of marketing for us, and it tends to be when you look at the real estate world, it's a very long tail of institutionally managed apartments. There's thousands of owners that own, say, 5,000 or more units, but they all look to the largest operators for what they're doing, whether that's smart apartments or CRM or anything that they're sort of the leading edge.
My understanding of the industry too, the owners, the properties transact a lot. It's kind of a liquid market. If these major owners start adopting your technology, all of a sudden, if you wanna sell to them, you probably wanna have the same technology. Is that the right way to think about the industry or?
Yeah, that's the right way to think about the industry. We definitely, as an industry, there's so many variables that go on when you're managing assets that are all around the country that you crave homogeneity wherever you can find it. We don't run two accounting platforms, we don't run two operating systems, and we don't have two different smart home vendors. That's, for us, it's a great benefit. Our natural growth happens just as our customers buy more properties, that we do.
Right
Without going back and reselling anything. We just literally every week get new orders in from existing customers that say, "Well, we just bought a building. Let's go do it.
One of the things that probably most people, when you talk about automation, home automation, building automation, they'd immediately think about locks, but there are other things that SmartRent offers as services or products that I don't think are as obvious. I wonder if you could dig into, you know, some of the different offerings you've got, particularly things like parking and so on that are, I think, interesting and innovative.
Yeah. Yeah, you do when you think of a smart home, you think of the home, but it actually, it's a great point, right? It does start outside the home in the parking lot. Even if you just think about the friction, whether you're in a multifamily building or even at your office, like, of people parking in the wrong spot is a huge headache, and we've always relied on humans to have to go solve that issue. We now can augment that with technology. We have smart parking. We have a smart video intercom. When you approach the front door, you're able to get in. And then common area Access Control we think of separately from unit access. That's more like parking garages and elevators and front doors to the lobby.
That's a different product line as well. Really it goes from the curb to the couch, as we say that all the way through. It's another benefit of being hardware-agnostic, is we can take all these different great devices that have been created and put them into this one platform to manage.
I know you and I talked about this parking opportunity. It could be turned into a revenue source for owners as well. Is that correct? I mean
It is being turned into a revenue source for owners. It's a great point. Really one of the interesting trends we noticed when we started building this product is the construction rules haven't changed. You have to build the same number of parking spaces as you always have in the past, but residents own fewer cars. There's this excess inventory of parking spaces at a lot of these properties that aren't being filled by residents. We can turn that and monetize that into guest parking for the owner. They can actually put that into you know a parking platform, and we handle all the transactions. You pull in, you put in your information, you rent it out.
We're seeing some owners, a lot of properties that we have are nearby stadiums or ball fields, and they're doing game day parking, and they're making some pretty amazing revenue off of spaces that are just sitting there. Every owner hates space that isn't rentable, right?
Yeah.
If you're in the rental business. It's a very attractive entry to say, "What if I." You had some parking that's sitting there, what if that started generating revenue? It's exciting.
I think it's really interesting 'cause I just signed up for Cruise in San Francisco. It has fully roboticized cars. There's no drivers. You can go and order a car. It's very limited right now. But you wonder, well, you know that world's gonna grow.
Yeah.
Where do those cars park?
Right.
You know, what if they need to be parked somewhere, and you think, well, this would be a fantastic. It could be automated. It's really
Exactly, yeah.
an interesting area of development, I think.
I think it's gonna be a huge part of our growth going forward, for sure.
Let's talk about the pipeline a little bit. Could you just kind of give us an update on the committed units pipeline? Supply chain's been affecting some of this as well, but you know, how does that pipeline look today? Anything else you wanna say about you know, the outlook there?
Well, I mean, we're seeing every week we see stronger demand than we did the week before. It's a pretty incredible macro wave that we're benefiting from of everyone. It's our platform is broad and has different points that are appealing to different owners, but every owner is interested in some product we have, whether it's talking about using less staff to manage your property or talking about better protecting your asset. The demand continues to be incredibly favorable for us. You know, we have a backlog of committed units, you know, over 780,000 units that in the next two years will be coming onto the platform. Even beyond that, though, our current owners own 6.6 million units.
The pipeline, you know, and before we even pass the two years, we just have this. That some of the things we've been talking about some of the investors today is like, there's just this natural growth that's coming. Like, we've already done all the acquisition work, the hard cost to say, I like to sometimes. I'm not going to actually do it, but sometimes I can say, like, we could actually stop selling and say, "This would still be a business you would invest in.
Right.
Of course, we're not. We're out selling every day, but that just makes it more and more interesting.
We were yesterday talking about the real estate market in general, and I'd like to maybe get you to give us a little bit of a backdrop because I think a lot of investors that look at technology areas may not be as familiar with the shortage of housing and so on.
Yeah.
Could you give a little bit of that backdrop and then talk about the macro sensitivity of the business and what happens if we do get into a recession next year? You know, what would you expect to happen to SmartRent?
Yeah. I think it's something that's on all of our minds because of the macro backdrop. When you're looking at it today, apartments are printing. Apartment owners are having some of the best results they've ever had.
Right.
Partly a by-product of inflation. They're raising their rents. Even, like, last quarter, you could look at a UDR who's public, and they had 13% same-store growth. These are massive numbers. Like, we don't. You know, MAA in Q1 had 12% same-store growth. We never heard numbers like that. I mean, that's incredible, right?
What's the normal number of what good-
4-6 would be a great year.
Right.
Right? I mean, if you used to say, "I can grow rents at 4% and grow expenses at 2%," like that's.
That's a really good year.
Yeah, that's a great business. You know, like, you're happy with that, you're getting your bonus. These numbers are large. That creates a backdrop where there's huge demand. It comes back to what you alluded to, which is we have a shortage of rental housing. We have a shortage of housing period, but rental housing in the US. We still have demand outpacing supply. That being said, what I think is interesting about SmartRent is the other side of it is if we did go into a recession where your rents weren't growing and they were flattening, then everyone, and we've seen this in other cycles, everyone goes to the expense side. We help you run a more efficient business.
Mm-hmm.
I can take away half of your leasing cost out of the expense side and better protect your assets against water. With the ROI that we drive, we won't be subject to that fluctuation in cycles, that you'll actually always have a reason to roll us out.
Right now you've got this backlog, but then it should be the case that if things get worse from a rent point of view, you get more demand to
Yeah.
Reduce operating costs.
Yes.
Talk to me a little bit about the installation process for the product. You started off with that when you were talking about the business and setting it up.
Yeah.
Can you get into a little bit more detail on that? Like, how does the professional services side of the business work? What's required here to actually get the product installed?
Yeah. It is one of our sort of moats that we've built this large field services team that is an incredibly talented group of individuals. It's a very hard role to fill because if you think about what we're asking the person to do, they have to be mechanical because it's a construction project. You got to take the lock off, you got to take the thermostat off. You got to be a mechanically inclined person. It's technology, it's smart devices, so you have to be technical. Then the third one is you're in someone's home, it's occupied, you have to be personable. I have to like having you in my house.
Right.
To find all three, that's a unique skill set. The way our model works is we have what they're called a Field Install Manager. They're essentially a little general GC of a job, and they stay at one property. We always have one at every property. We augment that with contracted labor. We use a local general contractor to bring in labor. We have one person there who's gonna do all the pairing, all the quality assurance, and run the project.
That person is the face of SmartRent with the people, the tenants and the property owner and so on.
Right.
You have contractors come in and do the manual labor.
Yeah. That person, we also have a separate team that does the training. We'll have someone else at the property that's actually there just to train. We sit with the staff and show you how to use your new operating system. What we found is we can't get utilization of these platforms if we don't have really good training. Because it's not something that you can just say, "Here, here's your new iPhone, use it." It's like we actually gotta say, "Okay, when this happens, this is the new process." We train the leasing staff, we train the property management staff, we train the service staff, and then we're also there to help train the residents and help them understand the benefit that they're getting from these devices.
What about the competitors do this sort of thing as well, or not at all, they just kind of throw it out there? Or how does the competition respond to what you're doing in that respect?
Yeah. No one has duplicated what we're doing. All of our competitors have now started to hire people, but they're way behind. I mean, I think the difference was we were coming from being operators.
Mm-hmm.
we just intuitively knew there's no way to not do it this way. Like, it wasn't even like a real clear decision to say, "We should have a field services team." It's like, we know this isn't gonna work without it. We're now seeing because we've scaled faster than everyone and grown faster, certainly everyone is taking note of how we're doing it. Now we're out ahead and we've got that lead.
I guess that since you started off this way, you have processes in place to train people and so on. That all takes time too, right?
It does.
Develop materials and training and so on.
Yeah. Actually, even the contracted labor that we bring on has to be certified in our platform, so you have to go through a training module. All that needs to be built and understood. You can't operate at the scale we're operating at and continuing to grow that scale if you don't have a really good institutional underpinning.
Right.
You know, we've got hundreds of individuals now out installing every day. You know, you can't solve those problems with a notepad, right?
Yeah.
Like, it's gotta be a durable system.
Well, since we're on the topic, how does the labor market affect? That's been very tight. Is it tight for this sort of person? Are you finding it difficult to hire people? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah. We're fortunate that it's not difficult to hire people, but the cost is certainly going up. It's more pronounced with our contracted labor, you know, general contractors. That's actually, I believe or I hope I'll say, has peaked and started to come back down. As construction got tight in single-family homes before we started seeing interest rates rise, our labor skyrocketed. Some markets were 80% month-over-month cost difference. You know, so you've paid someone $50 and you're paying 'em $100 the next month is pretty shocking. Our W-2 staff that our Field Install Managers, we're able to attract and retain those people. We have some really low turnover there.
There's a few things that we do that drive that. The cost of labor certainly shot up on us.
Well, talk about that. How do you reduce turnover? Is it top secret or can you talk about it?
It's sort of top secret.
Okay.
No, it's not top secret. I mean, one is, I think we've always had a culture of people who come from multifamily, and even in our field team, we hire them. I think building that company culture has been really vital, that we're every one of us from myself to, you know, COO, anybody, we could go do the install. If you said to me, "Go do these apartments," I'd say, "You got it. Let me take my sport coat off, but I'll go do it." I think that permeates through the team. Another thing that we've done, which I've talked about elsewhere, but I don't think people quite understand the impact it has is we pay 100% of healthcare for every employee and their dependents.
100%. Whether you're a software engineer or a Field Install Manager or a customer service rep, we take care of that. I think that's been one of our biggest drivers of low turnover is that the cost that costs the business, if I gave you that in a raise, it wouldn't be as meaningful as saying, "I'm taking care of your health.
I guess now I wanna apply for a job after we get done with this.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah. How are you at installing smart devices?
Yeah, I don't know. Not that good. I do a little bit, but. Okay. Well, that's it. You're saying all the leadership team have to go through training for the installation process and-
Well, yeah, most of us were the original installers.
You know.
Yeah, no. Not necessarily. I wouldn't say everyone has to go through our training module, but everyone on the senior team has been there and been in the weeds. We send every new employee out for a week to be in the field to actually experience. I don't think if you haven't lived that, you don't really know what this team is experiencing, and you can't really be empathetic to what they're going through. It is a very, very difficult job. There's a lot of things going on that you're trying to manage.
When you guys started this, you were actually out installing it?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Let's talk about supply constraints a little bit.
Okay.
Supply has been a problem for everybody. Every one of these conversations I have, I've had 17 of them now, you know, supply is a topic, and you've been affected by it.
Yeah.
Can you maybe give us an update on what the status of it is, what you're seeing, what's hard to get, and how you think it progresses from here?
Yeah. I think this will be similar to the other 17 versions you've heard of this.
Yeah.
It is certainly not that there is no supply of anything, but there are isolated instances where we're still having issues getting the hardware we need. In certain cases, like, if you talk about our smart home hub that we put into every unit, I have as many of those as I want, right? Like, there's no supply constraints at all. We're fully back to sort of a normal world. Haven't totally seen the cost of the chips come back to where they should be, but at least I can get them. Then there's things that we install really around the Access Control product, which is a really important piece if you're thinking about self-guided tours. You can't do a self-guided tour if I can't get you in the front door.
It's sort of a key component. The supplier of those boards that we use has, you know, it's been a global shortage now coming on 18 months. We're just starting to see that start to improve. We're getting not as much as we want, but more in. Now the next phase of this for our business in particular is we still, even if you said tomorrow, "Here's the supply of everything you've been wanting," we still have to then go out and finish all the installation. Every day that we don't have full supply continues to push out that backlog for us. It'll take us, you know, into sort of probably middle of next year before we really come out of being impacted by the supply constraints.
We don't anticipate supply will be constrained until middle of next year, just to be clear. Even when we get the supply, we still have to go work through our backlog.
You've got to work through all the backlog.
Yeah. Yeah.
Are you seeing a thawing of the supply at this stage, or what's your feeling for what-
Yeah, I mean, I actually would be curious to see what it did. I mean, I think you talk to a lot of companies, but yeah, it feels like, it's thawing. There's still weird shortages, and it's sort of like.
Yeah
whack-a-mole, like something comes up, like now we maybe are gonna have a rail strike in
Yeah.
You know, it's like, please, can we just go back to normal. I think we're feeling optimistic, but not out of the woods, other than in certain cases we are out of the woods. To be truly through it is gonna take a little while.
Yeah. The consumer electronics end of the world is definitely, PCs in particular, very weak in terms of demand. There's supply becoming available, but most companies on the other side of that aren't seeing the benefit yet. Everybody's looking at that and saying, "Well, I should be feeling a benefit, but I don't feel too much of a benefit yet.
Yeah.
Things are getting a little bit better, I'd say, generally.
Yeah. We've seen. We've done it ourselves. We've changed components on our hardware. We've seen other vendors that we use, hardware manufacturers, willing to change their product and say, "Okay, if I can't get an ST ARM chip, I'll get a Nordic chip." There's work to make that happen, but we're seeing that happen too, which is helping.
Yeah. Yeah. Competition, let's talk about that a little bit. Who do you see as your competitors, and who do you see most in the market?
It's a straightforward question that has a more complex answer than you might expect. It's especially complicated with our acquisition of SightPlan. In March, we acquired a pure software company that sells to the same customers, multifamily software, all SaaS, no hardware. That's great in these supply chains. That broadened our breadth to where there's really no one that compares to us unless you go up to, like, a RealPage, you know, you say the, a large property management company. We've taken a big step towards being. We've always been the most comprehensive platform. That's sort of what set us apart from the beginning, is we had, we have the most breadth, and we've continued to add to that.
I know that sounds like I'm not answering that question, but so I will. On the smart home side, the IoT side, we do run into RealPage. They acquired a company called STRATIS-
Mm-hmm
Who was a competitor of ours, and they acquired a company called WhiteSky that has a competitive Wi-Fi product to ours, and so we see them. Most of the other companies, there's been consolidation. Like, IOTAS was a competitor that now is owned by ADT. They've sold to ADT. We've seen some consolidation of mergers. It's still amazing to me. I would have told you two years ago, by this time, we'll have a really strong competitor. It's a huge opportunity. There's 29 million apartments institutionally managed in the U.S. alone. Less than 1 million of them have been upgraded to be smart. There's a massive greenfield opportunity, but we haven't seen any of our competitors be successful at copying our playbook and being able to scale.
Yeah. Simply, it's pretty tough, you know, to do all of this installation plus have the technology layer and so on.
I always would say when I was into property management, property management is a pretty simple business, but it isn't easy, and that's true of our business as well. It's not wildly complex, but it's very hard to replicate what we've done. It's not easy.
Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the longer-term growth expectations you've got for the business? How fast can this thing grow? Let's say supply fixes itself by the middle of next year, like you say, but as we look out further, you know, what do you see the growth rate being for the business? What's the ballpark? How do you think about profitability too within that?
Yeah. Well, I think I'll start with the profitability and work my way there, 'cause I do believe it's very important that we get this company profitable. It's not today. We're on track to cross into profitability in sometime in next year. That's what we sort of guided publicly. That has a bearing on how fast we can grow, because we do need the staff and this team out there. I could say if I have 200 installers, one argument is say, "Go add 200 more even if you don't need them, and that way when supply frees up, you can grow much faster." We don't actually think that's prudent, and so we're not doing that.
It will mean that as we grow our monthly units, you'll see it grow in a nice pace. The macro view of that too is that, you know, if we're doing 20,000 units a month on average today, you can see a time in the not too distant future that could easily be 200,000 units in a month. You know, there's enough demand and enough supply out there that we could go do that.
Are there any other proptech proxies? You know, if you look at other proptech companies that have you know seen that kind of growth? Or do you you know think? Or you said is it such a new area that you really, there aren't good examples, historical examples for this kind of.
Well, I think.
-progress
the best historical example that I could share is just when we saw accounting move to computing.
Right
In the nineties, we went from a lot of literally ledgers.
Yeah
That's where you see Yardi and RealPage are the two dominant property management accounting systems. That really from a time of, I'll call it 1995 - 2002, basically every apartment in the country went to some system and had growth in that. We haven't seen it really in
Our vertical because there are no existing smart devices out there that owners were putting in.
I've been doing this long enough. I one time had a meeting with an investor. He'd been around a long time. We sit down to talk about the company. He pulls out a paper spreadsheet and lays it out and starts asking me questions and writing in pencil on the spreadsheet.
Yeah.
Yeah. That didn't last long. Everybody got away from that. It looked horrible. I was like.
Right
Boy, that is a lot of work, you know?
Yeah. Let's talk about M&A. On M&A, I'd like to back up to SightPlan.
Mm-hmm
Have you maybe do a little bit better, broader explanation of what SightPlan does.
Mm-hmm.
Just for investors that may not be familiar. Then talk to us a little bit more about M&A too. Are there opportunities, other opportunities out there, things that you could use maybe technologically that are available?
SightPlan was a really important strategic acquisition for us that we made in March. It was a unique situation where we'd been technically integrated with this product for almost three years, because we had a pool of shared customers. We actually have 39 shared customers who use both-
Mm-hmm
SightPlan and SmartRent. We had first-hand knowledge. We knew from these customers SightPlan works better with SmartRent works better with SightPlan. Totally complementary. What SightPlan focuses on, similar background to us in terms of operators that came out of the operations side of the industry. Terry Danner ran Riverstone, which was the second-largest fee manager in the country, and had a passion for trying to improve this process. They started out by working on the resident engagement and work order side. Some of the products that we're still offering there today is around if you need a repair done in your apartment, their work order module that we offer is a much more robust system than you're gonna get from one of the incumbent property management systems.
We also build software at SightPlan and that we're integrating into our overall stack that helps with what we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is operating properties with less staff. The idea that you would have our Answer program, the SightPlan product called Answer, allows you to have a centralized staff and smartly route calls depending on what type of call it is. You may have one HVAC guy who's at a property two miles away, and with an HVAC question, we'll automatically route to him. Then the other piece of the software is around audit and inspections of assets. When you think about that, it dovetails nicely with what we do.
Important product if you're buying or selling a property, which, as we talked about earlier, this is a very active acquisition disposition industry.
Was it just happenstance that you kept bumping into them in the market, or did you know them before? Or, you know, how did the relationship evolve with SightPlan?
Yeah. I've known them for a long time, actually. Terry and I go back to the late 1990s is when I first started working with him. I was always excited, and we always had a good relationship when it was two separate companies. We both took backing from RET Ventures, venture capital fund that their entire LP base is multifamily owners.
Mm-hmm.
If you're looking to get into multifamily, if you're on the proptech side, this is sort of the preeminent fund that you want to take money from because they have that. Those customers are LPs. We'd known them through that for a long time. We always had on our roadmap, we wanted to move into the work order and the resident engagement and the Answer, and we just realized that we're sort of blocked by them to move into that because we have all these shared customers. If I called MAA and said, "Hey, I've got a new great work order property," they'd say, "Well, we just put SightPlan in place.
I don't need to talk to you about that." We realized it was a great opportunity to grow it. Then also the team. I mean, we're retaining the team. We now have an office in Orlando, which is great. We have our Scottsdale headquarters and our Orlando headquarters, and that gives us, you know, bicoastal office presence. Great software development team, great product management team. We announced publicly. Terry Danner, who I've referenced a couple of times, has now taken over our combined SmartRent and SightPlan sales team.
Okay
... is running sales. It was great software, great, and a great team.
Okay. Interesting. We just got a few minutes left.
Mm-hmm.
I want to see if anybody in the room here has any questions. Anybody have a question? If you do, let us give you a mic and then just say who you are and.
You need a mic.
Yeah, you do need a mic because there's people listening to the stream.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Could you talk a little bit about like, I'm guessing it ranges from one to how many different devices are in a property, and then maybe force rank the top five that you see uptake across your properties?
Sure. Yeah. The question's around number of devices and top five that we put out, so I'll try to give a concise version of that. Really, if we're talking about in-unit hardware, the most important pieces of hardware that we typically deploy are the smart unit lock, so smart lock to control access, smart thermostat, to control and monitor utility usage, and then leak sensors, which I brought up again. Leak water does a lot of damage. I think those are the three where there's a tremendous amount of ROI for the owner. It's easy to kind of show where you wouldn't want any property without that. Then after that, it comes down to typically lighting control is the next most requested thing. That's. There's no.
Not a great ROI case there other than residents love being able to turn their lights on and off, obviously. We most of us who live in smart homes get used to that.
Right.
That's for the in-unit. Then I think as you go out to the property, it's sort of really around access is the primary use case and water damage, water leaks wherever there's a water line running.
Great. Any other questions? You have a question? Oh, okay. All right. Let me, I wanna come back to make sure we touch on the long-term vision for the company.
Yeah.
Because you know you just were talking about the SightPlan acquisition and this idea of anything that makes it more efficient to operate a multi-tenant building like that. Is that kinda your vision? It's not just strictly an automation thing, it's any technology that makes that easier? Is that the way you think about it? Or how would you articulate the long-term vision you've got for the company?
Yeah, that is how we think about it, and that was always really our founding philosophy. When we came up with the name SmartRent, we were actually talking about. We weren't talking about IoT devices in particular, but having it be a smart experience. We feel like the process of owning, managing, and renting an apartment is largely dysfunctional and sometimes broken, because we haven't embraced technology, you know? So really it is around how can we help owners operate more efficiently, and how can we make renting a more delightful experience as a resident. Everything we do has that lens on it. It doesn't strictly have to be hardware related, it could be just, like we talked about, your work order.
Yeah, that is the vision, that we're really looking to change the experience of operating and living in an apartment.
Right. Yeah. I've never owned or operated an apartment. I have rented them.
Yeah.
I'm wondering, what are the other pain points? Like, if you look at the other things that could be done here, what else is there to do?
Yeah. Well, the next phase that I think you'll see us open. There's a lot. There's more than we can go through.
Yeah.
... in two, so I'll just point to one, which is really around. The first step is around the Self-Guided Tour, but around the prospect management, so actually pre-leasing and using that. Then we largely have the living experience taken care of. With SightPlan and SmartRent together, most of that product is there. Then the other hardware things that, I think, are gonna be interesting macro trends that we'll look to embrace. I think it's kinda like we were talking about earlier with the self-driving cars. The other side of that is electric vehicles, that we still are very short on vehicle chargers. If you're really gonna say, you know, more than 1% of your population has an electric car, they're gonna have to solve that.
Other things we're passionate about at SmartRent is around embracing the E-E part of ESG, and helping our customers be better stewards of. They use less utilities, replace less water-damaged apartments. I think those are interesting trends. The solar battery backup. These are all sort of interesting things that are out there.
There's a lot to do then.
Yeah.
Is it? Are there companies doing some of these things, or there's not many people doing a lot of the things you've described?
It's similar to what we found when we got into the IoT space. There's companies doing them, but they're very narrowly focused, and owners don't want 30 different vendors to do one smart project. I think for us, there's an interesting opportunity to say, though, just like we didn't invent the smart lock, I don't have to invent a smart EV charger, but I can actually be the conduit to help getting those in. Vendor fatigue is a very real thing in multifamily. Being a competent vendor is very important to owners, and having someone you trust.
Great. The last thing I'll ask you, we've just got a few seconds left here, lightning round. It sounds like that process is not particularly technologically automated. Is that correct? There's no lead generation or anything like that that's being done out there?
There's a lot and a lot of proptech money has flowed into that. I think it does come down to we wanna be playing in that field as well though.
Yeah.
I think there are some. That kinda goes back to your M&A question, or there's interesting ways we can accomplish this goal. Not everything has to be built in the workshop necessarily.
It almost sounds like you could have a life cycle management of a renter. You know, if I rent one place, you could learn about me and what I like, and then know, "Oh, well I'm gonna like that building over there if I move to a new city," and manage all that and you know.
Yeah.
Even I can start to see possibilities there.
There you go. See?
So-
I love it. I love it.
Great. All right, Lucas, it's great, and we're out of time.
Yeah. All right.
Thank you very much. It's good to have you.
Thanks for having me, Rod.
Thanks for being on the company.
Yeah, thank you.