Real estate has been a dominant investment field and industry for generations, and like any field has its own specific needs and pain points. Property owners and investors in the modern day can manage property portfolios in the thousands of units or more, and large portfolios make the costs and demands of effective management and development grow exponentially. In short, traditional property management requires excessive effort for disproportionately small returns on investment, as managing activity and getting administrative work done takes up time that could be spent on achieving property goals.
It’s this problem that Smart Management seeks to solve. Founded by real estate veterans Tim Bratz, Brian Fast, and Matt Carlin, portfolio and property management are merely old challenges in need of new solutions. Smart Management’s goal is to create a world where property managers, owners, investors, and their partners can all work from a single source of truth instead of juggling disconnected tools and spreadsheets. Through clear financials, integrated workflows, automated best practices, AI accelerators, and real-time visibility into performance data, Smart Management promises to give teams a single ecosystem that lets complex strategy become a matter of daily execution.
“We want to be the preferred property management software provider for owners, operators, investors and lenders due to our radical transparency, ease of use and design that focuses on forcing results,” says [SPOKESPERSON]. “Our goal is to get to the point where we can make our software usage totally free in order to positively impact the most users for the greatest good.”
Built By Experts, For Experts
The team behind Smart Management has spent nearly five years developing their new platform, and their firsthand experiences with property management have informed every minute of that time. From Fast’s experience fighting inefficient property management and his engineering doctorate, to Bratz and Carlin’s work overseeing and managing Legacy Wealth Holdings’ massive portfolio of apartment units, Smart Management is run by and for expert investors and managers. With over 15 years of industry experience, the team knows the pain points and how they can address them.
The team can largely be split into two categories: the Legacy Wealth Holdings team, and the software engineering team led by Fast. The former has specialized in finding distressed assets and implementing comprehensive physical and economic renovations of the full premises. They’ve long taken pride in cleaning up communities and giving residents a place they’d be proud to call home, often in partnership with other third-party property management companies, but more recently through their own in-house company. The technical team run by Brian Fast, an investor in Legacy Wealth Holdings who stepped up with ideas for designing a better software solution, is the brains behind the technology, and Smart Management’s CEO.
“Brian has a doctorate in engineering and has spent his career as the “go to fixer” for companies like Northrop Grumman and Rockwell Automation,” says [SPOKESPERSON]. “He’s been recognized for delivering over $100M+ of financial impact through automation and software engineering.”
Improving Efficiency And Empowering Development
The nature of modern property management is inefficient both technically and paradigmatically. Property management, in general, makes money through volume, which incentivizes obtaining a wide clientele and a large portfolio at the cost of any opportunity to focus on individual goals. In casting such a wide net, property goals are sidelined for other tasks, which results in bloated timelines, skyrocketing costs, and routinely failing individual projects. The Smart Management team, who have owned and managed as many as 6,000 units historically and over 3000 currently, has seen this pattern time and time again.
“Smart Management turns an antiquated industry on its head and forces investments to achieve their goals in a shorter timeline through smart automation, AI co-pilots and built in SOPs,” explains [SPOKESPERSON]. “No one needs to remember what to do and when to do it. The software pushes bodies where they need to be in order to do what needs to be done. Based on our real case studies, we’ve seen a 10% increase in rents, 20% reduction in repetitive tasks and a 30% reduction in timelines.”
After a half-decade development process combining the experience in both real estate and software engineering, Smart Management’s platform is ready to change things. Unlike other platforms and tools for property management, this new ecosystem allows teams to house and access information about the properties in their portfolio, while also giving them the tools they need to advance projects directly. Smart Management’s functions include:
- Real time data transparency via live reconciliations and automated alerts, which give owners the ability to act on accurate and current data
- Proactive management with automated forecasting, renewals, and task prioritization to stay ahead of issues
- Lower pricing for full functionality compared to competitor’s software by replacing multiple subscriptions while retaining equivalent or superior functionality
- Features designed to increase income and reduce expenses, leading to NOI optimization and boosted property cash flow
- Asset value optimization via NOI optimization, which allows portfolio values to increase dramatically, turning marginal properties into valuable assets
Smart Management has completed all of their testing of this new management ecosystem in-house on their own portfolio, ensuring that it worked smoothly and effectively before rolling it out to their network contacts and the public. Further software expansions are planned for the coming year, including portals for both investor and vendor management; an employee locator; a construction management tool, complete with submittal general and Gantt charts; and 360 degree photos, floor plans, and digital staging. The goal is to tackle the needs of other industries in time, but for now the plan is to make Smart Management the one-stop-shop for all property operational management needs.
The onboarding process is designed to be as simple as possible. Customers are given a dedicated Customer Success Specialist trained to provide high-quality onboarding and guidance during the initial stages of implementation. After that initial set up and training, customers will be provided with a Customer Service Manager as a point of contact for any future needs. The workload for these roles are capped internally at specific, tested thresholds to ensure that customers consistently receive prompt and effective service.
“We’ve designed SM to make onboarding as simple as possible, having worked with most of the other software providers,” [SPOKESPERSON] says. “We’ve been able to take the data entry down from several days (using competitors) to a few minutes by designing Smart Management around report uploads to get the information in seamlessly.”
