Peoria Charter Service Bus

If I get hit by a bus…..

Everyday in my training to those on my team, I would repeat certain sayings that I felt were important to ingrain and teach those that I cared about or those that I felt had what it would take to become a good property manager or overall employee. One of my classics was …If I get his by a bus, the next guy will be able to…….

Well the other day I did get hit by a bus (sic) and it did not hurt, it was actually pleasant! The bus that hit me was not moving but parked in a rest area taking a break. I noticed a huge mural painted on the side that stated ‘surf and ride’, but I knew there were no “waves or surf” around there, so I was my normal, curious self and I interviewed the bus driver to find out what this message was about. What I learned was so very interesting. The twist is that the bus has free wifi for its passengers. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words so please view the bus photo in this article, which is a Peoria Charter Bus that travels between Champaign and Chicago, Illinois.

What a fabulous idea! A bus moving down the highway with wifi. How cool is that? I loved it. Of course it got me thinking about how neat it is when a business owner makes a decision to do something unexpected and innovative. The owner of this bus company believes that by providing wifi on his bus he betters his chances of getting you to ride his bus. This is not profound, it is simply good business.

Based on that concept, then why do we as property and facility managers not realize that by providing services, like wifi, or customer service online 24/7 or automated messages, or client document portals, that can really help grow our business? Why are we not running to get the services or subscriptions for our buildings and facilities? Is it us or is it the building owner? Who is really, driving the bus, to embracing technology in our world?

I find it amazing not to find automation or connectivity in every building or facility I visit. When I travel, I look for places with wifi. Why? Because quite frankly, I cannot work or play without it. Yes, I can use my smartphone as a hotspot now for my laptop, but there are times I need to have wifi. Where I work can change in a moment. I need to work where wifi exists, yet I trudge around looking for the service. IMHO nobody has grabbed this space yet (besides Starbucks, Panera, McDonalds) other than fast food, bookstores, airports, libraries, hotels, and (what is left?)….. No office buildings, retail stores, apartment communities, condominium buildings, medical buildings, and industrial complexes, have really embraced this yet. They are just not feeling the love for these services.

In our industry we have to realize that if a bus can roll down the highway at 65 miles per hour and offer FREE wifi service, should we as building managers embrace this for our clients and visitors too? It seems like a basic utility today, yet there are common areas throughout buildings all over America with no wifi, no online customer service, no 24/7 portals of information! It is the same old thing. Call the office between 9am – 5pm, or we will snail mail it to you or if you are lucky we can send it to you via email.

That spells o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y in my book! Maybe your property can make a statement or get exposure by offering FREE wifi or online everything, 24/7. Maybe your company can make a statement and offer automated services of the basic paper you are pushing now. These efforts can be turned into exposure or marketing events for your property in the marketplace. They say being 1st is so very important. Why not make your property or company step up and take that step?

Alright, so you do not want to be first. That is totally understood. But guess what? You are NOT first in the world, just first in one small aspect of one single industry. Banking has totally embraced ATM, digital reports, cell phone apps, paperless checks, debit cards, and a host of other customer service tools. The airlines are online for everything. You can see your loved one’s flight online and watch the plane in the air, 24/7/365. Almost every single retailer or product you purchase has online services. You are not 1st in the world, just in our small part of one industry.

Try it by taking a baby step. Take one horribly painful task that is repetitive and paper intensive and think of how you can do it without paper or online or via a software as a service application (SaaS). Think of a communication step that you can use with automation. Once you start the conversation in your building or at your company, it will start to gain momentum. I can promise you that once you and your staff get a taste of efficiency or streamline a process, they will never look back. The only complaint you will get is, ‘Why did we not start this sooner?’

If you want to discuss solutions and ideas or a vision to take for your property or company, email or call me and I will be happy to listen and then may be able to make suggestions for solutions that are at your fingertips NOW! Call 312.725.0060 or email Linda@ManagerLabs.com.

Outsourcing of services has been around forever. Are you not outsourced yourself? So many of us are! If you own the property or building, you are not outsourced. Cloud computing is no different. It is simply a cost benefit analysis, coupled with the power of mobility, ease and efficiency. You do appreciate efficiency, right?

In so many cases we are about being mobile and we have not been good about customer service either. We need to change that. Our people and buildings need mobility and excellent customer service. Today it is not there yet. Cloud computing is the perfect compliment to our industry and our corporate needs. Not only will it reduce our overhead, but it will allow us to move faster and be more nimble. This is especially true in the strong need for our industry to increase collaboration and decrease redundancy.

This is certain.

Think about your own life and the services you find most convenient. Do you like to do business Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, or do you prefer doing business online 24/7/365? You need to think of the internet as an opportunity for your properties, facilities and companies to be open 24/7/365 as well. It is our job and our duty to our clients to capture as much traffic or service inquiries as humanly possible. It is called customer service. While your office may have the door closed and locked, the internet and your website should be open and ready for business. In essence your operation is open and available 24/7/365.  The cost is so miniscule compared to staffing, that it makes no sense to ignore the internet as a vital tool in your business.

Questions, just call us at Manager Labs for a 1/2 hour discussion on taking baby-steps into today’s world of making yourself strong, while the conditions are soft. You will be glad you did!

Q. How do I begin to automate or eliminate tasks that will make our property or facility management operations more efficient?

A. The most effective way to understand the task is to investigate. Or as I fondly think of this: investigate to automate or eliminate! The only way I have found to reduce our detail-laden industry is to follow each task like a detective and ask tons of questions. Hence the term, investigate!

In my past positions I would literally walk around and ask people what they were doing and why? I would also ask myself the same question about my own processes and procedures constantly. It was important for me to analyze what I was doing and reflect on how often that task would benefit our operation or company.

My favorite example is filing of anything made of paper. When I polled the staff on what task was the most hated, it was a unanimous vote of – FILING PAPER! Everyone hated it and felt it was wasteful. We began to analyze what we were filing and how we were filing it. Once we learned of the task, we began to measure the frequency of our need to access that paper we filed and how we accessed it: month, alphabetical, property name, client name, chronological, etc.

With a simple task such as filing, and changing your current ways, you will notice so much efficiency unfolding. You must analyze each task with the goal of either elimination or inclusion with another task to make it work smart for you! It may seem tedious, but property and facility management operations are so detail oriented that it really does require an in-depth analysis or investigation of what and why things are being done. Use this simple and short checklist. Post it around the office. Put it in your employee newsletter. Make this your motto – - Investigate to automate or eliminate!

• Think digital. Be sure all of your data and documents are on your server system.
• Follow the reports. Where are they being stored?
• Start a future cut-off date today. In other words, effective 2011, we will no longer ________________________.
• Whatever it is you are doing in 2010, try to stop doing it in 2011. Start a new method with a new year. It makes so much sense because it is easy to remember and document. For instance, if you print reports and file the reports in paper form. Stop all reports as of December 2010. Starting in January 2011, they will be in .pdf (portable document format) and filed in a certain folder on your server.
• Insure all MISSION CRITICAL folders on your server are backed up with a strict method in place. Back-ups need a back-up as well.
• What is inside all of those filing cabinets and how often are they retrieved?
• Back away from the copy machine.
• Stop using the fax machine and start using the scanner or only use the fax machine to scan it.
• How is it being filed/sorted? Is it by property or facility? How you file can make a difference in time and efficiency. By year, month, etc.
• Does everything need a file? Do you really need to file it at all? Keep digging and determining what you really need as compared to what it costs you to perform that task.

We have created a poll at trendycharts called ‘Investigate to Automate or Eliminate’ Are You Thinking Property and Facility Management Efficiency? We would love to see the trend in our industry today and how it evolves. What type of efficiency-minded thinker are you? Will this article change your mind about how you do think? Take the poll and let’s see how our industry is thinking today and into the future.

Remember:
Investigate to Automate or Eliminate.

Q. How do I use technology to generate more business/client/traffic leads for my company or property/facility?

A. Notice, the word ‘leads’? Leads because they are opportunities for business. In this simple blog post, there is no way to tell you how to improve your business itself without knowing a whole lot more information about your business. Leads are simply people making your phone ring, so to speak. In other words, if there are 10 people in your market looking for a business to hire, or an office space to lease, you MUST be sure you get to see those people and at least expose your business to them.

There is no difference in our work to lease or sell a property. If there are 10 opportunities to lease your space or your apartments, or your service centers or storefronts, don’t you push to be sure you see every single deal? The same holds true with your business. Just pretend you are a building owner and your business is a building. Why not push as hard for your business to feed it leads as you do your leasing or investment sales listings?

Here is a simple test: Search for your company or your building in Google Search. Did you find your company or your building? Remember, pretend you are the customer you want to attract. Now that you see what comes up, you need to work to see your business or property come up in that search! Once you see yourself come up in a Google Search, you have accomplished the goal.

Those techniques and tools are a must today if you are going to give your business a chance. In this blog post we share 1 single concept that reveals the most basic fundamental concept you MUST understand and have in place to give your business a chance to see those “new business deals” for your firm or property. If you are a start-up or an existing business, this blog post is of the utmost importance to understand.

Here is the key concept to comprehend………..drum roll, please.

Key Concept

You must have at least one or more versions of your business name, reserved as a domain name.

If you are a new business or an existing business, a new property or an existing property, get the best domain name that describes what you do or the full name of your property. If you can get a keyword in your legal name, that helps tell what you do, that is even better. If your business is a destination or is geographically significant, add the location to your name or geonaming, (made up word) which means, add your location to your domain name or putting your location in your social media names and microsites.

It is difficult to put all of your services into a domain name without it being long. For instance, Property Management, Facility Management or Property and Facility Management, coupled with other services typically provided: leasing, investment sales, project management, consulting, etc., is much too long. I suggest you get your main name reserved, as well as micro-sites in many different configurations. Here are some illustrative examples:

Chicago Property and Facility Management Services, Inc. (super long, but it does say what you do and where you are!) Today, keywords and name searches are really important, especially for mobile use.

http://www.chicagopropertyfacilitymanagementservices.com (Main domain)
http://www.chicagopmfmservices.com (Micro-site)
http://www.chgopmfm.com (Micro-site)

http://www.chicagofacilitymanagement.com

http://www.chicagopropertymanagement.com

http://www.chicagopm.com

http://www.chicagofm.com

http://www.chicagopmfm.com

http://www.chicagoleasing.com

http://www.cpmfms.com

On top of that, you can add the .net, .org, .us, or whatever other category of domain name is applicable to your country or type of business. If your main domain is too long, simply use a shorter version of your name and just forward the other domains to your main site through your domain hosting service. If you use a domain registration service such as GoDaddy, this is super simple and takes a few moments to set up. Now when someone searches for you, no matter what they use, they will find you. Also, the micro-sites are a great way to see what is working in your marketing and promotions. If you know that you always use http://www.chicagoleasing.com for ALL of your “hire us for our leasing” promotions, that traffic is directly attributable to your leasing efforts and is now tracked through that domain.

This is a concept and not an exact blueprint for every business, but in concept, do not limit yourself to one single domain name. Many domain names cost pennies to own and they belong to you once reserved. With the internet exploding and growing, reserve these names now for future use; but always point them to your main site. If you have a long established name, it is also a great way to liven things up in your marketing; add other names that point to your firm. How about http://www.thebestpropertymanagerinchicago.com? or http://www.greatestleasingbroker.com, depending on your business service or http://www.bestplumberinchicago.com, http://www.bestjanitorialinchicago.com, etc. Today with tools like NameCheckList, it is so simple and NameCheckList does all of the heavy lifting for you! There is no excuse any longer as you can now see a complete picture of the name availability of your domain, across multiple opportunties. There is no excuse for any business today, not to be online.

If you do not have the $11.00 to scrape together to reserve the domain name, at least do a Google Place page, Twitter site and Facebook Fan Page, or even Squidoo lens, which are all FREE. Every business should at least have a single page on the internet in some fashion. Reserving your domain name is really step one to embracing the technology available and insuring your company and/or your facility or property has a presence on the internet.

When it comes to your business or name, now is the time to set that up. This is not only your main domain, but your social media names as well. Our industry is so very behind the times, along with our properties. Each property or facility we manage should have their names and a location online to be found. The commercial real estate industry is in its infancy with the internet; so it is not too late. The point is to get your Facebook Fan Page (not Facebook account), Twitter Site, Google Places and domain set up now. Even if you do not have time to use it, at least get your names reserved for future use. Make a pact with your company to include a budget for each property in 2011 called Technology. Include an annual budget for a property website and domain registration. The budget should be at least $5.00 per month! Yes, you heard correct. I am talking about pennies here, just for a single page that gives the basic information. It truly is your job and responsibility to insure your clients and/or your company are not being left behind because you did not reserve the domain name for their company, property or facility.

Take this PM/FM Poll in trendycharts.com. trendycharts is the place to find out what other PM/FM think, so take the poll.

If you need help with this concept for your properties or firm, please send me an email or call me and I am happy to help. My personal agenda is to remind our industry to obtain a good domain name or social media name for their business or property and facility. It is a necessary business decision you must make today.

July 1st,
is the
trendycharts.com
beta launch!

Stephan Wehner and I have created our first, team, web application. The entire process was developed as an intentional test of our ability to work as a team and collaborate and execute 1 single application in very short order.

We decided that if we were going to work together on the various Manager Labs projects, we needed to test the waters first. We both agreed that there was no other way to do it but to do a test of our team capabilities and our ability to “get the job done”. We are both very excited about tomorrow and are eager for visitor feedback on this project.

The story of trendycharts is simple and is based on the constant need I have observed for folks in the CRE and PM/FM industry to always want to know how many others are doing what and what were they using and who were they using and what do our clients, customers, tenants, colleagues, vendors, committees, boards, think of us? What does the outside world observe and can we influence how they perceive our company or marketing or curb appeal? This is the first Public beta for Manager Labs, so for us, this is big deal in that respect, however, it is not our main application. When contemplating what our mini-project would be, we figured that “the need to know” in our industry was critical now. If you are not checking the pulse of your clients, customers, tenants, vendors, there is no way you can know your future. We felt this mini-project would help us, as well as the entire industry. That is how the trend aspect came to me as well. If I know what you think today, can I influence that thinking? We knew there were many excellent poll and survey sites out there, but none of the sites we were aware of did recurring or interval polls and surveys. What is most interesting about trendycharts.com is how we will be able to monitor and watch for trends and see those trends change. Everybody know the pain of change. We hate change. It is so painful for us as PM/FM people to make a move until there is a trend towards it. Nobody wants to be 1st! This is how trendycharts.com was conceived. From concept we took it from there. I applaud Stephan and technical genius. I can also say I truly enjoyed the project and we hope all of you enjoy it too.

Please help share our excitement by answering a few polls and giving us your feedback. Thanks to all of you who have supported us during this time. During the beta we need the “eagle eyes”. Please share your thoughts about how you see trendycharts.com helping you in your business or if you have issues with its functionality, please let us know.

http://www.trendycharts.com

Also, please feel free to post trendycharts on your favorite social media sites or within your Yahoo, LinkedIn, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, etc. groups. We appreciate all of the momentum we can get. I am loving the various polls people are posting. Yes, already in a couple of days we have had some good ones!!

Have a safe, healthy and happy 4th of July.

Thanks,
Linda
Stephan

Okay people, it is not Greyhound this time, but the bankrupted Amtrak and the very dysfunctional DMV in Las Vegas, Nevada (you had to be there). Our industry has been passed up again! I just heard from a fellow Buzz connection, that Amtrak is now offering free wifi on its trains. While at the same time, I have also learned that the State of Nevada-Las Vegas DMV is following the post office’s APM machine, since 2005 and has kiosk automation that collects money and processes basic services! Although the comments on some of the blogs about Amtrak today, were quite entertaining, the subject reminded me of our recent post, “If a bus, a hamburger and plane can do it, why can’t we?”

Nevada DMV Kiosk, circa 2005.

You may recall that McDonalds offers free wifi at all of its restaurants. I am not talking about slow, bogged down lame wifi here folks. I am talking about super fast and awesome wifi. The workers are clueless that it exists, most of the time, but boy is it fast. I love it. Surf the web and drink coffee and eat yogurt. Yummy.

So when I saw the Buzz this morning that Amtrak now has wifi, I just shook my head. Here we are, property and facility managers with captive audiences all over our properties, owners who want full buildings and no FREE or public wifi or even the thought of automating anything at all! I think it is absolutely unbelievable. How did this happen? How did the world just pass us by? Why and how can the most dysfunctional and blatantly known, perpetually bankrupt Amtrak and the classic DMV offer something as simple as wifi and a kiosk/machine, similar to an ATM, inside a building or facility that we completely manage, repair, clean or worse yet, own. Yet, we still do not have wifi or even the thought of the dream machine like -an APPM (Automated Property Management Machine) for our industry?

I look back over the 30 some years in this industry and shake my head every single day. I talk to property managers, facility managers, service businesses too, that tell me they have no website, no domain name, no awareness of what is happening all around them. What is Twitter is not even remotely in the cards. Now even Facebook has passed all of us up. Yes, Facebook. The app that your great grandmother uses! The buildings are in a time warp or something and the managers got swooped up too! We are all just stumbling and mumbling while this goes on.

Facebook at 500 million users!!

Everything is a swipe, a click, a snap or whatever, but we still have 3 part Peachtree NCR forms on our desk and are filling out paper lease forms and logs on clipboards. It is so funny, but it is not really. It is rather pathetic and mindblowing. There must be something scary to us or we have a fear of technology. I am not exactly sure which. The IT departments at our companies might as well be frozen in giant ice cubes since 2000 (yes, 2000!!) when they started to think that a property or facility manager might be able to use a single computer in an office of 5 people. Oh and they gave us 1 single email address called abccompany1@abccompnay.com. They did stop technology once they rolled out the LANS, only at the corporate office. Each of our desktop machines were not even connected due to the cost of a modem phone line in 2000. I guess that was good enough for us and all we could handle.

Now grant it, there are many that have embraced it, exploited and used it up like it was air, but those are the few and far between. All of those people are at Realcomm right now in Las Vegas, Nevada. They are having a blast and they are mingling and talking to Jim Young about where we are today. (According to Jim that is probably 5% of us are using webbased systems) and Jim is just so worked up right now with all of the enthusiasm you cannot imagine the frenzy and energy at that place. I bet Las Vegas is wondering what on earth came to town!!

I am eager to hear feedback from him and I will do my best to track him down or Jean Claude Goldenstein, the founder of http://www.creopoint.com or others that will be sure to attend. Once I do, I will give you the report and a take away. Many of the people from all of the major software accounting houses are there, along with the technology SaaS people, like Dale Vanderlaan of Realogic and his team. We will find out what and how things went down and share it right here for all of us to learn.

But the icing on the cake of all of this. And this is a true story, for real, totally accurate. I got 3 very fuzzy pictures today. So fuzzy, I do not believe they are real. I actually asked my friend Stan if these were real. He said yes, these are real. Here are 3 pictures of the first that I have ever seen, APPM units. APPM=Automated Property Management Machines. No joke. Read the fuzzy words on the screen. It brings a tear to me eye, it is so awesome. I am hoping that Stan will give me more information on these fuzzy pictures. He had better not be kidding. If it is true and these are real machines (outside of the U.S., of course!) You will all be the very, very first to hear of this. Stay tuned.

APMM = Automated Property Management Machine

Well the property and facility management industry is inundated with acronyms: PM, FM, ROI, NOI, MLS, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, TI, LO, LOI, you get the drift. But now the industry is being exposed to terminology and acronyms that the tech world and many others, hopes will change the industry forever. The term is SaaS, or Software As A Service. In other words, an automation that is online and can be called a tool or portal. With SaaS, everyone is delivered the same software via a browser that you use for FREE or with a subscription, just like any other subscription service.

The point of SaaS is to actually provide service that enables you to automate or streamline the current process or method you are using today in your offices and improve service delivery and/or reduce your labor and overhead. For example, we all have heard of Lock Box, Multiple Listing Services (MLS), and Online Banking. Now the next generation of online technology has started with a multitude of products and tools that are above and beyond those traditional shared software, now online, products. The products vary from website portals that deliver template formats for property websites to payment processing and bill paying. Everything consumers have been enjoying at home for years! In addition, all of the Cloud products, such as document storage, email and online productivity applications are basically SaaS services as well. With the Property Management industry fraught with overhead and a multitude of remote sites, SaaS and Cloud should be on any companies radar as an alternative.

It is very exciting to find blogs, such as Software Advice where you can read about the Property and Facility Management industry and its migration to this evolution by our industry with technology. It is about time we get our act together and reduce our redundancy, provide 24/7/365 service to our customers, create standards, eliminate the pain of training, pool our resources, create economies of scale, and improve our accuracy. The author of the blog, Chris Thorman is a member of several groups I belong to on LinkedIn and I offered to share his basic and easy to understand article at his Software Advice blog for software advice to the Property Management Industry.

Consider joining our family of LinkedIn groups:

PFMI (Property and Facility Management Innovators)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

–Vendor Bidding Lab (beta) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2238793

–PFMC(Property Facility Management Companies) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2644670

Rooftop Gardening

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300

Certified Property Managers (CPM Group)
Need to be listed in IREM Membership Roster.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138868

Join me at Maven Research too: https://www.mavenresearch.com/join/4G4Y4QmB

Please take this one question poll about how you process work orders. It should take you 5 seconds to respond!

Everyone in the Property Management and Facility Management industry is looking at how they do things. It is a good time to take a pulse on what methodolgy the industry is using for work orders?

Check out this poll and take the poll yourself.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com

Click here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/82981/bfkgx

How healthy is your Organization’s Core? Every time you hear a ringing phone, think about it.  I would bet that if you attended Realcomm 2009 in Chicago over the past 3 days, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you did not attend, you MUST attend next year. Get out the coffee can and start saving your money. If your company cannot afford it, pay your own way. Visit www.realcomm.com for more information.

The well being of your corporate infrastructure depends on it! To survive your organizations core must now run 24/7/365. There is no more 9 to 5. It is obsolete terminology.  There is no time for processes to cease or take a break. Today is a 24/7/365 world and the pace is getting faster and more efficient. Is your infrastructure gaining speed or losing speed? Are you hearing ringing around your offices? If so, you need to focus and reduce those ringing phones.

Think about investing small sums by trading the wasted labor expense it takes for a permanent solution that can be used over and over again. Consider the growth opportunities if you can do more with less.  This is not about eliminating people at all. It is about retraining people and realigning people. Grow the business itself, not for the sake of growing the labor pool, as many of us have done in the past.

Our industry is jam packed with business intelligence and we need to discover and unearth it. Our industry holds the key to a massive opportunity for somebody, and that somebody should be you!  The data we all share and the information we all have is vital and it is being unearthed.

Everyone is now relating to one another 24/7/365 via the internet.  People no longer want to wait for your office to open at 9:00 a.m. That is almost silly to even think of today.  What is your own reaction to waiting or being told “No”? Ask yourself that question every time your phone rings. A ringing phone should truly be the bell that goes off in your head. If there is a will, there is the internet.  If you need something you go online and just get it.

You must invest in your Organizational Core. Automate tasks, digitalize Documents, minimize paper, embrace technology, and embrace the change. The challenge for us as an industry is three fold:  ego, money and awareness.  Ego for those that believe their way is better; money for those who have the money now and do not want to lose it (ie, large software companies that will soon be obsolete); awareness for those that do not know about the movement.

There are a few organizations pioneering industry wide standards that you need to be aware of:

Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate – (OSCRE) – http://www.oscre.org   “Deliver global standards for exchanging electronic real property information and drive their adoption”

Multifamily Information and Transactions Standard – (MITS) – http://www.mitsproject.com/ “MITS is an industry-wide effort by the apartment sector to develop common data standards and extensible mark-up language (XML) protocol to facilitate data and systems integration.

Realcomm – http://www.realcomm.com,  Jim Young, Founder. The intersection of Commercial Real Estate Corporate Real Estate, & Technology.

Manager Labs – http://www.managerlabs.com, Geoff Domoracki and Linda Day Harrison, CPM, CCIM, Founders. Where the concepts of the future, become a reality for the industry today. An organization dedicated to providing all PM / FM firms and related Vendor Services, the opportunity to embrace technology, identify technology and utilize technology before they buy the technology. Bring your need or idea to this group and we will execute it as a prototype to prove out its effectiveness and ROI.

Each of these organizations are progressive, consciously and consistently providing the cutting edge to our industry. Your Organizational Core is depending on you.  Keep your core healthy and consider any and all the baby steps that are available to embrace the new ways.  Almost all of our mundane and redundant efforts can be automated. Going forward make a pact with yourself to think about your Organization’s Core and whether or not your decisions and actions are working towards a healthy core. Test yourself and watch what is physically going on around you and every time you hear that ringing phone, think of it as your wake up call.

When your day is spent trying to revolutionize an industry, it can be rather exciting yet a little frustrating at the same time. Not only do you have to get the word out to millions of people, but you also have all of those who ignore you when they hear ‘change’. Those people may agree with you that they want everything to be done faster and cheaper, so long as it stays the same. We always start out by reminding them that there can be very little progress without change, but it is hard for them to swallow that part of progress as it relates to changing anything. Progress they want, change they do not want. In order for a property manager to be able to say, Yes and Now to each customer, building owner, staff member, vendor, leasing broker or anyone they encounter, there must be a monumental change within the industry to make this dramatic progress a reality. We are hoping, like so many people, that by adding Greening to the concept it might take off. It seems that anything about Greening or The Environment is popular. As property managers we need to start Greening ourselves.

For us to become a green industry our effort will be more than just recycling, it will have to include creating standards, minimizing training, eliminating redundancy, identifying the appropriate tools and stopping the madness of starting over every time a new property is assigned to us and minimizing the horrific pain when a property is taken away or sold. If and when, we as an industry, empower ourselves as property managers to provide Yes and Now solutions, there will be a great efficiency or greening of the property management world. The greening will take place throughout every facet of the physical property as well. The greening will impact actual costs and improve customer retention, lower employee turnover and increase the actual value of the property if we all pull together and green this industry.

For over 2 ½ decades I have been in property management, with the majority of those years in the field, at the frontline. The frontline is an appropriate description of those persons in a company who deal with the customers. When you are at the front, the demands come from various directions. Those challenges come from the general public, existing customers, building ownership, the local municipality, the corporate office, vendors or even our own property staff, and usually all at the same time. There is a constant barrage and an endless flow of expectations, with internal conflicts. Herein lies the problem or dilemma.

For instance, the customers expect us to be at our desk at all times to answer their questions or answer the phone when they call. The building owner wants us to walk the property each day and insure all things are in top condition, while watching every single penny spent and every single penny collected. The property manager is also held accountable for each member of the building staff and the assurance to ownership and our corporate office that the staff is being supervised with eagle eyes. Those high standards are expected at the on-site office we are assigned to, in addition to the other 6 properties we manage.

The corporate office wants reports done on time so the accounting department is insured immediate response to their inquiries or needs. When a broker inquires about space available, those tenant rep brokers want the answers now. The local municipality expects us to be at the ready and drop everything, on a moment’s notice to do a full building or fire inspection so we comply with all codes and ordinances. All of the vendors want to be paid immediately after performing their services and the vendors will call repeatedly until we can tell them the exact time they will be paid. Simultaneous to this we are listening to the property leasing broker on the other line who is impatiently waiting for feedback on a 7 page, lease proposal that he/she needs to have our feedback on within the next 15 minutes. All while there is another tenant standing in the office appalled that the illegal car in their parking space has not yet been towed, along with the staff member who wishes to find out why their paycheck was shorted 1.5 hours overtime.

All of the above scenarios can be made less painful if we pull together and start a grassroots effort to revolutionize the property management industry and take the property manager out of the line of fire by igniting a movement towards creating an environment whereby the property manager or the frontline staff, can truly find the time to provide excellent customer service. In addition, immediate responsiveness to the general public, our customers, the building staff, the government, the corporate office and the vendors who all believe they are entitled to receive answers now and make us a Green industry.

Because the industry is bogged down with redundancy, limited standardization, dysfunctional tools, insane repetition and wasted motion, we are the biggest culprits of waste and ineffiency. Today, with all of the creative electronic gadgets and sleek cell phones, why is a property manager ordering 3-part NCR work order pads from Peachtree, bulletin boards to post notices, reams and reams of paper to print statements, newsletters and other legal notices, cases of timecards for the staff to punch in and punch out, binders to store records and logs, and tons of envelopes to mail out the paper coupon books, paper invoices, vendor paper checks and paper remittance stubs and letters imploring the vendors to provide the paper certificates of insurance or other vendor compliance requirements? The reason is simple. We are not creating cohesive systems or systems of any kind. With cohesive systems that communicate, the redundancy will be gone, the manual task will be gone, the errors will be gone and the service will be improved.

There is a group tackling these challenges right now. If you have heard of the organization Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) you are on the right track. This group is taking the challenge head on. OSCRE understands the key is to create standards across all firms. OSCRE is doing this very task in a very impressive fashion. As a group, those of us at ManagerLabs.com are studying the OSCRE standards and investigating how we as web developers and technology innovators can embrace this profound effort to standardize the property management industry. In a conference call with one of the OSCRE leaders last week, we were given an overview of the various standards already in place. ManagerLabs.com will continue to monitor the OSCRE processes and keep spreading the word about this important step in the process of improving the property management industry. If you take the standards and connect this to all of our systems, we will all be able to share data across any database, no matter what accounting system, work order system, commercial listing service or lease abstract system.

Our mission at ManagerLabs.com is to connect all of these dots so things can truly be ‘touch it once’. Every aspect of managing any asset should be treated as a giant template. Once this template is in place, simply change the names and fill in the blanks. If we, as an industry can start looking at standards, practices, systems and procedures as templates, we can truly be a much Greener industry.

For more information on OSCRE or to join this group, visit http://www.oscre.org.

There may be some that wield high tech tools of sorts, but overall the property/facility management and commercial real estate industry is lacking the technology that would unleash power into its systems and processes.  Because we are so busy making our clients money, counting light bulbs and managing labor to the tiniest penny, we typically fall short of optimizing our workflow.  In my 25 years of experience, I have realized that the pathway for our industry to dig itself out of this low profit margin hole is by embracing the tools that exist today. It has always been my personal mission or desire to demonstrate that a property manager can go from 0 to 60 with the right tools and infrastructure at their fingertips, simultaneously providing clients and customers with a higher level of service.

There are managers who do not yet have automated work order systems, dispatch capabilities or automated monthly owner reports and early on in my career it became apparent to me that this inefficiency ultimately had an impact on the bottom line. It was in an office akin to a mini-Kinkos of sorts, producing upwards of 18 partners books per month, where I realized the gap that was emerging in our industry. I will never forget the moment when we were actually able to convince one single client to permit us to email a PDF to them. That was a huge milestone in my career and one I will never forget. We were so proud that out of 55 clients, one single client would permit such high tech delivery! This huge triumph over the antiquated way of business, opened my eyes to how cost effective and efficient things could now be given the technological advances. 

Despite the advances, our industry was still slow to adapt, and for me the gap between technology and the property managers became exceedingly more of a problem.  The way Property Managers operated was unnecessary, redundant and even absurd in some cases. Tasks that were taking days could take the click of a button, streamlining and accelerating my business, leaving me freed up to provide quality customer service; walking the property or meeting with potential new customers; working with leasing on creating new ways to lease our buildings; taking customers to lunch; working with programmers to develop a comprehensive and effective website; producing a newsletter; hosting a tenant retention activity; even staff training day.  All of these useful and creative projects had taken a backseat to the repetitive, wasteful functions that currently occur in the normal course of a property/facility manager’s day and the industry cannot afford to tolerate this any longer.

There are a few simple things that we can begin to adopt now that will take the industry from 0 to 60. The first is cross industry standards various templates for all of our databases and that will allow software systems to talk with each other. When all of our software is communicable, we will eliminate redundancy and exchange information with clicks instead of paper and laborious data re-entry. The second is connectivity and communication. It is not necessary for a manager to be tied to a desk, in fact a good property manager is mobile without compromising the inflow of requests or customer service needs. The manager is always available and reachable with the tools to dispatch requests and monitor the vendors or projects at all the properties they oversee.  The third is effectively utilizing the Internet as a fundamental component of customer service… Adopt these principles of standards, utilizing the Internet and management mobility and you will empower the property/facility management industry. Not only will you provide the speed and improve the quality, but you will provide your clients and customers with the excellent service they deserve from today’s up to speed, property/facility manager.