Commercial Real Estate and Multifamily Tech Solutions

Today's Guest is Mike Branam.

Mike is Director of Multifamily Sales at PointCentral and has nearly 20 years of experience in real estate technology, Mike has been a part of several successful prop-tech start ups serving the multifamily industry. Join Sam and Mike in today's episode.

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Intro [00:00:00]

Mike Branum's Background and Experience [00:01:02]

Evolution of Smart Home Technology [00:02:52]

The benefits of smart property technology [00:09:24]

Future-proofing smart property technology [00:10:19]

User experience and customization of smart property technology [00:12:08]

Saving on insurance with technology [00:18:52]

Benefits of smart thermostats [00:19:51]

Closing [00:20:39]

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Connect with Mike:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebranam/

Web: https://www.pointcentral.com/

Connect with Sam:

I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/

Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com

SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f

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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - I spent a little bit of time in Arizona. So, you know, if it's 115 degrees outside and the outgoing resident has their air conditioning, it's 62 degrees and they're not in that unit for another 90 days. The property is on the hook for, you know, pretty decent chunk of change utility wise. You extract that over a portfolio of 10,000 units. You're talking about significant costs. Yeah, smart property technology solves that, right? So when we start to integrate with property management softwares, so when a resident moves out and the thermostat automatically gets reset, the door automatically locks. Now, maintenance can better serve other aspects of the building to fix that dishwasher that broke yesterday. Right. And and increase service levels and customer or resident service satisfaction. Welcome to the how to scale commercial real estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. Mike Branum is the director of multifamily sales at Point Central, and he has nearly 20 years of experience in real estate technology.

Speaker 1 (00:01:02) - He's also been a part of several successful prop tech startups serving the multifamily industry. Mike, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Sam. Good to be on. Absolutely. Mike There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there? Where did I start? I started about 20 years ago in real estate technology at the time, really working on startups and had partnered up with a couple folks that had been on the ground floor at Google and they served as mentors for me in understanding property marketing and the rental space and search technology and pioneered that into a company called Rent Pits, which grew into a company called Remotely, which from my perspective, I believe it was the first smart apartment solution to offer smart home technology to the multifamily space. So I've spent the better part of the last dozen years specifically in that space and now leading the central sales and strategy team that does smart property technology.

Speaker 1 (00:01:59) - So still coming from where I came from and to what I'm doing now and have done so for the past five years. What what is different about what you're doing now than what you've previously done? You know, the technology has come a long way. You know, when I sort of look at Smart Home and put it in a similar bucket is like the flat screen television. 15 years ago, it was like only your wealthy friends down the street had a flat screen, right? Now everyone has one, right? So the cost came down, production ramped up. And of course, you know, it's just sort of like the standard models now. Now there's different types of models, but sort of everyone has one. Smart home is very similar. It's kind of been on that path where, you know, first the technology needed to prove itself. Once it did that, the cost to to sort of enter Smart Home, whether it was your house in my house, was getting the thermostat or getting a smart lock that's really grown into smart home is defined much differently now.

Speaker 1 (00:02:52) - And in fact, I look at it as smart properties specifically for rentals, that it's not just the the end user is the benefactor of that. When I say end user, it's not just the person holding the phone controlling the thermostat. Now it's the it's the building that benefits from that. It's the it's the owner operator of the asset. It's the people who work in the building and live in the building. They all benefit from smart property technology because it's it's mitigating risk. It's making life more customized. It's it's automating certain tasks so staff can do different things, more impactful things. So it's come a long way and it's come a long way fast over the last several years. It really has. I'm thinking back, gosh, to like in the late 90s, early 2000, they started talking about the smart home, you know, and they would send these drawings, these graphics of like, you know, you see all these wires running everywhere and where we're going to take smart homes. And it was just like, okay, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (00:03:46) - Like, you know, they were they were designing whole neighborhoods that were going to be smart neighborhoods. Do you recall that? I do. I do. I go back to like The Jetsons. Right? Like we're all supposed to be flying to work at this point, aren't we? Right. So I think that was like the vision of like everything is sort of automated and everything is super high tech and future proofed. And I think the reality or the evolution of the technology has been, hey, how does it make my life better, easier, more comfortable, more secure? And I think that's where that adoption is coming. I remember years ago people would say, well, if I can't get up and turn off a light switch, then this isn't, you know, I'm not that lazy. It's not turning off light switches. You know, really what it is, is making sure my door's locked when I leave for a trip. It's making sure that if if there's a flood in my space, that that water is turned off automatically.

Speaker 1 (00:04:32) - So don't come back to a $50,000 bill and clear out my basement. Right. So the technology is really just benefiting the real estate space in that way. Now, maybe we'll fly to work one of these days, but not yet. Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, hey, they're working on those vertical takeoff and landing quadcopters and all that stuff. You seen those. Those electric vtol things that. I don't know. I read a lot of flying magazines, and it's always the. It's. It's still in the future. I mean, they keep talking about it, but it's not here yet. But I think that's interesting how how that kind of has played out where you're right. It's not it's not that we're too lazy to get up and turn off a light switch. It's that we maybe want lights to come on at various times when we're out, when we're out of town or we're on vacation or things like that. But then also just the health of the building, even even just from technology.

Speaker 1 (00:05:18) - One of those thought that came to me is my pickup truck. My truck notifies me if I leave it unlocked, Right? I walk to my office and all of a sudden just, you know, get a notification on my phone like, hey, hey, you left your truck unlocked like nobody's in it. You're like, Oh, right, I'm an idiot. I can lock it from my phone, which is kind of wild how some of those things. And oftentimes I live in Memphis, which I always want my truck locked. So those are helpful things. But let's talk then, how this really ties in, though, to multifamily. I mean, a lot of this adoption, a lot of this technology, there's there's a lot of different moving pieces in this space, like aggregating that into a central platform that is meaningful both to the tenant and the landlord is a task. How have you guys done that? You know, several ways. It's a really good question. There's a couple base components to it that that had had and have impact.

Speaker 1 (00:06:10) - Every building has some form of access control solution. Every resident unit has a lock in a thermostat. So taking that and sort of leveling up to the to to the new modern world of, okay, the residents shouldn't have to have a separate access control solution versus a separate app for their smart lock for the door and then a separate app to control the thermostat. Nor should the building and the staff have to sort of figure out all these different technologies that are sort of weavin