Jonathan Margel
Francois: So, our guest is Jonathan Margel, co-founder and CEO of Building Stack. A customer centric property management platform currently lives with over 150,000 doors in Canada. Right out of university, Jonathan managed over 2000 apartments. That's crazy. And he was immersed in the day-to-day operations.
So, that's where this idea came about. He's also an investor in real estate, in multi-family and commercial properties in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto, and tonight's focus is landlord and tenants, the importance of communication. So, Building Stack, Jonathan. I personally use it and how I see it is a great communication portal
Just before we went live I actually got a message on Building Stack, a ticket about my laundromat. Somebody, I guess, ripped out the coin machine on the washer. So, there you go. And then I just forwarded that to my maintenance man. And that's it. I'm done. So, two seconds and I managed the call. So, welcome Jonathan.
Jonathan: Thank you so much for having me. It warms my heart to hear a story like that.
Francois: Good. Hopefully it's not a big damage because I just replaced that washer. I'm not happy, but I mean on the management side, it's great. And we have a track record and you can manage on your website, the timeline as well.
So, my maintenance manager, I'll be able to see how quickly he gets this done.
Jonathan: I'm so happy. Yeah. That's why we created it. So, it said it's great to see it in the hands of competent landlords that care to communicate with the tenants. That's really amazing thanks for bringing that up.
Francois: Exactly How about can you tell us a bit more about communication? Because you managed over 2000 doors yourself and what's that like on paper or what did you do?
Jonathan: Yeah, great question. And that's more or less why we started the business about 12 years ago.
So, for a few years I was running around managing many buildings, many tenants spread out across Montreal, mainly. Things were done. Work orders were done in red, white, and yellow carbon copy papers, but into a slot. If there is water all over the floor. Copy, put it in a thing. An 85-year-old superintendent comes down and he looks at them and puts on their glasses, shuffles them around, loses them its a disaster.
That's how property management was, let's say exclusively done. I'll say last night. About a decade ago, and it's still quite a lot of operations that are doing that. And if not, maybe a little bit better. Let's say by email or remembering text messages, stuff like that we have a much better solution for it.
Use it every day. Many people use it every day across Canada and in every city, we’ll get into that today. I have some fun notes written down to cover with you. Perfect. So, I think the three topics that we wanted to discuss today were trends. Couple things have been pretty obvious and, in our eyes, let's say over the last year or so.
So, I wanted to start the conversation with what I saw. Some of those biggest trends were to help out all the landlords that are here. I think one of the biggest ones that I noticed is honestly just with respect to landlords appearing, to be seeking out various PropTech solutions to adopt this wasn't something.
Everyone was really comfortable with what they're looking for, let's say up to last year, but I think people were more or less forced into starting to try things out, getting out of their comfort zone. So, that has to be the biggest trend that we see. And it's one that puts a smile on my face, keeping us busy.
Also, we're seeing landlords shifting nearly all asked. Day-to-day property management to try to go digital. So, things aren't talking about, automating filling vacancies, the entire leasing life cycle signatures, tenant communication online rent payments. My opinion, I think Canadian property management adoption of PropTech is probably three to five years behind.
But it looks like we're now on our way to catching up. Good for us.
Francois: Yeah and the tenants enjoy it. So, at first, when I first adopted your system, I had some more immature tenants and I thought they would not jump onto this as quickly. And most of them actually love it. Like they use their phone and they can use the app and they're like, oh, this is great.
I can bug you night and day. I'm like not really. I can just forward things.
Jonathan: Yeah, that's the whole point. It's really not hard to use. If someone can text. I can write an email. It's not that many more buttons. All you need is the internet and you're good to go. So, that's the whole concept.
Yeah. And then one last point. Just so I don't forget it, I'm seeing a big trend now. With landlords looking to facilitate providing access to book or purchase services, tools to manage the booking of amenities for their tenants. I feel like there's a big push to remaining competitive by offering a better product.
That's outside of just rent from me and live in this unit. So, that's a hot topic. Today and I think a couple of years ago everyone was going all crazy for smart logs and thermostats and this and that. So, I think that's more or less a couple of years behind us.
And the rest of the technology on the software side is the big focus.
Francois: Yeah, that's the next evolution is the whole convenience. That's what tenants look for is convenience. Same with filling apartments. That's what I've noticed in the past year. I'd say 75% of my new tenants have actually never been in the apartment.
They all wanted virtual tours and then the sign digitally for their lease. And then they got the keys and the lock box and that's kind of it. Or if I was a bit more modern, they would have a code and get everything in. So, it's very self-serve and that's quite a shift from in the past. You'd have to have a staff member go and show the apartment and there's a lot of costs involved in that.
So, that's great. And I see your platform is being updated constantly. So, if anybody's tried Building Stack, like there's all kinds of new features, and I think you guys saw the Quebec lease now is available like right in it.
Jonathan: Quebec, Ontario, BC and the rest of the provinces are being added ASAP.
Francois: Perfect. Can't wait for New Brunswick.
Jonathan: It's just a question of time. Just knocking them down one by one. But look, it's interesting times right now and we have a few hundred clients at the moment and you better believe that we're going to hear feedback every day, every week.
Hey, did you think about this? Hey, this is a pain point. Can you try to help us? And if something comes up enough times, we'll take a serious look at it. And I would say we're adding features every week. It's not something that we created and it's just sitting there stagnant. It's something that's constantly being improved very often from the feedback of the users.
Francois: And that's a big difference. So, compared to large American companies, you actually get to see a real-life person. Like I even know some of your staff now from messaging and oh, I remember this person while if it's a big kind of nameless corporation, that's very different. So, that's quite interesting.
Jonathan: People appreciate the work, that the software was built in Canada for Canadians. It goes a long way absolutely. That's something that comes up very frequently. People are like, oh, I'm so relieved your based in Canada. Wow. Amazing. I'm so proud of processed data for sure.
Francois: That’s excellent. And the whole communications. It's super important if you're building a team. Unfortunately, it is against the tenant to keep all these records very carefully. Like you said earlier, I had tenants texting me on Facebook messenger and text message and email, and it's all over the place.
And then when the time comes to try and file this good luck, finding everything. Evidence, but if it's all centralized and it's easy and there's pictures attached to it, there's dates and timestamps. So, it's a great tool as well. If you're dealing with the landlord and tenant board or their rental tribunal in New Brunswick or Quebec or wherever it is, sorry, it's changed names I think.
Jonathan: That's my experience going to represent cases at the rental board is why it's dictated the way the software looks and works today. It's all about having things centralized, organized. Let me search for this tenant. Let me search for this unit. Show me everything from last month who read it, who didn't read it on which day at which time?
The number one thing is just being organized, having everything cleanly like in a timeline, what happened, who was involved when, if you provide that? You're already off to a great start as opposed to people, again, shuffling through papers and handwritten memos, it's a disaster.
So, you show that you're mature. You have a well-organized system for your communication. It definitely goes a long way on the legal side. And again I've been myself probably 500 times. I've seen firsthand why we won, why we've lost and just being organized as the main reason.
Francois: And it's accessible to even small owners. So, I know some people I see as attendees here, and I know some portfolios and things, even if you have just a few doors, it's very accessible and what's nice is you can tell your tenant, Hey, you can pay by direct debit withdrawals. You can make a credit card payment with some fees. Yeah, it's again, the convenience people like that whole convenient part.
And I thought as a small landlord, there's no way that can start offering like a terminal. And then all that, there's a lot of fees, but with this, like the fees are quite simple and very reasonable and it looks like you're much bigger than you are. It helps you scale to the next level.
Jonathan: Here you're hiring from the sales team. You're absolutely. And I do want to make it very clear that I don't want anyone listening today to look into the company building stack and say, oh, this sucks, very expensive or only I'm not big enough for this. You're not like we're very happy to work with anyone of any size.
We have many clients managing five doors, 10 doors. Let's say growing a portfolio. But we also have clients managing 10,000 doors and everyone in between and the pricing scales accordingly. We don't want to ever turn anyone away. There's actually a special discount for all REITE club members.
So, that goes a long way. You literally just have to mention the REITE club and you'll save a lot of money. Yeah, you could absolutely have enterprise type solutions to help you focus on growing the portfolio instead of wasting your time running. I'm managing 400 different things. Day-to-day we help you focus on all that matters.
Francois: Yeah. And it's Canada and USA, which is great because I'm buying more and more in the US. So, I know some of the listeners as well, and yeah, it's a great solution. So, the importance in 2021, you have to offer that communication with your tenant and convenience and for both parties as well, even tenants. It's good for, I know a lot of people like we're landlords mostly here, but some people are tenants and tenants’ rights are important as well. To be able to show, hey, this has been leaking for two weeks and you're aware of it. So, it does go both ways.
Jonathan: Yeah. Oh, for sure. We just want to make everyone's life easy and organized and just help people elevate their operations. No matter how big the house or how comfortable they are with technology. Everyone should be able to access it and have better data.
Francois: That's great. And what's next for Building Stack? Do you have some new innovation, virtual reality or something coming up?
Jonathan: We actually have something pretty big. Probably coming out next week. So, we're going to be rolling out a tenant's insurance module. So, that tenants can not only pay their, yeah. They can not only pay their rents online. They can also purchase renter's insurance directly from the platform and the manager, the big one pretty much mandatory everywhere where we live, but it's still very popular here. And yeah, and then the big value prop is on the management side to see a nice dashboard of which policies are active, which ones are if purchased online, otherwise you can just manually manage them.
So, that's a pretty big feature big pain point for a lot of different people. So, you'll be able to do that in a couple of days, actually.
Francois: Yeah, you're constantly, can I see proof of insurance? And then you have to educate people. What is the tenant's insurance seriously? It's ridiculous. The amount of people that don't even know what insurance is and then, yeah, so, usually I end up not picking them as tenants, but sometimes it depends on the market.
Like some New Brunswick or different provinces. It's not as common as people are not as used to it. So, if you offer again that convenience, one click, you can get your tenant. And as a landlord too, you're able to show, okay, these people are still insured. It's still valid for our own insurance and that's really convenient.
Wow. So, can't wait for that feature to roll out.
Francois: So, thank you very much. Jonathan Margel from Building Stack, jm@buildingstack.com. If you want to find out more, it's really worth it and they give a great demo. So, even if you're just curious, find out and you'll be impressed I'm sure. So, it really helps my own business and I can't wait to see us.
Jonathan: Yeah, we're happy to speak to anyone. Any question whatsoever, please don't hesitate. Connect by email to write to us on LinkedIn. Check us out on the website. Whatever is most convenient.
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