Jonathan Margel
Sarah: Welcome everybody, REITE club community. I'm excited to be here today for actually one of our first and definitely I think the first of this year's “lunch and learn”. And so we've got Jonathan from Building Stack. And Jonathan is going to actually walk us through some really interesting things today. I've actually seen a little bit of the behind the scenes and we are definitely in for some good insights and some good information this "lunch and learn" will be about 30 minutes in total. We'll be wrapped up at about 12:45. There will be questions that we will take at the end.
Jonathan we'll talk for about the next 20 minutes, about what it is that we are learning today and then there'll be a time for questions and then a way for you guys to connect afterwards with Jonathan as well. Jonathan, I'm going to hand it over to you. If you can give us a little bit of your background and in what we are in for today and you feel free to share your screen.
Jonathan: Absolutely. Thank you very much for the nice intro. Give me a second just to share this. Can I get a thumbs up from you, Sarah? If you could see this, we'll take it. So, very nice to have been invited to participate. I love the REITE club. Whatever you and your team are doing is fantastic. It's exactly what the real estate industry needs. It's an absolute honor. To reintroduce myself, my name is Jonathan Margel, born and raised in Montreal. I'm the co-founder, CEO of a company called Building Stack. It's a property management software company. We look at it like a platform because we do a lot and we're able to help many different operations in many different ways.
Like many of you, I also have a background in real estate and been involved in the industry. For most of my life, probably for 20 years, I've been exposed to real estate ownership, investment refinancing, buying, selling, managing. It's really all I know. I also happen to love technology and to be a big geek. Instead of doing the easy thing and spending my years managing what's already there and being a bum. I decided to do something exciting and to first and foremost, add value to our own portfolio and we built something out that was so exciting that fast forwarding to today.
It's being used by 150,000 tenants all across Canada. We have close to 300 clients of all sizes ranging from people managing a couple of duplexes to huge enterprise clients or REITs that are managing thousands of doors on building stack. It's something that's grown exponentially over the last decade which I'm extremely proud that I've been involved in this project for so long. And yeah, I'm really eager to teach you all a little bit about prop tech and some of the solutions that are out there. Discuss some of the pain points and just get into it. From my experience, I've been very plugged in to the Canadian prop tech space or property management space for many years.
I've seen all the trends and how things have changed over time. And to be honest, there's many people using nothing or maybe using Excel. Pen and paper are still today. But with the current climate and whatever is going around or whatever is going on with COVID, people are finding us a little bit more than they have in the past. People are really going out of their way to look for property management solutions. People are ready to step up their management game, get on the cloud, get online.
There's no more face to face contact. There's more, so many things to change drastically. And I think for me, only that reason, it should be a very interesting presentation for everyone. Perhaps you are using something and you're in the market to switch or to stop. We're a great candidate for that, and hopefully I'll be able to demonstrate why. So, let me start off with this.
Sarah: And before you get started, I will say I think it's just really important to have processes and procedures in place or use somebody else's processes and procedures in place to be able to do the tenant management and the unit management, because ultimately trying to build this from scratch is going to cost a lot of time, a lot of money trying to go at it alone. This is why I'm really excited for what you're going to be showing us because essentially you're making all of these processes and procedures that can take a lot of time and and mistakes. And you've actually created a really cool process. So, go ahead.
Jonathan: There's a ton of automation. And if anyone who's just getting started or thinking about getting started and property management or ownership, investment. This is an excellent way to scale your operation quickly, efficiently, and to be able to do more with less and save money. And in the meantime so a few questions that I'd like to ask Juris, if this sounds like anything. Assuming that you're someone who's currently managing real estate. How are people paying? Are they paying by check, by cash, by e-transfer? Are you managing passwords? Daily deposit limits, you have no idea who paid for what you are keeping track of who paid, who didn't pay on a spreadsheet, Excel.
Maybe you're using accounting software, a lot of people use pen and paper, which is insane. It's happening. How are you communicating with your tenants? I've spoken to a lot of people that are just fed up and frustrated. Yeah, my tenants won't stop texting me and emailing zero organized in person, speeding in your face. Forget it's not efficient. Those days are in the past. Vacancies, you have a few vacancies, are you creating an ad and then copying and pasting it on 20 different listings channels? You decide to raise the price, the asking price. Are you doing that 20 more times every day, manually processing applications, credit checks?
Do you feel unorganized? Are you done with wasting time on repetitive tasks? We have solutions for all those things, as well as many other questions that I did not ask. So, to present you building stack, the platform that I co-founded. It's a web based platform for property management mainly on the operation side, if you will, the biggest pain points that we would solve. Really exists all throughout the entire tenant life cycle. So, from finding the tenant to keeping them and keeping retention rates very high specifically we help with online rent payment, by credit card, debit card, bank account, you can set up recurring payments.
The tenant can do it on their side. Pad tenant portal, great place for everyone within the operation to login, communicate, submit work orders, receive, building notices or updates. Hey, we're closing the water. It's pretty good to send an update by text or email, instead of posting a piece of paper or slipping something in the mailbox. This is a much better way of doing things. Just full work order management. Full transparency for you and your staff? Auto posting and vacancies because we have all this info. We're able to create an odd kind of automate the process of posting it on Kijiji posting on rentals, Nazi, or posting on many other websites. All the leads that might come in would be funneled into the building stack.
You could write notes, documents and sign documents to it. You could ultimately send a credit check directly from our platform, how the application fills. I think you're starting to get the idea that we do a lot and everything is linked to each other and the way that it needs to be to completely reduce. No duplicating efforts or double entry type stuff. And just that last point, I forgot to mention also with the same information that we use to create an ad, we can also help you overnight via one of our templates. I have a beautiful website for the whole portfolio building by building. Very customizable, you can really really be flexible with what you want to have or not have, or even just use some of the data that we have to push to your existing website, if you didn't want to give it a complete facelift. And much more because it's true.
Just to get into it in a little bit more detail we've built the platform in a way that we've split it up into several different modules. No two companies manage the same way or have the same exact pain points. We're mindful of that and we split up all the functionality and to four main platforms or plans, if you will. And also within each plan, the pricing would change based on how big the portfolio is.
Do you fall into this tier that's your higher tier? We want to find a way to work with anyone large or small. It doesn't matter. And anything if you're a smaller landlord or someone getting started, we provide a way to take advantage of the same features and functionalities that a 5,000 unit management company would be using. And you could take advantage of that for your growing portfolio and really be able to do more. You can manage your units, parking spaces, storage, make sure that you don't forget any renewals. Full history of your units, your buildings, your tenants, the employees who paid, who didn't pay your expenses managing your leases.
It's endless, whatever you need to do. We definitely have a way of handling it. And we're adding to the platform honestly, every day. We have a very talented team, all in house. We're getting feedback daily and it never ends. It just keeps growing and it's very exciting to be part of this company. So, these would be some of the features that are in our entry-level plan, the core plus. Keep in mind that I believe Sarah we'll be sharing this with everyone. So, you can look at this slowly at your own leisure later on. As I mentioned, one of the big things that we do is help people centralize their communication.
Just the most transparent way possible of communicating with your tenants. We have a mobile app. The website works on a computer, on a tablet, on phones, download the app, go on the browser, whatever you want. It looks like it's railing you also. If you happen to have properties in Quebec or anywhere in the country where people may speak French. Perfect, we can handle that. This is such a great tool, worst case scenario. If there's ever a situation at the rental board or there's a conflict, this is a really good way of having a really organized structure. Documentation showing, who read it, who didn't read it on, at which time, how good of a job is your staff doing? Does it take them seven days to reply to it?
How long does it take them to resolve really powerful data that we help crunch marketing. Like I mentioned we can help post ads all across different leading websites, help you keep track of which sites are working better. Maybe I should put my money in here. Maybe I should spend more money on Kijiji. We help you make those decisions. Again, website functionality, sending credit checks. Just so many things to keep the system up to date, make sure photos are there, make sure all the content and promotions and whatnot is all structured. And Wandel the rest systems putting ODS together, pushing them live when they need to be removed.
When they're marked, they are rented and focus on actually renting the units as opposed to spending hours. The full stock plan is basically everything that we do and everything that we will do. So no need to, out to go into detail. It's basically all the different plans or modules combined.
Like I mentioned before, we have quite a sizable footprint in the country and are growing quickly. I included some references for some of the larger clients that we're proud of, that are proud to be working with. Just to give you an idea, many of them, you wouldn't even realize about where we're their websites and helping them do many different things in their day-to-day operations.
I wanted to show a quick demo for two minutes, max. If you like, what if you're interested, make sure to reach out to us. You're all going to get a copy of this deck. And it's very easy to get in touch with us from our sales site just by Googling us. And it would be a pleasure for myself for one of our talented team members to walk you through the platform in more detail. But I'll give you a high-level idea right now. So, I decided to start by showing you ,but the attendant would see. This is our portal, it's basically a thing that a tenant needs to do. And in our opinion, information from the property, are there building rules, regulations that you'd like to share with people, are there emergency contacts, call this number, we can call this number weekends.
You can do that, read only once on things document. I imagine many of you have different documents that are important to share with tenants when they move in, when they move out. It's a form to fill out whatever. You can just dump those there, choose to share them with tenants and it'll be there when they need to see it. And it'll show you the two main features. One of them would be tickets. Look at this like the work order solutions. I'm a tenant out of a problem. Toilet is leaking water everywhere helped me. You would have to choose a category. Let's call this one plumbing.
We would encourage everyone using this to upload as many photos, videos, documents, whatever to avoid having to send someone to go inspect. You should be able to demonstrate whatever is going on. With a few pictures, we know a building, the tenants, and the question, is it a situation in their unit or in a specific common area? How does the tenant want to be notified when someone replies, email, text, voice, or a push notification or all of the above, and the last step would be to confirm that the tenant will allow someone to go into their unit between X and Y o'clock to do the work.
It's done and not going to show you in detail today, but basically there's a lot going on. Once I clicked. You could set up automations that, all tenants within this building and not building automatically assign the work orders to this specific employee and notify them by text and email, you can do that triage by category, by priority, by building or any combination of the above. We really help save time, get the message across to the right person in the right method. It's a very powerful feature. And then once you open it up you could send a follow-up message, document, photo close it.
If the problem went away then there's a lot more functionality on the employee side. So, the second layer that I wanted to touch on before wrapping up the quick demo was online rent payment. It's a huge need for people today. We've been getting a ton of traction, people just desperate for finding new better ways of collecting rents online. We are the best solution in Canada. Hands down, I'll show you why. Basically if you enabled online rent payments, there'll be a button here. Click here to make a payment. We have three options, bank account, credit card, debit card. All the fees are charged to the tenant.
If they choose to pay online, we do have options that you can make an add-on to your subscription to make bank free for example. Everyone has at least one freeway of paying online. Most people have a bank. Shouldn't be an issue like if someone could pay by cash or check, they should be able to login and pay online this way. Again, you can set up recurring payments on the tenant side, on the employee side, pay this much.
I would like to pay X dollars automatically each month, starting this month, ending that month, I agree, type thing done. Many of you are looking for recurring or pad solutions. This is an excellent one. It's an extreme transplant. Who paid, how much they paid when they paid the funds go directly to your building's bank account. It's extremely secure. We've teamed up with one of the best payment processors in the country. It's super easy to use. We have all the options, all the settings that you could want. And it's just one of the many things that we do. So, I wanted to touch on that for a moment. Let's go back to this beautiful deck.
Some of the other things that we include that I wanted to highlight today is that when we get started with new clients it's extremely turnkey. Send us your rent, roll, send us your tenant contact lists. We'll set up everything the way it is today. We'll teach you and your staff, how to use the system, and how to keep it up to date.
Moving forward, we offer technical support in upshot phone, email, whatever you want, 4,000 videos and articles explaining exactly how to do things. It's such a simple solution to get set up and keep up to date using in the future. I wanted to mention something that we've never done before. So, keep it confidential. We've teamed up with the REITE club to provide all members a whopping 50% discount on any plan in the entry-level tier of less than 125 units. Again, it's something very special. I really don't want to say this lightly, take advantage of this. You have amazing technology that was already extremely well-priced at an insane discount. I think my dad's in the zoom, he was going to smack me off there, but it's okay. It's done.
Sarah: For the negotiation, that's one of the things that we want. We want to make sure that we figure out what the best options are for landlords. And also, how to get the best pricing as well for you guys. I think this is awesome personally. I'm going to be using it for myself. It's. Advertising and the whole management platform. And also just like being really diligent with keeping documents, keeping track of things. At some point, you never know when you're going to need it. You're gonna need proof that has certain potential management or maintenance.
Things come up. But there's so much more to Jonathan on this platform that you can connect with your employees or other people as well. Collecting payments, that's like the whole thing is here for you and it's given to you on a platform. So, you don't even need to worry about anything else. Of course there's still going to be some tenant screening stuff that you've got to do. With the advertising and whatnot it sounds like you've got the credit check, but you're going to call references.
You're still going to do some of that stuff, but everything else is pretty much turn key, ready to go. You just have to, use a platform, get the tenants on the platform. And I think it's really cool. Thank you for the discount as well, because we wanna have a great opportunity and I think this is a great deal as well.
Jonathan: We're building up our relationship together between the club and building stack and we really want it to make a big splash. But my mentality is we would like to help all the members one way or another. If there's one pain point or one feature that excites you when listening there's definitely a way to get started. Make sure to mention the REITE club as a promotional code when booking the demo or just mention it verbally. And I look forward to speaking, we have 36 people here. We hope to have 36 demos set up and we'll absolutely dive in further detail. It's the last slide. Is it time for Q and A or some follow-up questions?
Sarah: Very cool. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Let's do a few questions, if you guys have any specific questions. I think I saw one earlier today that maybe I'll ask you just in terms of what do you use for reporting standpoint? Is it QuickBooks? Does it go into Excel or how does that work?
Jonathan: A lot of the data or reporting stats live within the platform, but anything financial, anything that has a number associated with it you can easily export to CSV, to PDF. You could import it into QuickBooks and to Sage. And so whatever you're using I would make the argument that perhaps it depends. You think you're trying to do, you should just do within the platform itself, like it's built for property management, QuickBooks is an accounting software there's no specific niche there, anything that being said, you can absolutely use third-party accounting software and us once a month, explore whatever rents you want to import into their expenses with ease all throughout the platform.
There's extensive reports. Either like a real-time dashboard format or just something that you could explore. Like I just mentioned grants roles, full reporting of work orders or a specific work order, tenant lists, renewal reports, expense reports, like whatever you think that you would need, we definitely have. And if we don't and you let us know, we can build it. One of the beauties of the company is that it never stops, we get feedback if something's missing and it benefits everyone. We do it.
Sarah: Very cool. And just to go back on your advertising piece. So, essentially you would upload the pictures in the program. You would write the text and then at the click of a button, it could upload into many different platforms at once, including Kijiji. Is that right?
Jonathan: I'll go into a little bit more detail because it should be exciting for people. Fundamentally the platform you're creating your units. You're adding tenants to the units, who moved in how much they're paying when the lease is expiring, et cetera. So, with that info and assuming that you just added a floor plan or photos, if you have a special promotion and that's typed out in the platform, that's all we need. We know what's vacant, what will be vacant? You choose which channels you want to push those ads on and we'll do the rest. So, that's how it works and it's such a great feature, like who would want to do that.
Sarah: Very cool. We have a couple of questions. Just about the ability of taking this across Canada. Is it, A. Nationwide and B. What about the US? if people have US properties?
Jonathan: That's absolutely nationwide. Yeah, we're proudly Canadian software. We have clients in every major or smaller city across the country and have for many years. So, I'd be surprised if there was a city that didn't have at least one user at this point. We have a couple of clients in the states. It very much applies like you have a building that you're managing tenants in Canada and the United States, it's the same relationships. So, absolutely, we can handle that if it's a cross border portfolio, no problem.
Sarah: Awesome. I had another question just in regards to when you went through your maintenance and guys, feel free to add questions. If I don't see any new ones I'll maybe just ask Jonathan a few that I'm curious about, but guys, feel free to add them as well. So, let's just say a tenant puts together their maintenance requests, it's non-urgent and let's just call it, the toilet is leaking. Could you just forward that over? Could you bring some of your team members so that some of that goes directly to them potentially as well?
Jonathan: It actually cuts out at the second half of your question.
Sarah: Are you able to add team members, so that they get, for example, if it's a plumber or an electrician that is your go-to person, do you add them to the platform and could they see those requests coming in?
Jonathan: I'll give you a couple options of how people do that currently. There's no limit for how many users that you cannot on the employee side of the building stack. If you have a plumber and electrician that you use day to day, add them as users to the building stack. Give them very minimal permissions of what they can and cannot do which buildings they have access to. You could even take it a step further and say all plumbing issues or plumbing category issues in this building and this building send it to the plumber.
And then when they do get it, make sure that you send it to them by text and email, but they can't communicate with the tenants. They can write an internal message. They could take out a photo, they could order an invoice, whatever, but they can't communicate. They can't see their phone number, their email, like you could really get down to exactly the level of kind of permissions that you'd like to share with someone like that.
Sarah: Very cool. We've got a question from Andre Brown. Do leads for vacant units come into the platform? Can you reply to leads directly from the platform?
Jonathan: I guess yeah, they absolutely do come into the platform and you could manually create that. Let's say someone just walked in off the street, they saw the sign, whatever, and you want to keep track of them. You could actually just create them manually and manage them that way. With respect to communicating with them, that's something that we'd like to build out this year.
It's been discussed, it's not finalized yet, but that's a direction that we'd like to head in to me. It makes sense to close that. It would make sense to be able to have that kind of back and forth with the prospect in the platform since everything else is there. That's definitely something that I would expect us to add in the near future.
Sarah: Very cool. It's 12:45, Jonathan. If somebody is interested and they want to know more. What should be the next step for them?
Jonathan: The best move is to go to buildingstack.com. If you're interested, you like what you heard, you like what you saw. Fill out the form to set up a demo. If it's in the next couple of weeks, it'll probably be myself who will be doing that due to holidays and everything. If not, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn. You could reach out to us anywhere that imaginable that you Google building stack, someone's monitoring it. Someone who will get in touch with you could reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Also I believe there were some links within the PDF that we're sending out. So, that's the easiest way.
Sarah: Very cool. And don't forget to mention the REITE club for half off.
Jonathan: Don't forget to mention the REITE club.
Sarah: Otherwise, you guys are going to pay full price. You don't want to pay full price, half off with the REITE club. Amazing, Jonathan, thank you so much. You've built something amazing. I'm super excited about it. Ultimately, as you grow, it's also good if you're starting out. So, you use it from the start, but as you grow, trust me I've been in the past getting messages and text messages from tenants and sometimes you gotta screenshot them.
This just simplifies everything. So, guys, a demo is free. Reach out and it could be tailored. You could have different things that you might need versus somebody else. Thank you so much, Jonathan. This was really informative. I love what you guys have built, I think is just super helpful for landlords out there.
Jonathan: Thank you so much and happy holidays to everyone. Happy early new year and looking forward to communicating with anyone that was interested.
Sarah: Awesome. REITE Club community, thank you very much as well. Take care everybody.
Jonathan: Thank you.
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