NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club award-winning podcast on the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith. And in this episode we are speaking about property management. Is it an industry that is broken or guest Yotam Cohen thinks so. He saw that firsthand with his own experience. Here’s Yotam.
Yotam Cohen: I think today the standout of property management is very low and because of that, people are not paying enough for all the work that the management company needs to accomplish and I don’t think people are aware of how much work it is to run a building. It seems very simple, but actually there’s a lot of moving parts to it.
NY Launch Pod: Listen to the interview to find out how Daisy is changing property management from the ground up and a whole lot more. But before we go to the episode, we have a sponsor RezCue, New York State’s premier residential rental compliance platform for landlords, property managers and real estate agents. Rental laws in New York State are difficult to manage and RezCue helps you follow the law. If you are a landlord who wants to keep up with inflation or rental demand, you need RezCue. For example, you may not be able to increase your rent by the amount you thought or get your tenant to leave at the end of the lease. RezCue helps solve all those problems and a whole lot more. Go to rezcueme.com and enter in some simple information and RezCue will take care of the rest. It takes less than two minutes. That’s rezcueme.com, R E Z C U E me.com. And with that, let’s go to the interview. So why does the world need another property management company?
Yotam Cohen: I’m coming from a very different world of tech. I actually co-founded one company in the tech industry and it was sold to Vimeo. So I’m not coming from the real estate industry. I got introduced to this world by becoming a board member of a building and found the world of property management and how antiquated and poor disruption it is. So I think yeah, as you mentioned or as you think about it, property management, it’s been here for so many years, but as other areas of our life has evolved so much from the way we commute, the way we order our food, everything is completely different. Property management hasn’t yet changed so much. So it’s not just having another property management, it’s having the right property management that is built in the right way in order to provide great experience and to streamline the entire processes of property management.
NY Launch Pod: What do you think is wrong with property management or what did you think was wrong with property management that inspired you to build this company?
Yotam Cohen: So I think it’s starting even I think before that I was living in apartment buildings. I had amazing building life and really bad ones. I had these amazing experiences with my neighbors. We were sharing kids, helping each other, babysitting one’s kids.
NY Launch Pod: And this was in New York?
Yotam Cohen: And this was actually in Tel Aviv where I’m originally from, from Israel
NY Launch Pod: Tel Aviv. Okay.
Yotam Cohen: And was living in this amazing apartment building at
NY Launch Pod: Didn’t sound very New York.
Yotam Cohen: No. But this is what we’re changing. I started the company when I was living in Tel Aviv and Israel, but saw that experience, having those amazing positive experiences with my neighbors. We then moved, I had my second daughter, we moved to a bigger apartment to a different building, better building, elevator parking, we had everything there. But my experience was completely different.
NY Launch Pod: In Tel Aviv.
Yotam Cohen: In Tel Aviv. And the neighbors were constantly fighting with each other on almost everything and the budget wasn’t managed. The elevator was always down; nobody knew what’s going on and I saw firsthand when I moved to a better apartment, but my quality of living went down. So I saw and kind of asked myself like any other entrepreneur, what can I do better? And I joined the board of a building to really try to improve the life in that building. And I got introduced to the role of property management through that. And I saw firsthand how antiquated it is, how much it’s not really focusing on people and the experience of people and how much potential you can actually unlock when you do things very, very differently.
NY Launch Pod: You said a lot there in terms of it being antiquated. Why do you think it was antiquated?
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, I think a lot of people, and I’ve been talking to a lot of property managers, owners of companies and those are great people, uh, really trying to improve things. But in a nutshell, the way this industry is structured doesn’t really enable those companies to succeed. I think today the standout of property management is very low. And because of that, people are not paying enough for all the work that a management company needs to accomplish. And I don’t think people are aware of how much work it is to run a building. It seems very simple, but actually there’s a lot of moving parts to it. And then those companies are not getting paid a lot, so they actually need to be much more efficient on how they do things. So they spread too thin, then the experience is really bad and then the standard is low and then people are not willing to pay enough for property management. And it’s kind of like this vicious cycle of an industry that is broken from the ground up. So we started Daisy really with a very different mindset into this industry. And I’m always saying that my biggest advantage and sometimes disadvantage is that I’m not coming from this industry. So it helped me to really rethink all the fundamentals of how things are being done today. And because we are the management company and we run those buildings, we’re able to completely change everything that has been done and use technology to scale, to create efficiencies and to provide magical experience for residents.
NY Launch Pod: And charge more?
Yotam Cohen: Sometimes more whenever it makes more sense. We have our own calculator for pricing that is actually taking into account all aspects of the buildings from the day it was built to how many units you have there to a lot of other power metals in order to find the right pricing for the building. Sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s less, and sometimes it’s actually the same pricing. But we do provide a much better experience for everyone in the building, including the boards, the residents and the owners.
NY Launch Pod: I would say in some senses it’s not a problem to charge more if you’re doing more and if you’re providing more value. And that might be your advantage not coming from the property management world and providing a different model.
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, it’s that one aspect of it. But I think that the use of technology at our core of the company really enables us to build things very, very differently, to be much more efficient in how we run our operations. So we use technology to communicate, to create transparency, to automate a lot of the workflows in running a building. And all of that enabled us to scale and to provide a better experience.
NY Launch Pod: So you had this bad experience in your own building, you had a tech background and then you said, I’m going to start a property management company with someone seems a little crazy.
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, people say that. It is crazy. And then we started immediately in Manhattan in the toughest city I think in terms of running buildings across the US Yeah, I think that for me it’s about the customer. It’s about the people. I see a building, I see an ecosystem, I see people living together, and I see a home. And I think that for us it’s about the customer, the people that are living in the building and the potential that you have in the fact that everybody shares space, decisions and budget together. And we started with extensive research, talking to many people from the industry, brokers, property managers, lawyers, and really just to get a sense of what’s going on here. And we just heard the same horror stories that I mentioned before happening over and over again. And while really kind of like doing this research we understood that the only way to disrupt this industry and to build it in the right way is to become the management company. Because if you are selling software to other management companies, you’re not really able, you don’t have the flexibility to change the fundamentals. Our org structure is completely different from the traditional management org structure. We built ourselves completely differently. We are much more built like a software company than a traditional management company. So it enabled us to really focus on the customer, the service we’re providing to measure our performance and to scale as we scale with the buildings.
NY Launch Pod: So in terms of structure, how are traditional management companies structured and how is your structure different?
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, so I think the main problem in this current structure is that you have this one what we call gatekeeper or sometimes black box property managers that are running the building. They’re basically; you are in charge of these 10 buildings, eight buildings, seven buildings. You are the property manager and you’re doing everything. You are answering residents, you’re talking to lawyers, you’re talking to brokers, you are talking to the boards and all the knowledge of what’s happening in the building is stored in their head. It’s not distributed, it’s not on a system and you can’t really understand what’s going on with those buildings. And this is the way the industry is structured. So you have a person there. We completely broke down this structure. We have the Daisy operating system. The Daisy operating system has everything stored in it. Everything that is happening in the building from maintenance, compliance, financials, everything is within our system. We built a dashboard for the board members where they can log in; they can see everything that is running in their building in a transparent way. All the tasks, what’s their status? They can see their budget in real time, how much money they have in the bank. They can vote, they can suggest items, they can see all the residents and everything that is going on there. Basically get a full 360 understanding what’s going on in their building. For the residents, we built the Daisy Neighbors app where they can log in, they can get notification from us, they can chat with our 24/7 support team that answers in less than three minutes. They can get all the documents they need, they can see packages, their pay common charges, and everything is running within the app. And in the back office we built our own operating system that connects all the dots, all the data points on your building and enables us to automate a lot of the work that is being done today by humans.
NY Launch Pod: For example?
Yotam Cohen: So for example, insurance, if you think about insurance and renewal of insurance in a building, it’s a very repetitive type of work. You have a date, you have the insurance, you have the policy, you have all the documents, everything is stored with Daisy. And today in our system, the system is actually guiding this process as opposed to a person needing to be reminded or to think about when the insurance ends. So the system controls all the flow from the beginning to the end and then there are sometimes people involved in the process, but the system stores everything.
NY Launch Pod: Well I would say trying to get bids for different insurance too Would be a human to human interaction.
Yotam Cohen: Yes, and we have connections and we are working with a few of them. Some of them are already connected to our system. The idea is to also connect the ecosystem outside of the building, like vendors, lawyers, accountants, brokers; all of those can be connected to it in a digital way that will provide more efficiency, fast response time and better experience in the end for everyone.
NY Launch Pod: And I just want to go back in terms of why you started it. You said I had this experience, I said it seemed crazy, but what made you say, I’m just going to jump into this property management world and found a company for it, which is a hard thing to do.
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, it’s hard and specifically property management. I think it’s a very tough and complicated business to disrupt. But I think that from my view, going back to the people living in the building, I see firsthand how much impact we’re making on people’s lives. We just had an event in one of the buildings we’re running community events and we had these parents meet each other that they never knew. They live in the same building, they have kids the same age and now they’re spending time together. So those kids now have friends within the building and this is what, you know, keeps me motivated every day because we’re improving people’s lives. This is why we believe there’s so much potential in the building because your neighbors are the ones that are actually living the closest to you and if we can create that positivity, trust, connection within those buildings where you can change people’s life.
NY Launch Pod: How many buildings are you managing in New York right now?
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, so we launched, we are a very young company. We launched mid 21 in New York in Manhattan. And since then we’ve been growing really, really fast. We’re now getting close to the a hundred buildings across the city. We’re signing buildings every week. So we are currently the fastest growing management company in the city according to the city data. Um, so it’s very, very exciting for us in the past two years and look into our next few years.
NY Launch Pod: What was it like getting the first building signed on?
Yotam Cohen: It was very exciting. Very, very exciting.
NY Launch Pod: How did you do it?
Yotam Cohen: So, as you mentioned, starting from the get go in Manhattan, we had a lot of network of people, of board members that, we are interviewing first in in order to understand the main pain points in order to come up with the best solution for them and all of those network, a lot of those people said when you are launching, let me know, we want to be the first ones. So actually our first building was signed in Soho. Our second one was in Health Kitchen just a day after. And since then it’s been going really fast.
NY Launch Pod: And how are you getting new buildings online?
Yotam Cohen: So, what’s really exciting, I think we manage to create a lot of waves in the industry and as a whole and a lot of people hear about us from different places, so most of the buildings are actually coming to us, to our website. They sign up and then we kind of walk them through our solution and how different it is than any other management company out there. And then they sign with us. But most of the buildings are coming to us either by finding us online or through referrals and we get a lot of referrals as well from existing customers, which is very, very exciting for us.
NY Launch Pod: So you talked about how you’re the fastest growing company, the first couple buildings you brought online. What happens when you bring a building online? What’s that process like? What are you doing and how do you manage the building from there?
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, that’s a great question because switching a management company is not easy. It feels like sometimes switching your bank, right? So it’s a big,
NY Launch Pod: Yeah, it’s probably a miserable process.
Yotam Cohen: Yeah. So there is a lot of trust in general in Daisy. I think one of the things we’re really focused about is building trust. Because if you build trust with boards, trust between the residents and the board and Daisy, then you can actually unlock the potential. So the switching process, we basically structured it for 60 days. Some management companies do it for 30 days. We actually believe it should be longer so we can get to know the building in the right way and set them up for success. We have a dedicated switch team that is in charge of transitioning the building from the previous management company to Daisy. But I would say it’s very different as well. Like anything that we do, it’s not just a list of documents. We are basically doing a full analysis on your building from going to your building, looking and doing an investigation, all your systems in your building, taking photos, all the models, the vendors. We kind of like really organize your building for success on the financial elements, onboarding everybody to the Daisy Neighbors app, to the dashboard, starting to engage through there. And we basically have a very cookie cutter plan for those 60 days, which we finalize with, an event usually in the lobby, we call it Daisy and Donuts, where we welcome the building to Daisy, we onboard everybody to the app, we help them with all the digital aspects of it and then we launch the building.
NY Launch Pod: And through all the buildings and launches that you’ve done, what are common threads or themes where buildings are failing and that you’re able to improve upon?
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, I think that the main pain points that we see in this industry, and that’s what we tackled from the get go, is really around transparency and trust, which in my belief comes from communication. If you don’t communicate then there is no trust. And we invested a lot on the communication aspect and giving full transparency for the boards on everything that is happening with their building as well as owners and residents within the building. So we invested a lot around that. The second thing, which is really getting things done, there are projects, there are tasks, their maintenance ticket, all those things need to get done and need to be communicated on their status. So with Daisy, with the first thing that I believe, if you want to accomplish something, you first have to be able to measure it and if you can measure it, then you can actually optimize for that specific process. So we started with really measuring all the processes, the core processes in running a building, as I said, from compliance to accounts payables to accounts receivables, to maintenance of the boiler. All those processes are mapped out with our system and we measure everything that we do to understand the time it takes us to resolve any issue within the building and by doing that we can actually communicate in a better way for you. If you have a leak in your apartment, then you know exactly what’s going to happen and we can communicate constantly with you to update you on what’s the status of that. So you trust the process, even if it’ll take two weeks. But we constantly keep you apprised on what’s going on with it, you understand it’s not going to be solved in a minute. So yeah, our ability to measure and to set KPIs, key performance indicators internally and to look at it for my view, I can now in our system go to any building and just click on it and see what’s going on, what’s currently running, what’s the status, what are the things that are stuck. So as a leader as well, I can oversee all the buildings that we manage and make sure that things are doing in the right way.
NY Launch Pod: And one of the things that you mentioned, you’re growing very quickly, you’re in property management. If you’re saying it takes 60 days to onboard a building however many days to fix a leak, how have you been able to manage the growth that you’ve had while keeping customer expectations where they are? Because if people are expecting quicker turnaround and more trust, how have you been able to do that in tech from your experience may be easier because it’s very scalable, but in real estate a little bit more of a challenge.
Yotam Cohen: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that, again, moving from a little different industry to this industry, there’s another aspect in this industry that, that idea in a previous company that is exactly what you’re referring to, I think has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s a lot of advantage to actually having a physical presence within the building. We are growing fast and we are investing a lot in scaling our operations. We grew the team rapidly in the last year and we split a lot of initiatives and we’re focusing on all those gaps. But the idea in the end is that yes, disrupting an industry from the ground up, building a different type of property management takes time. But we are building really, really fast that I can tell you that.
NY Launch Pod: And what do you see as the future for Daisy? What’s the goal for the company and for the next few years?
Yotam Cohen: I think what gets me really, really excited is the potential of what we are doing. This market is huge. Just in New York you have 11,832 condo and coops just in New York, right? Uh, so
NY Launch Pod: You’re very familiar with that number.
Yotam Cohen: Yes, we mapped everyone . But, yeah, the market is huge. The market and the potential of what we are doing is, for me, endless, the amount of buildings, other cities. It’s really, really exciting for us to, to really dream of being here. Also within the building that we manage, the potential is, is just unlocking every day. So for us, the goal is to really build a big company that will impact people’s lives as many people as possible and continue to grow and to evolve in what we’re doing.
NY Launch Pod: Do you want all 11,832 buildings?
Yotam Cohen: We are growing here really, really fast. We want to expand to more cities. We’re going to open in Miami this year. We already talked with a few buildings and we already announced we’re going to launch it in our second city, I think eventually. Yes. We want to grow as many buildings as possible. It’s very, very exciting times in our company now.
NY Launch Pod: Well, that is a wonderful note to end things on. Yotam, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Yotam Cohen: Thank you very much for inviting me.
NY Launch Pod: How do people find out more about you and Daisy?
Yotam Cohen: Daisy? joindaisy.com. Basically you can go there and reach out to us. So you can also find me on Twitter at Yotam C.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can visit nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. And follow us on social media @ nylaunchpod. And if you’re a super fan of the podcast, Yotam, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Yotam Cohen: I’m a fan, a big fan.
NY Launch Pod: If you are a big fan like Yotam, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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