Business
Two startups sharing their company visions on providing a better rental experience… Benjamin Pleat, CEO/Founder of Doorbell Communities (supercharging apartment living through curated event experiences) and Ashrit Kamireddi, CEO/Co-Founder, and Scott Bierbryer, COO/Co-Founder, of VeryApt (a trusted apartment review community for people who want to make sure their next apartment really feels like home) joins Thomas Kutzman on location at The Future of Real Estate Summit in Miami,FL. Presented by Prevu. In this episode: Conferences as a great opportunity to discover new ideas/innovators Doorbell Communities Looking at the experience side of things, not changing real estate, don’t redesign spaces, how the use of space is a platform for community creation Leverage existing spaces from lobbies to community spaces Creating meaningful experiences to cerate sticky communities Work in best in class providers including local businesses, good to support local businesses and get them in building Skepticism that neighbors don’t want to interact in a place like NYC, content gets them out The business model, and expense structure The value of software and analytics Offering experiences from psychic mediums, pastrami tastings, coding classes, and more. Currently in Boston and downtown Wooster Challenges are in the real estate finance world, recurring fee treated as different kind of expense, and Class A vs. Class B Avoiding technical debt, and how software augments experience without inhibiting, and enables community building and personal interaction Affordable housing, offering the same experience or hurdle distribution and acceptance by community VeryApt A data-driven concierge rental platform that makes finding the perfect apartment effortless Having very accurate data and content, making the ecosystem transparent Not just scraping listings, accurate [ricing/inventory, data from tenants talking about experiences in apartment Unique IP on recommendation engine, able to highlight buildings Concierge replaces much of the value of traditional agent Owning listings, not just scraping and taking data feed Trying to instill same culture and processing several markets Building out the brand, opportunities tangential to what they’re doing now ,rental insurance, figuring out moving Taking infrastructure and help solving problems beyond the immediate rental part