At this year’s CREtech Conference in New York, we heard a lot about the importance of data. Speakers mentioned it on almost every panel and some presentations focused exclusively on the nuanced challenges with data. Nearly every exhibitor had a message about the type of data their technology generated.
There was a wide range of data types and data technologies on display. Some examples:
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- 3D data for virtual tours and AR (Augmented Reality)
- Data for marketing, buying, and selling properties
- Data about potential deals and transactions
- Data about contracts, leases, and agreements
- Data about tenant requests and services
- Data about tax lots, ownership, and property history
- Data about revenues, cash flow, and expenses
- Data about occupancy and traffic patterns
- Data about parking usage and availability
- And even data to manage bathroom supplies and cleaning!
So much data about so many things!
Two thoughts among all the talk about data:
1. Across the board, it wasn’t always clear what property owners and managers would do with all the data. How do they practically use it? How does it improve outcomes for their business, their property, and tenants? Ask anyone who has been given a bunch of stats, graphs, and charts ‒ data simply for the sake of having data isn’t terribly useful. As one panelist noted, a lot of the tech on the show floor looked like a solution in search of a problem.
2. Surprisingly, there was little in the way of data about the physical condition, operational state, and health of a property as a whole. Heating and cooling, plumbing, electrical, structural integrity, and indoor environmental conditions are what make a residential building livable and desirable. Certainly, there were solutions addressing one aspect or another of a property, but there was nothing that addressed the entire property comprehensively. Yet, owner-operators must manage the whole property, not just one part or the other.
Without properly functioning systems, repair and maintenance costs go up, asset values go down, and the resident experience suffers. Knitting together a patchwork of disparate PropTech solutions ‒ each one focused on a single aspect of a property ‒ is not a viable approach. It costs too much, requires too much integration, and puts too great a technological burden on users – a burden that could easily be avoided with a more holistic approach.
Welcome to Dwellwell. We’re defining a new category of data for residential properties, Maintenance Diagnostics. In this new category, we deliver a comprehensive view of the performance and “health” of an entire property. Specifically, that means:
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- Monitoring heating & cooling, plumbing, electrical, structural integrity, and indoor environmental conditions
- Giving owners an understanding of the quality and efficiency of their real estate portfolio
- Enabling operations and maintenance teams to be more proactive through early-warning insights
- Helping property managers maintain a comfortable indoor environment.
In short, we take an integrated and comprehensive approach to property data, translating it into actionable alerts and insightful information of how well a property is operating.
This is what Dwellwell was created to do. And we do this all with an all-in-one, plug-and-play sensing system that anyone can install. Sure, our SaaS platform gathers and synthesizes a lot of data and includes cool proprietary technology. However, we get the most excited by solving the everyday challenges that owner-operators of residential rental properties experience on a day-to-day basis.
Illustration credit: Image by storyset on Freepik