HOW TO RUN YOUR BUILDING!

Carol Ott: Welcome to How to Run Your Building, a conversation with New York's leading property management executives. I'm Carol Ott with Habitat Magazine, and my guest today is Alvin Wasserman, Senior Director of Asset Management at Fairfield Properties. 

Most property management companies today will tout how technology can help them better serve their clients. From check paying to service requests to communication, technology seems to make everything more efficient and faster, and it certainly has changed the management business. Alvin, if you could put a reverse hat on, how has it changed the role of a board director? 

Alvin Wasserman: The board director has more access to more information than ever before.

And if they want to communicate a message to the entire community, we can do so instantaneously. If they want to track service requests, they can do that at any time. If they want to review what invoices have been paid, what status there is of the invoice, when it was received, when it was approved, when it was mailed, they can do that. If there's a question about somebody complaining about a repair that that was done before and it wasn't done right, they can view the entire history of repairs on any unit. So there are so many things that the board has available to them now that they didn't have before.

Carol Ott: So it used to be that if your co-op or a condo transitioned to a new property management company, that new company couldn't really begin managing until it had received all the boxes that contain the association records. How does that work today, with management companies using technology to store the records?

Alvin Wasserman: All records in companies that use digital technology are online. There are no more paper files. The only thing kept in paper files are: legal documents that must be kept on paper: contracts, things like that. But other than that, everything is scanned. And when there is a transition, the new company gets a disc, they upload the disc into their computer and they have everything.

Carol Ott: And that's my question actually. I wondered if it was the technology that is transitioned to the new company or, if one company is using, for instance, an Avid Xchange platform for its bill paying and the next company is using MDS, how is that data transferred to the next company?

Or is it? 

Alvin Wasserman: It's available through the platform that any management company is using. Whether the different platforms communicate with each other, I couldn't say. But if they don't communicate with each other, they would have that available in a disc. They may not be able to open it if they don't have the Avid Xchange platform, but they can request from Avid Xchange to print out hundreds of pages of payables. They would pay a fee for that and they would have it on paper. It is possible that these different platforms have a way to merge documents from one to the other, but I don't know for certain if they do.

Carol Ott: So for boards who are working with a property management company who has kept up to date and embraced these different platforms, I'm wondering, if they ever wanted to transition to a new company, which often happens. Does a co-op or condo then get locked into the technology it basically has all its data in? I can't imagine some, co-op or condo would transition to a company who had no technology, although they're still smaller companies out there who aren't using that much technology. But it does lock you in. 

Alvin Wasserman: Not really.

The board can work with any company they want and transition to the new platform that, that the new company has even if it's different than the old company. Keep in mind that annually, the independent account for every property does an audit of the books. And if they're doing a complete audit, they're reviewing invoices, payables, receivables, everything. And they're issuing a comprehensive financial report every year. So every board should have that. And that gives you a basis for history, corporate history. But there's a workaround no matter what. You can from the former company even if it's, for example, if we're transitioning something and the new company doesn't have our platform, and the board says we would like paper copies of everything.

What we would do is send a disc to a printer and they would pay for the copy. The printer would open it, print it. And give them copies. You're not held prisoner to any particular technology. 

Carol Ott: And I wanna talk to you about security. Every tech platform has a security challenge and I know legally somebody has to bear responsibility if that platform was hacked.

I assume it's not the property management company. Is it the tech platform? Is this something, when you engage a tech platform, that as a property management company, you look at what happens if there is a breach? 

Alvin Wasserman: I can only speak for what takes place at Fairfield and we have six full-time people in an IT department.

And the reason why it's that extensive is because we have a very large equity portfolio and what we're protecting is the life of our business. And so we back up data every single day. We have multi-factor authentication on everything. 

And we work with RICO business systems that also monitors our security.

They have a platform called Sentinel that watches if there's somebody trying to break in. So we have really extensive controls, probably more than a typical management company because again, we have a large equity portfolio and we're protecting ourselves and our clients benefit from that.

But look. If hackers can hack into Sony Corporation or the New York government, the United States government, then they certainly, if they really were motivated to see if somebody paid their rent, they could hack into us. But we have insurance for that. We have cybersecurity insurance, so we have that protection if there is any loss.

The real danger is if they hack into the bank accounts of our clients or our bank accounts, but that's not us protecting that. Each bank is responsible for that. And that could happen with your personal account or your business account or with your properties account, with the receivables, payables and where the money is going.

But the responsibility for that protection is with Chase, Citibank, Signature, Flagstaff, all of these banks. And they have extensive systems and they're insured and they have to make good on any loss. 

Carol Ott: Would you assume that also extends to Avid Xchange, which is very popular in the property management business?

Alvin Wasserman: They must have that kind insurance. They must. But again, they're just an intermediary. Ultimately, they're dealing with a bank that pays the invoice and that bank has to be insured. But if Avid Xchange they must have insurance on that basis. And I can't imagine that we would use them if they didn't.

Carol Ott: And I wanna ask you: technology isn't free. All these platforms have license fees. Sometimes it's monthly license fees. As property managers have embraced more technology, their license fees for using this, there's suddenly become a line item for that. How does it work in terms of the relationship with the new client?

Is that fee something that the management company has absorbed? Are some of those fees passed along to clients? How does that work? 

Alvin Wasserman: In our situation there has been no increase in fees, management fees. To to cover the additional costs of technology. And I will tell you this, it's a fallacy that people say technology will, people will lose their jobs.

People will it'll reduce the number of people that a company needs to hire. Exactly the opposite has happened. We've had to increase staff due to technology, and we have increased costs due to technology. And as a result we have increased efficiencies due to technology. But the out of pocket expenses comes from the management company in our situation.

But overall it is costing us more than it did before. 

Carol Ott: I assume from the property management company's perspective, even though there's an additional cost, the benefit must outweigh that cost. 

Alvin Wasserman: It certainly does. It certainly does in efficiencies in communication, in customer relations, customer service, in every single area.

It's better for the boards, it's better for the members of the community, the residents, and it's better for the management company. And it's just part of the world we live in today. And either you grow with it or you go the way of the dinosaurs. 

Carol Ott: And on that note, I wanna thank you very much for sharing your insights.

Thanks so much Alvin. 

Alvin Wasserman: You are most welcome. My pleasure.