Aleš Špetič, CEO and Founder of Klevio looks at how simple technologies can save managing agents time, money and stress.

Whether you live in a house, flat, or bungalow, chances are that you have quite a bit of tech surrounding you to help make life easier. Whether it’s a timer on your coffee machine or a motion sensor for your security lights. With the growth of smartphone adoption, software is always at hand to help give you control over your environment.

Quick messages using Whatsapp, Netflix offering entertainment on demand, Uber providing on demand point to point travel, Waze giving you directions and all of the solutions in between, smartphones are empowering users to have more control over what they see, how they move around and how they communicate.

This technology has also led to an explosion in property technologies (PropTech). People are looking for ways to manage their lives – and most of that management is on their smart devices. Monitoring the heating in your home with a HIVE setup or your water usage with Dropcountr. These tools are made to make everyday users understand and have control over what’s happening in their homes. But, the real innovations to you, the managers, are being made with property management tools. We’ve moved our homes into the shared economy, with platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway. People are now hotel managers on top of their day jobs, and they want the same types of controls over their rental properties as they do their own dwellings.

Multi-unit Management is the next evolution

As disruptive technologies move into the mainstream, they become an expected offering. From companies having multiple channels to reach them like Twitter, email, phone and Facebook, to banking offering an app to manage your accounts, so too moves property management. This usually starts with the management of processes. Companies like FixFlo have made the administration of multi-unit management more easy. Tenants can add issues that need attention directly into the software and the landlord can then book a repairman to fix it. All within the app. This makes all the email back and forth unnecessary and saves time for all parties.

If you look at a lot of the property management apps out there – one of the key selling points for all of them is the ability for instant, direct messaging between landlord and tenant, that is how they predominantly started – so, although people are wary of a lot of the PropTech solutions out there, they already use the forefather of it all. Think of these products as WhatsApp, but over time creators have added issue reporting, rent chasing, property searches and so much more to the service.

But what about physical processes as opposed to digital ones? If you manage multiple rental properties or even a single apartment complex, you are looking to save time. Time on booking new tenants, paying rent, repairs, etc are all things that are simple to change. Physically getting a repairman in the door though is still a hands-on experience for most people. Someone needs to be on hand to open the door for that person. The meet-and-greet lives on.

Commercial adoption drives expectations

When talking about expectations, you need to talk about adoption. If there were 100,000 people on the planet that used Facebook, you wouldn’t expect that everyone you meet has a Facebook account. But with well over 2 billion users, you can be pretty sure that everyone you meet has an account. The same is true for commercial property technologies. Cardkeys became mainstream when hotels started to adopt them and people came to expect that technology, because they became familiar with it.

I believe that Klevio is the next step in the evolution of access systems. If you can unlock your car remotely, surely you should be able to do the same with your commercial property. Klevio creates virtual keys to allow access. That means that commercial property managers don’t need to be physically at the property with keys in hand to allow access. Airbnb hosts can allow guests access without going to the home. Whether it’s an emergency visit from a plumber or a planned visit, the virtual keys can be given to the people that need them for the amount of time that they need them. Virtual keys, much like smartphones, will become the expectation, not the exception.   

Keyless saves time, money and the environment

Property managers will be able to save time by not having to drive to a location. They’ll save money, by not having to travel to a location. Managers can give access to maintenance workers without needing to drive to the property and the tenant won’t have to stay home to give that worker access. In the same vein as HIVE systems, virtual keys solve multiple problems at once, just by existing.

In reality, there are some very simple things out there that will help save you precious time and money. You don’t have to go and adopt all solutions thrown at you, or start your own tech company, but I would suggest that you explore your options for digitising simple, costly processes.

Aleš Špetič is the CEO and Co-Founder of Klevio. 

A serial entrepreneur, Aleš has co-founded and run four tech startups. He’s also a trained engineer, has an MBA from California State University and has written a book on database programming. Nowadays he spends much of his time with his head in the clouds – quite literally, flying between London and Ljubljana at least twice a week. He claims to love every second of it though, as it’s the only time no-one can reach him.