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How Are Building Management Platforms Changing The Way We Live? With Jessica Beck & Marcela Sapone

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May 25, 2022

Summary: Louisa
is joined by
Jessica Beck, Co-Founder and COO of Alfred and Marcela Sapone, CEO and Co-Founder of Alfred for the 5th episode of season 9. During this
episode, they discuss how building management platforms are
changing the way we live. Taking a deeper dive into how Alfred came
about and in which city it all began, they also touch on what the
product is, what trends they are seeing, and why Alfred acquired a
property management company. They wrap up this riveting chat by
talking about their journey as female founders and what is next for
Alfred. The value bomb from this episode is, “Once you build an
asset, you need someone to manage that asset.”

Resources:


Companies Mentioned:


Shout Outs:

 

 


Key Insights From This Episode: 

  • The people who were able to make it all work
    had one thing in common: they got really comfortable with asking
    for help as well as comfortable with the idea of a team backing
    them up. – Marcela 
  • ​Once you build an asset, you need someone to
    manage that asset. – Marcela  
  • Real estate has been very resistant towards
    tech enablement. – Marcela
  • My advice to founders would be; it does take
    time but if you build a relationship and you go building by
    building, one building to ten buildings, you not only build a great
    relationship, but you actually get to build a great product and you
    get to learn and work with your customers to bring something to
    market. – Jessica
  • We learned that in this space, there’s so much
    fragmentation; there’s fragmentation on the technology side, on the
    services side and on the operator side. – Jessica


About Our Guests:

Jessica Beck, Co-Founder and COO at
Alfred 

Jessica Beck is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer
of
Alfred. Beck leads Alfred’s day-to-day operations and
under her direction, Alfred has grown to be a leader in
hospitality, successfully rolling out a national resident
experience and building management platform with hundreds of
thousands of units managed. 

In an effort to expand Alfred’s
footprint, Beck has negotiated and developed partnerships with some
of the country’s largest real estate developers, expanding Alfred
to 44 major cities across the country. 

Along with Alfred’s Co-Founder,
Marcela Sapone, Beck supports founders who want to live more
consciously through WHITESPACE Ventures, a seed investment firm
focused on design-led tech for better business. 

From SXSW to the Sante Fe
Institute’s Annual Business Network & Board of Trustees Symposium,
Jess speaks regularly on entrepreneurship and building scalable
solutions in the sharing economy. Beck holds an MBA from Harvard
Business School and a BA in economics from Williams College, where
she was captain of the women’s rugby team and graduated cum
laude.

Marcela Sapone, Co-Founder and CEO of
Alfred 


Marcela Sapone
is the
CEO and Co-Founder of
Alfred. Sapone launched Alfred with a mission to make
help a universal utility in every home. Since 2014, under Sapone’s
leadership, Alfred has expanded to serve more than 135,000
residents in 44 cities across the United States and Canada, and has
been named as Fast Company’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in
2018, 2019, and 2020. 

As one of the first leaders in
the sharing economy to advocate for fair compensation of service
workers, Sapone adopted the company-wide policy of hiring all
Alfred staff as W2 employees. Sapone has worked with the U.S.
Department of Labor and the White House under the administration of
President Barack Obama, as well as The Brookings Institute and The
Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities and Financial Security
Program, to advance these efforts of economic security for the
future of employment. Along with Alfred’s Co-Founder, Jess Beck,
Sapone supports founders who want to live more consciously through
WHITESPACE Ventures, a seed investment firm focused on design-led
tech for better business. 

Named one of Goldman Sachs’s
“most intriguing entrepreneurs,” Sapone writes and speaks
frequently on principled leadership, human-centered technology, and
her commitment to being a steward of good jobs and meaningful
change. Her writing has appeared in Forbes, Quartz, and Recode,
among other highly reputable publications. She has been included in
Fast Company’s Most Creative People list, featured as the face of
Consumer Tech in Forbes 30 Under 30, and was also a winner of
Connect Media’s Women in Real Estate Award in 2021. Sapone serves
on the Norwalk Zoning Commission, where she supports initiatives
and creates opportunities for urban development and growth. Sapone
earned her BA from Boston University and holds an MBA with
distinction from Harvard Business School. 


Alfred 

Operating at the intersection of
real estate and technology,
Alfred is the leading resident experience building
management platform that is changing the way we live. Founded in
2014 by Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck, Alfred’s mission is clear:
to create an industry shift in real estate, transforming renters
into residents and apartment properties into neighbourhoods. Named
by Fast Company as one of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in
the World, Alfred has been recognized as a leader in the on-demand
and in-home economy, investing in the local ecosystems and
neighbourhood businesses that give meaning to our communities.
Alfred to date operates in over 135,000 residential units in 44
markets across the U.S. and Canada through strategic partnerships
with international real-estate operators, such as Brookfield,
Hines, Related, RXR, Greystar and Jamestown. To learn more,
visit
www.helloalfred.com.


About Our Host

Louisa Dickins

Louisa is the co-founder of LMRE, which has rapidly
become the market leading global PropTech recruitment platform and
search consultancy with operations across North America, United
Kingdom, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

To promote the industry she is
so passionate about, Louisa set up the Global podcast


‘The Propcast’
where she
hosts and invites guests from the built environment space to join
her in conversation about innovation.


About LMRE

LMRE is globally recognised for leading the way in
Real Estate Tech & Innovation talent management.

From the outset our vision was
to become a global provider of the very best strategic talent to
the most innovative organisations in PropTech, ConTech, Smart
Buildings, ESG, Sustainability and Strategic Consulting.

At LMRE we are fully committed
at all times to exceed the expectations of our candidates and
clients by providing the very best advice and by unlocking
exclusive opportunities across our global network in the UK,
Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.


Timestamps:

[02:10] Marcela: How did Alfred
come about and how did you meet? 

  • I went to Harvard Business School and ended up
    sitting next to Jessica, we were both working 90-100 hour
    weeks. 
  • Our objective, both as individuals and
    personally, was to figure out if it would be possible to start our
    own adventure, build our own business and to find a
    co-founder. 
  • Our question was, “How can we enable women to
    stay in the workforce longer?” 
  • Our solution was, “Could we create a business
    that would put groceries in your fridge, dry-cleaning your closet,
    packages on your counter and have everything you ever needed at the
    tap of the button. And could that be included in our
    rent?”

 [05:40] Jessica: In which
city did this all begin? 

  • We were one of the few consumer companies that
    originated in Boston as we were still students. 
  • We opened our next market in New
    York.
  • We have scaled to Canada and now we are in 52
    cities. 

[07:25] Marcela: Can you tell us
more about the product? 

  • We focus on the largest category and asset
    class in the world, which is housing and we are making it
    digital. 
  • We take technology and we take a resident
    first, very consumer perspective and we are disrupting the way that
    traditional property management happens in multifamily and single
    family build-to-rent communities.
  • At your fingertips is an application that
    allows you to buy services, to pay your rent, to book amenities, to
    book the Peloton, to book the workspace, to complain about
    something going wrong in your apartment and to request your
    packages to be delivered to your front door.

[10:05] Jessica: How did you go
about bringing on your first massive client?

  • Our approach in working with the industry and
    gaining our first customers was really one of
    partnering.
  • Our first big customer was Related
    Rentals. 
  • My advice to founders would be; it does take
    time but if you build a relationship and you go building by
    building one building to ten buildings, you not only build a great
    relationship, but you actually get to build a great product and you
    get to learn and work with your customers to bring something to
    market.
  • We always took a partnership oriented,
    consultative approach. 

[12:05] Marcela: What are the
major trends you have seen between Boston or New York in terms of
what a resident is looking for.

  • In Boston and New York, one of our biggest
    categories in the service marketplace in terms of time-saving
    service, was dry cleaning. But in San Francisco, you have
    absolutely no dry cleaning, and in Texas pet care was our largest
    category.
  • In the last three to five years while we’ve
    been building the business, there’s been a tremendous amount of
    change in the industry.

[15:10] Jessica: What was the
reasoning behind acquiring a property management
company? 

  • One of the things that we learned along the
    journey is if you really want to change how people live and you
    want to do it past the front door of their home, you need to be
    much more connected than you would guess.
  • We realised in order to really deliver the
    product, we had to become much more integrated into building
    operations to create an end to end user experience and to deliver
    on top of that platform, you need to have a
    consolidation.
  • We learned that in this space, there’s so much
    fragmentation. 

[21:15] Jessica: How long on
average does a resident stay in an apartment?

  • The average in the US, for annual churn in a
    property is about 45 – 50% a year and as a consumer business that
    means there is a lot of opportunity.
  • What we’ve found is when you put a community in
    a building and residents start to participate and their lifestyle
    starts to get automated they end up staying
    longer. 
  • In properties where we’ve been operating for
    some time, we’ve increased the  renewal rates for our partners
    by 5-10%. 

[24:25] Marcela: Any advice you
can give to other female founders?

  • We try to ignore the fact that we’re female
    founders, we would never do female only panels or raise and go out
    and say, “Female led companies raising X amount.”
  • Focus on the business and the fundamentals of
    the business. 
  • Have an extreme level of patience and a level
    of acceptance.
  • Jessica: Being a founder is hard so find a good
    support system. 

[27:55] Marcela/Jessica: How do
you support your growing team as well as retain
employees? 

  • All of us on the planet are at a point where
    we’re taking a big step back to evaluate our choices.
  • There’s been a reshuffling of where people are
    putting their energy and the careers they want to be
    in.
  • One thing that is extremely clear is that
    connecting back to your mission and having an incredibly clear set
    of values as well as being as radically
    transparent. 
  • Being empathetic and personal with each member
    of your team and understanding their goals. 

[31:40] Marcela: What is next
for Alfred? 

  • Slowly and steadily continually leading the
    category forward to become the leading brand in residential real
    estate as well as work with our stakeholders to move the industry
    forward. 
  • Continuing to add value to all of our
    customers

[34:15] The ‘LMRE’ part, Louisa asks the guests to talk
about; 

L – Touch on
the main 
lessons you have learnt throughout your
career.

Marcela: First things first and
one line to do lists. 

Jessica:  When you’re a
founder, you’re kind of the captain of a ship and you see calm seas
and stormy seas but you are always in both. 

M – Please give
a
 mention to anyone / product / service.

Marcela: John Fagan, Co-founder
& CEO at doorkee.

Jessica: Our whole
team.

R – What has
been the most 
rewarding aspect of working in PropTech?

Marcela:  We’re taking
things from a piece of paper and turning them into something that
you can engage with and interact with. 

Jessica: Echo what Marcela
said. 

E – What are
you 
excited about in the future of PropTech?

Marcela:  Getting through
2022 and 2023 and being able to reflect back and be proud of making
it through a pretty challenging market with lots of ups and downs
and twists.

Jessica: Keep pushing the
envelope in the industry. 

[36:05] Jessica: Are there any
plans to come to Europe? 


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