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What is the real role of a COO? With Kevin Shtofman and Frank Furman

12.1.22

Welcome back to season 8 of the Propcast! In this first episode, Louisa speaks with Frank Furman, COO at PadSplit and Kevin Shtofman, COO of NavigatorCRE about what the real role of a COO involves. They discuss how the COO is the ‘CEO of Execution’ and how they support organisations to scale efficiently. Louisa shares some insights on recruiting for the COO role and how the role can look different in each organisation. You’ll learn more about how PadSplit and NavigatorCRE operate in this insightful episode.

Companies Mentioned: 

Shout Outs: 

Resources: 

Key Insights From This Episode:  

  • Our view is that if you can make affordable housing higher return than market rate there is no affordable housing challenge because you’re leveraging the capital and energy and intellect of the private investor, and they are motivated to solve that. – Frank 
  • The most consistent problem I got was we’ve got a bunch of information that we don’t use to make decisions because it’s spread out all over the place. It’s almost like what Frank’s company has done with space we are doing with information and data. – Kevin 
  • In the most general sense, to me, a COO role is an execution one. – Frank 
  • I really think at the end of the day, the job of the COO is to help a company scale efficiently. – Kevin 
  • What I found is the most important role of the COO is finding lieutenants. – Kevin 
  • The COO hat really is the CEO of execution. – Kevin 
  • I think a few trends that we saw in 2021 are absolutely going to continue in 22. You’ll see continued consolidation among proptech firms. – Kevin 
  • Finding talent as you grow is still so hard. And that’s what keeps me up at night. – Kevin 

About Our Guests: 

Kevin Shtofman 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinshtofman/ 

Kevin has spent the last 17 years in the Commercial Real Estate industry, working with clients across four continents. His work at Morgan Stanley, EY, and Deloitte led him to join NavigatorCRE as their chief operating officer just over two years ago.  Kevin has presented on stages in 27 countries, discussing the future of real estate technology and covering topics around Blockchain, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Twins. He and his wife Katie live in Dallas with their two daughters, Avery and Lily.  

NavigatorCRE is a patented, cloud-based business intelligence platform that serves enterprise owners, operators, investors, and managers across all property types, stages, and geographies…and works on any device, without an app. Over 2 Billion square feet sit on the Navigator platform. 

Frank Furman 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-furman-4b70b353/  

Frank is the Chief Operating Officer at PadSplit, a co-living startup that is dedicated to solving the affordable housing crisis. Prior to PadSplit, he worked as a Category Director at Georgia Pacific and as an Engagement Manager for McKinsey & Company in London and Atlanta. A former infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, he commanded at the platoon and company levels and served two tours in Afghanistan. He has a B.S in Aeronautical Engineering from the United States Naval Academy and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins University. He and his wife Caelyn live in Atlanta, and have two sons, Rudyard and Byron.

PadSplit is a privatized housing company focused on providing affordable houses. They have over 1,700 units (within just 3.5 years), including single and multi-family properties. PadSplit also increases yield by more than 100 percent for property owners by using existing housing stock as shared housing. PadSplit was founded in 2017 to leverage housing as a vehicle for financial independence for low-income workers that serve our communities. 

About Our Host 

Louisa Dickins 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-dickins-ab065392/

Louisa started her career in property working at a well-known estate agency in London. Realising her people skills, she moved over to Lloyd May to pursue a career in recruitment. She now is a Director at LMRE, who are a specialist recruitment firm driven by PropTech and recruitment professionals, and Louisa oversees their 5 core areas. Louisa co-founded LMRE and provides a constructive recruitment platform to the new disruptors in real estate. Louisa is also on the board of Directors at UK PropTech Association (UKPA). 

About LMRE 

www.lmre.tech

LMRE believe there is a better way to recruit. LMRE focus on a more comprehensive, client led focus delivering exceptional talent to the place at the time. They are passionate about the industry and passionate about people’s careers. LMRE spend time with each client to become and an extension of the business, and their transparency and core values help them grow with the sector. LMRE simplify recruitment and innovate with our clients and evolve the people driven, PropTech community. 

Transcript 

Louisa: Hi, everyone. And welcome to the Propcast.  

Now, today we are joined by two of my US brands. We’ve got Frank the CEO of PadSplit, and Kevin the CEO of NavigatorCRE. And we will be discussing the importance of the role of the COO in the growth of a startup business. Who better to talk about it than these two. 

We’ll also touch upon a few other hot topics, like affordable housing. I mean, that goes into PadSplit and obviously BI. And then we’re also going to be chatting through and gossiping about all the M and A that’s happening as well and what that means for other businesses in our space.  

So, without further ado, welcome to the show, Frank and Kevin.  

Frank: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.  

Kevin: Yeah. Excited to be on.  

Louisa: I think it’s time to let our guests talk about their journeys. So without further ado, Frank, I’d love to hear about your journey. Now, we spoke about it briefly before we press the record button. And you served in the US Marine Corps. You worked at leading consultant McKinsey, you’re now CEO of PadSplit there. How did this all come about? And then we can also go into a bit more about what PadSplit does and what problem it solves, and the affordable housing space, which is a problem globally. So why don’t you kick us off?  

Frank: Yeah. How did I get here? That’s the good one. I really should figure it out. Haphazardly. I think as with most people, yeah, definitely. Several years in the Marine Corps, infantry deployed a couple times Afghanistan. Several years ago, they moved to London, worked for McKinsey, and ultimately kind of bounced back and forth between several different things. And I’ve always had a lot of interests. And I think that’s part of why I actually enjoy consulting in a lot of ways, that you work on a lot of different things that can be an industry different product all the time, every couple of months or every couple of weeks.  

And I’d actually left McKinsey as we were having children and took a job at Georgia Pacific. My wife wanted to go back to work, and I traded a lot of hours and diversity for being in general management. I was promptly very bored. And my brother in law, Atticus, is our CEO, he’s always been in real estate. I’ve invested in projects with him for years, and obviously I’ve been married to his sister for eleven years. So I’ve got to know him quite a bit.  

But I’m working on this thing. This thing’s been kicking around in the back of my head. It’s a room rental model. I know that it works. I’ve done it on properties before. I’m kind of bored, too. He started several successful real estate companies and had more or less handed off the day to day. And frankly, I was at the point where I’m bored. I’m looking for a challenge. Let me do this as a side hustle, too. And so we started on it and started kind of growing it from there. And it sort of just started gaining momentum. We started gaining customers, and all of a sudden we’re like, okay, well, I think I need to quit my job. I think we need to do this full time. Or maybe there’s something there. And that was about three and a half, four years ago, and we’ve grown since then.  

We have 117 folks. We’re in most of the sort of the Southeast and west. And while that seems like we’ve grown a tonne, there have been struggles along the way, I’m sure you can imagine. But what we do at our core is we’re marketplace platform, so think like Airbnb. But instead of being fractional in terms of time. So on short term rental, one short term rental, we’re fractional in terms of space. So it’s renting by the room.  

So what we do is we work with landlords, as we call hosts, to capture monetise underutilised space within their rental properties, right within their assets. And they were kind of a couple of core insights that got us started on this path. One is for a particular kind of asset, one that’s larger, one that has a little bit more space. That extra space is a liability. Extra space cost you more for your room terms. You don’t get paid for it. You don’t get paid to have extra square footage in a rental, really. But when you rent by the room, those bedrooms are your revenue generating units. You do increase your revenue so you can generate significantly higher yields. And as asset prices have appreciated and yields have been compressed, that’s just been more important.  

And the other insight is that you kind of mentioned it everywhere I go, Frank, the thing is here in Cincinnati, in Las Vegas and LA, wherever we have an affordable housing challenge. Yeah, I hear it. But the fact is they’re right. I mean, it is everywhere. In our view is that if you can make affordable housing higher return than market rate, what you’re doing today, there is no affordable housing challenge because you’re leveraging the capital and energy and intellect of the private investor, and they are motivated to solve that.  

So how do you make it without subsidy, without lietech and tax credits and all the complications, how do you make creating truly affordable units high yield? And if you can do that, that’s the hard part, obviously.  

Louisa: I guess we’ll talk about it later because I see within the coliving space, there’s not too many players but I know Common has a couple of acquisitions. I’d love to hear a bit more about your growth, because there’s been a huge amount of it.  

I was lucky enough to meet your brother in law Atticus, which is just telling me all the good things that you guys have achieved. So we’ll talk about that a bit later.  

But Kevin, obviously it’s fantastic doing a podcast with you. It seems every time I see you with a margarita in hand at a conference after drinks. And I’m not complaining. Let’s have more of a professional conversation. Talk about your journey to prop tech. So very similar to Frank, you’ve worked with leading consultancy, but you’ve also done invest banking with Morgan Stanley. Like I mentioned now, Navigator. Talk us through that and then talk us through also NavigatorCRE is a business intelligence platform. Not all the audience knows what that exactly means. I’m still struggling to learn about all these different technologies in the market. So tell us about your journey and tell us about your business.  

Kevin: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I will attempt to explain my journey quickly and keep the focus off of clearly my habit of imbibing during the day at these conferences to keep it exciting. I’ve spent the last 17 years in commercial real estate. You mentioned a few of the companies. Stayed in investment banking, did my MBA during the financial crisis. Very lucky timing. And then almost ten years in management consulting focused specifically in the real estate technology group. Before my most recent role, before I became COO of Navigator was leading a group of people in our real estate technology group globally. And that brought me up on stage at a lot of conferences and events. It put me in a lot of different geographies, so I got to meet with owners, operators, investors, managers across all property types in all geographies and hear about their problems.  

And the most consistent problem I got was we’ve got a bunch of information that we don’t use to make decisions because it’s spread out all over the place. It’s almost like what Frank’s company has done with space we are doing with information and data. So we’re bringing all of the financial, operational, market demographic, et cetera. And we centralised all of it in our data warehouse, which is where we store all the information, both historically and up to date dynamically. Then we integrate all the information together and create visual outputs so that people that aren’t necessarily very technology savvy can understand the information and make decisions a lot faster than they would have normally. So when an executive asks a question about asset performance or acquisition pipeline or lease velocity or aged receivables or where store of who to rent to or when to use or not use ESG tech or what amenities to address base all of those decisions in the past have required a bunch of prep meetings, and we try to eliminate a lot of that by having all the data at the ready so that executives can make decisions a lot faster.  

Louisa: And I’m think that’s what everyone wants. I always see deals seem to go on forever. When you say a lot faster, what sort of time frame are you looking at?  

Kevin: In a, I’ll call it the future state, once all is complete and all the use cases are defined, all is visualised like the end state is often in order of magnitude improvement. So if something is taking two months to go through an approval process and get approved and all that, we’re trying to get that done in less than a week.  

We do that because all of the information across Department, across system, across geography is at the ready. And I think everyone saw this first hand when Covid happened, when you were less able to travel to see each other in different markets, in the office and able to collaborate face to face it accelerated the necessity of having data in a place where everybody could access it regardless of where they were, when they were, who they were for.  

Louisa: You obviously, you described your product there. We all need to talk about what your roles are within your businesses as well. I mean, you both have very integral roles to the growth. You both have products, we’ve just learned about. Your product is nothing without the C suite and obviously the wider team.  

Now I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve been on a couple of calls talking about the importance and the role of the COO and two clients which I’m trying to hire that role for, and they both gave me very different descriptions of what they think that person does and looks like in the skills they should have. You both have obviously very impressive track record CVs, everything like that.  

So, Frank, what would you say are some of the key skills that make a good COO? How did you, I guess, get into that role? What makes a successful COO?  

Frank: Yes, it’s a great question. I think it depends a little bit on the organisation. In the most general sense, to me, a COO role is an execution one. Right. The CEO and the board, to a large extent, your shareholders are setting the vision, setting the priorities and the COO’s job is to execute on that. 

Now, obviously, there’s a give and take there and refining a product refinement, kind of top-down sort of vision and directives that should hopefully be informed, certainly by data and experience and the unfortunate real-world learnings of having your previous plans be interrupted by real life. Now the way that you do that, and obviously I kind of started as the COO PadSplit when we had two people, there wasn’t a whole lot of that then. I think then executing that, mopping the floors or cleaning the toilets or whatever need to be done.  

But when I think about how you do that as an organisation grows, I think the key skill and maybe the hardest one for a lot of organisations, especially growing ones and ones that are developing kind of new products and new technologies and new industries, is having really great metrics and being able to actually know what’s important. Understand how those metrics actually tie into day to day and which ones drive great performance.  

Anyone can do really high level metrics but it’s tautological. Of course, we want top line growth. How do we get there? Okay, well, that means we need more sales at higher volume. Okay, well, fine. But how do we get there, then?  

Also, you can actually measure. I mean, that’s another issue that many people in, certainly startups, but in all companies run into where we can measure everything these days. I mean, data is so much more accessible. Everyone has their dashboards and you can run queries and all that. But there’s all sorts of things that you can measure that you can’t control. Or you can measure but it’s based on assumptions because people are going to have to enter the data and they’re easy to use.  

And that takes just really intimate knowledge with the business and the processes to say, okay, well, if I’m thinking I mean, I spend almost all my time really on the supply side of our business. I’ve fortunately been able to offload much on the sort of resident side. But when I look at our sales cycle and our sales process and how that bill becomes a loss, so to speak, it’s easy to say, okay, we’ll measure this in our CRM, and we’ll know when this opportunity hits and when it goes to this stage and well, all well and good. But you think, well, I’ve done that before, and I know how that happens. And I understand how the sales rep is thinking about it and how the customers thinking about it and how the data gets entered. And I can’t use this metric because it’ll be really easy to tweak. And that’s actually not what we’re trying to improve. It’s sort of a derived Glamour metric.  

So all that to say, it’s about having this kind of really abstracted view of how the machine works, but that’s deeply informed by the real world challenges of how that actually operates so that you can abstract a view. Anyone can build a model, but can you build a model where the abstractions are correct and relevant? So that’s how I think it works, whether or not that’s what I’d like for it to be.  

Louisa: Kevin, what about you? What do you think makes a COO? What makes you good at your job? 

Kevin: Similar to Frank, when I joined Navigator as COO, I was employee number ten. Now we’re 52. And with the wonderful help of LMRE, we’re planning on growing a lot, hopefully doubling to 100 employees next year. And that requires processes that can scale.  

I really think at the end of the day, the job of the COO is to help a company scale efficiently. And there’s a lot of ways to do that right there’s. Like Frank mentioned, tracking everything in a CRM. To me, my role is hybrid. So I oversee our sales team and our operations team, and to a certain degree, our fundraising effort as we continue to raise capital. And what I found is the most important role of the COO is finding lieutenants, right. The VP level of people that are one level below who are running their own teams efficiently and reporting up to me. The biggest change in going from ten employees to 50 is that extra layer of scale.  

And to Frank’s earlier point about tracking KPIs, you need to determine which KPI’s actually matter in your business. For us, we are trying to convince owners, operators, investors, occupiers and managers of commercial real estate, all of their information on our platform. And that takes a lot of effort. And so the first thing we had to do was segment the market, who are going to be our most long term profitable customers? Right. Is it a large company? Is it a small company? Is it an integrated company? Is it a diversified company? Is it a focused company? Is it local? Is it global? Right. We had to segment the market by type, persona, property type, geography, et cetera.  

Then we had to hone all the messaging that goes out to each of those different persona groups in various mediums. So, the COO hat really is the CEO of execution. I truly think that the CEO’s job is strategic in nature and they’re spreading the gospel of the company with various audiences, clients, regulators, competitors, even. And the COO has to go execute.  

But what I found at Navigator is we’re kind of two in a box, and we’re both operating in both roles to get things done and preach the gospel and the vision. And I’ve seen that at a lot of technology companies where you have a handful of people at the top who all have various C level titles, and you are sharing roles as they grow and figure out who’s best at what role.  

Louisa: Yeah. Going back to your point about finding your number two. So you can go from, say ten to 50 to 100 like your plans are, we’ve gone through something very similar at LMRE, fine we’re not selling a product. We’re selling career, but those have been some of our hardest hires to do, but then sort of managed and then obviously put in all the training to ensure that they are managing and developing their team below them.  

It takes a lot of work, and I don’t think people realise how much time it takes as well. But when you’ve got that base team, base managers who can then continue the growth, then you’re off to a great start. 

Now on the podcast we love to gossip a little bit. We’ve obviously been reading the news whether it’s Real Deal, CRE Tech, you name it. And there’s been a lot of prop tech acquisitions, whether it’s been OfficeApp, Rise, Lane, Building Engines. And not to mention WeWork’s IPO.  

What do you guys think is going to happen next year? Kevin would love to hear from you first, particularly in relevance to PadSplit. Brad from Common bought Ollie, and previously that I think Ollie bought Star City so what does that mean relevant to you? Surely these acquisitions are a good thing. That means there’s a great market for it people want to buy. And so, Kevin, why don’t you kick us off?  

Kevin: I think a few trends that we saw in 2021 are absolutely going to continue in 22. You’ll see, continued consolidation among proptech firms. And that’s just a sign of any industry starting. I think COVID highlighted some fast growing companies and exposed ones that weren’t quite ready for this change to hybrid work, and that’s caused a lot of acquisitions.  

I think you’ll continue to see more IPOs because 2022 is going to mark the end of the clock for all of those SPACs that launched in the mid to late 2020 craze, they all have 24 month windows to deploy the capital. So you’re going to see, I think a lot of SPAC activity in 2022.  

I think this new, everyone’s calling it digital transformation, that used to be a sexy and unknown term. That’s now just standard. And most of the companies that are coming to these prop tech conferences, they’ve already drank the Kool Aid. They are on board to change to a more digital format.  

And then I think the last, there’s going to be some sort of reckoning on what ESG actually means and where it actually matters to a real estate company. It’s a sexy term. People want to talk about it a lot in public. But how is it actually going to make a real estate company more profitable, have higher brand value, provide better tenant experience?  

ESG has become a very ‘de rigeur’ term. Everyone wants to talk about ESG and how they’re changing their business to be more environmentally responsible, socially responsible, have better corporate governance.  

The question in 2022 is going to be what KPIs do you measure to justify the ROI of focusing on ESG? Like we’re coming out of what was an uncertain time in COVID, and now I think people are focusing on different things because they’re feeling better about their business. The question will be, where is ESG worth investing in? And where is it going to be profitable both for a real estate company and for real estate company’s brand. And where is it more just marketing fluff. That’s hard to back up with numbers.  

Louisa: Yeah, going back to two points you made that obviously you mentioned about the real estate folk drinking the Kool Aid. I love that expression. So American, I love it. But yeah, more these heads of innovation they’re all being hired. And they’re all asking, obviously, LMRE will make these hires. But we are getting more and more mandate for these heads of transformation, digitalisation, integration people as well, because they are using your products. They need to make sure their business is actually using them properly and making use of them.  

And then there’s also going back to the ESG point. I saw Matt Ellis from Measurable wrote an article about these new hires we made in the ESG space, not like a COO, but it’s basically a Head of Water for these businesses and a Head of Carbon. I think for the CC. I can’t remember exactly the new title, but companies in real estate are now making these hires. We really understand and make sure they’re tracking the ESG and the reporting and everything like that. So yeah, lots to come in that space.  

Frank, what’s your whole opinion on all this M and A and how it may or may not affect PadSplit. Surely it’s quite exciting.  

Frank: Sure. Well, I suppose I guess it’s binary if it’s exciting or not. But I agree with Kevin wholeheartedly, and I think he’s absolutely right. I mean, we’re going to I think, see a ton of activity in 2022. I can’t see there’s just too much too much capital out there. It needs to be deployed. It will be going.  

I do think we’re going to see some very public failures that will be high in people’s minds. And I’m not saying for this company or that company, but just in the fact that because it involves where people live, there’s a lot of sensitivity to it, maybe outsized relative to when, say, SaaS startup goes down or this or that. I mean, WeWork is going to IPO, obviously at a much lower valuation than they raised at. But it’s very public because a lot of people had a connection to the brand. It’s physical space, and they’re definitely, as with all kind of speculative ventures, there are going to be some widths. Right.  

And Co Living is a particularly interesting space. There was a ton of buzz in it. There were some acquisitions, but none of those were big exits. They were consolidations for companies that really struggled with Covid, and in some ways with the kind of long term lease liabilities that also kind of bedevilled WeWork. So a lot of it was kind of perhaps a little structural exuberance with some of those business models that hopefully won’t impact us. We’re not really structured that way, but I certainly foresee a lot of activity.  

I think there will be some consolidation. I mean, everyone’s kind of racing for scale with a lot of things. So it just takes an inordinate amount of capital to create scale of assets. You look at kind of institutional SFR space that will be no different for Co living or anything else for people who want to own the assets.  

So undoubtedly, I think we’ll see another record breaking year in terms of M&A activity and exits and so on, even if there are some very public failures throughout.  

Louisa: Yeah. Well, let’s see what happens in 2022. This is going to come out a little bit later, maybe in the new year. I don’t know exactly. But we’re recording this it’s early December, and we’re all sort of gearing up for maybe, but we don’t know if we’re all going to be able to travel. But we’re all looking forward to 2022, which hopefully will be a massive year for NavigatorCRE and PadSplit.  

Now we have come nearly to the end of the podcast. We’ve got the final part, which is the LMRE part. So L lessons learnt in their career. M is a chance for Frank or Kevin to give anyone or product or service a shout out. R which is what is the most rewarding part work in this space. And E what are they most excited about? So, Kevin, do you want to run us through your full answers?  

Kevin: Oh, wow. Lessons I’ve learned this year in 2021. Events matter, face to face relationship building has only been highlighted during COVID, for us as a technology provider, but just as social humans. Being able to shake someone’s hand and share a meal or a conversation, it just adds so much value.  

And what I’ve found is that where we’ve had the best relationships, especially with other technology players out there is they have the same feeling. This more open and collaborative nature of companies wanting to integrate with each other and partner together and go to market together has been really helpful.  

We’ve had a handful of companies in the acquisition space that’s deal package that’s been mainly Yardy and MRI, in the leasing space that’s been BTS and Dotted. And there’s, like countless other companies that we love partnering, integrating with because our clients already use them.  

What am I most excited about? An acceleration of the trends we’re already seeing, that’s the excitement. I think there will be more events, there’ll be bigger events, there will be a ton of acceleration in the adoption of prop tech. The acquisition activity is just going to make the industry more exciting for everybody. Anytime there are exits, people get excited. And so I think just the energy level in general is going to be really intense in 2022.  

For my greatest fear, finding talent as you grow is still so hard. And that’s what keeps me up at night.  

Louisa: Yeah, me too, Kevin. Well, yeah. Anyone who’s looking for a job or hiring. Shout out to LMRE!  

Also, Kevin, going back to your point about importance of in person events. I’ve had a few conversations and people have been asking, how were they? And I’ve always obviously, I think the ones which went at Blueprint were wonderful. Also in Vegas, Michael’s ones in New York and London were so important to meeting people, shaking hands, confirming obviously the relationship understanding people. There’s still such a need for them. I don’t think it’s going to go digital and I question people that do think there won’t be a place for them. So yeah, I completely agree with you. There’s so much excitement and hopefully there’s more people into this space as excitement only going to grow. 

Now, Frank, time for you. To finish us off with your lessons learned, anyone you want to give a shout out to or a product. R, what’s the most rewarding part? And what are you most excited about in the future of prop tech?  

Frank: Well, of course, Kevin sold a really good lesson about the importance of in face meeting. So with that aside, for me, the lesson not that it’s a new one. I think it’s kind of an internal one, but just so important is that your integrity lowers your cost of capital. And real estate has always had it’s charlatans. God knows, startups and ventures fake it till you make it as part of the gospel. It doesn’t mean you’ll deliver on all your promises. Sometimes you’ll fall short. But if you try, if you’re an honest broker in your feelings, and I mean the small ‘b’ non real estate broker sense, you gain people’s trust. And if you can do that, getting capital is easy. Getting capital is straightforward. People trust you and trust you with it. So I’m not much for career advice. But if I were, that would be kind of lesson number one for people, and certainly for me and something I try to keep in mind.  

For mention, has nothing to do with prop tech. But my wife’s startup Jojo Learning is all about raising your children in a bilingual world, teaching children a second language. Our children become fluent Mandarin 100% through my wife’s very hard work. And so she works incredibly, incredibly hard as a labour of love for her. So I always have to give her and her team a shout out. Everyone should check it out even before you go to PadSplit.com. Very important.  

As far as the rewarding aspect for me, I mean, there’s definitely the aspect with customers that is just really transformational when either I see… we talked a little bit about ESG metrics, and I tend to be a type of cynical on it because I think a lot of it is kind of fluff to sell to your LPs, and you can change them every week, and no one cares as long as there’s a thing. Whereas I look at our business and say for me, the number of units that we have that are available at $600 when an apartment is $1,000, that’s the ESG metric, right? If we have 100,000, it’s 1000 times better kind of thing. But at the human level to see our residents are cut from the crooked timber of humanity, and they fall short sometimes, right. They air. But certainly you see folks for who it really works and they’re able to save money and kind of move up the housing continuum and these things that can be difficult for folks. So seeing that even if it doesn’t work every time, seeing it happen kind of increasingly happen at scale is really rewarding.  

Also, just people on my team who have now been with us a couple of years where they’ve really kind of grown and developed and is now like a badass sales rep. This is awesome.  

And as far as what I’m excited about in the future of prop tech, it’s just that I do feel we’re just on the cusp of so many interesting things because it is a really untapped industry.It’s very old school and across the board, whether it’s certainly anything that touches the regulatory side. Oh, my God. Is it antiquated and slow? Certainly anything on the and that pervades everything but construction techniques and the way you frame up a house now, isn’t that different from how you framed up house 100 years ago? There’s a whole lot of stuff there, and that, obviously and then kind of moving on to sort of creative financing and data and everything else. So there’s just a whole lot there that there’s so much opportunity that will hit next month and next year and so on. So just kind of watching it grow and evolve in it.  

I think what people don’t appreciate sometimes that people spend about 30% of their income on housing. It’s just such an important part of our lives and such a huge share of our wallet that US single family homes is the largest asset class in the world. So it doesn’t need to be an enormous change to be an enormous impact. Anyway, I think it’s maybe overdue, but maybe we’re there  

Louisa: Awesome. Thank you very much for that, Frank. And obviously, Kevin, too. It’s been a pleasure having you both on the Propcast. I’m very excited to see how both our businesses grow and develop in the next year. And hopefully, Kevin, I will see you next week in person. And obviously, Frank, maybe in 2022, we will finally grab a drink as well. But thank you for joining the show. And I’m looking forward to catching up with you after the podcast.  

Frank: Thanks for having us on.  

Kevin: Thanks so much. 

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