Todd Katler, CEO of Anyone Home talks with Patrick Antrim, CEO of Multifamily Leadership on operational strategies for success post-pandemic.

The pandemic led the industry to evaluate the way they adapt. Not only did operators need to pivot their strategies to accommodate for social distancing and health and safety precautions, but they had to adapt new technologies, processes and procedures. The most successful operators have adapted while making the consumer the point of focus. From various technologies to creating future leasing strategies in an unpredictable market, operators have to shift quickly to accommodate for new and changing conditions and sometimes fake it till they make it. This episode will cover the various levels of adaptation among operators, how operations will continue to evolve and discuss specific strategies for success.

All right, today on the show we have Todd Katler, founder and CEO of Anyone Home. Todd has a great depth of experience as a 25-year veteran of multifamily on both the management and operational sides of the business, but also implementing innovation into multifamily and his goal and vision for elevating the rental housing experience. For both the prospective and existing residents,  the perspective and experience that onsite professionals have is something that we’re really tuned into.

He has successfully graduated Anyone Home from a startup to more than 300 employees and doing more than a million contacts per month. We’re here to talk to you today, Todd, about what’s next for leasing and multifamily. Thank you for having me, glad to be here. Listen, I just want to talk to you a little bit about what’s different now and what’s the role of leasing?

Where are we going with all of that? You know, it’s interesting. Multifamily, historically, is very, very slow to change because there’s really not a lot of existential risk for the most part. If you’re an operator, you didn’t make a lot of money, or a little bit less than a lot of money, but you’re not going to not make any money.

I think with the onset of the pandemic, what we saw is changes that were already happening by early adopters that the whole earlier adopter curve just sort of moved to the left a bit where people who were risk-averse are saying, geez, we got it. We can do something or nothing. You know, let’s do something, but we’re seeing a lot of companies that otherwise wouldn’t have changed changing quite a bit now.

Yeah. So a question on that, let’s go into the fears. Let’s go back before the forced innovation with a forced change. You know, you mentioned something very interesting in that success can sometimes be the biggest issue for multifamily and we saw that with the hotels and auto industry.

You know, I’m looking at industries like that, seeing massive change in the intermediary areas and in that customer experience. And so what do you think the fears are? I think in bringing on something that maybe it’s not just the early adopters getting involved, but really everybody should just because of the customer experience.

I mean, self-guided tours are probably the easiest one to show as an example of that. So we started Anyone Home to serve institutional loans, single-family operators and people that have 10,000 plus units of single-family homes. They adopted self-guided tours in seconds because they had to to survive. It was the only way they were going to be able to operate with a margin even remotely similar to multifamily. 

So if you’re trying to attract that same institutional capital, you don’t have much of a choice. We launched self-guided tours for multifamily from a technology perspective a year and a half ago and it took almost a ful...