The real estate technology scene is white hot right now. That’s partly due to the fact that the real estate industry has been reluctant to embrace new technologies and update increasingly out-of-date legacy systems.
One Chicago company attempting to push the real estate industry into the present, and eventually the future, is Mobile Doorman. The company has created a white-label designed to let property managers communicate with residents via smartphones as opposed to through flyers and sticky notes.
“People use several apps a day to manage their lives,” said Mobile Doorman founder Bob Matteson. “In the apartment world, it’s not that easy to communicate with your building. There’s a big opportunity to improve that relationship by leveraging mobile technology.”
The Mobile Doorman app allows residents to do everything from pay their rent to book a common area and make maintenance requests. Property managers can also share announcements with tenants and gather feedback from residents through surveys. The platform offers 13 features that can be turned on or off as needed, and buildings pay Mobile Doorman a monthly per-unit fee.
I was in the epicenter of the tech world, and my apartment had zero technology to communicate with its residents.”
Matteson developed the idea for Mobile Doorman while living and working in the Bay Area at a consumer payments startup. The property manager at the high-rise he lived in would communicate building announcements through flyers and notify residents of package deliveries via sticky notes.
“I was in the epicenter of the tech world, and my apartment had zero technology to communicate with its residents,” said Matteson.
Growth was initially slow when Mobile Doorman launched in 2013. It was hard for Matteson to penetrate the real estate industry as an outsider, and at the time property managers didn’t place a high value in tech. But Mobile Doorman continued to develop its product as the industry’s attitude toward tech shifted. A refined product, plus high-level hires with years of experience in the multifamily industry (that’s the technical term for apartments, folks) helped the company reach new heights over the past year.
Today, Mobile Doorman is in 26 states and almost 200 properties, with each property averaging between 250 to 300 units. Not without competitors, Matteson said Mobile Doorman’s edge comes from the fact that it sees itself as a consumer company.
“We want to create the best possible user experience for residents,” Matteson said. “That’s a no-brainer in consumer industries, but not so much in real estate. We’re telling these property companies, ‘Hey, call them customers, not tenants, and treat them as such.’”
Mobile Doorman has a team of 18 people distributed around the country and will be hiring for its relationship management and engineering teams this year. Those roles will primarily be based in Chicago, as the team potentially doubles or triples its size by year’s end.
