About Tricon Residential
Tricon Residential Inc. is the fourth-largest single-family rental company in the United States, with a growing portfolio of more than 36,000 single-family rental homes in the U.S. Sun Belt and multi-family apartments in Canada. As one of the country’s fastest-growing real estate companies, Tricon has gained a competitive advantage by leveraging its highly responsive, personalized customer service to create profitable long-term relationships.
Recognizing that IT modernization was critical to further strengthening its market position and seeking to become a technology innovator in the residential real estate rental industry, Tricon has been engaging Effectual as a key technology partner since 2019. This partnership has given Effectual the opportunity to execute several successful projects, including developing initiatives deliver including developing an independent innovation function within the organization in addition to providing ongoing support through the Effectual Modern Cloud Management service.
The Challenge
Tricon was seeking to make the home-tour and rental application process as efficient as possible for potential tenants and its own employees, while also reducing the amount of time that its properties remained vacant between tenants. Tricon initially sought a solution that would enable prospective home or apartment renters to schedule home tours through its website and then gain access to the property without needing to have a sales agent present, providing the renter with greater flexibility in touring the property at their convenience.
The Solution
Effectual first helped Tricon develop a smart-lock solution that would enable a potential renter, after he or she had made a tour reservation online, to use their phone to access the smart lock feature and enter the rental property. Effectual teamed with a company called Verifast to incorporate an ID validation component into the solution, which would match a photo of the individual’s face captured on their phone at the point of entry to the property with their driver’s license photo to ensure that they are who they claim to be.
After the online scheduling and remote-access capabilities were implemented, Tricon wanted to leverage technology further to provide potential tenants with a self-tour capability. The company sought Effectual’s help in developing a system that leveraged smart speakers to enable self-guided home tours. The challenge was to create a system that didn’t need signs or other prompts requiring the prospective renter to initiate the “conversation” with the smart device.
Within just a few weeks, Effectual developed a prototype leveraging Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker system. The solution uses Alexa Smart Properties—a set of technologies that property owners and managers can use to deploy and manage Alexa-enabled devices at scale. The solution integrates the door-lock responses so that the self-guided tour can be triggered automatically once the smart lock is activated. When the individual enters the property and asks for a tour, the Alexa speaker welcomes the person and provide some basic information about the property, such as location, square footage, number of rooms, amenities, whether it’s pet-friendly, rental rate, and local amenities. The bulk of the solution’s technology is built on the AWS suite of services and integrated with AWS-native solutions as much as possible.
After the individual completes the tour and leaves the property, they receive a text thanking them for taking the tour. If they express interest in filling out an application, they’re provided a link to do so online. Once Tricon personnel have reviewed the application, the rest of the leasing process can be completed online.
The Results
People looking to rent a Tricon property can now schedule tours at their leisure, eliminating the need to sync their schedule with the property manager or sales agent. Instead of all the back-and-forth of paperwork and sending files and other documentation typically associated with renting an apartment or home, Tricon has made the process nearly seamless for prospective tenants. The solution has enabled Tricon to provide greater flexibility in terms of access to the properties; increased the efficiency of the leasing process; and removed some of the human bias inherent in face-to-face interactions.
Just as important, the new Alexa-based system is expected to significantly reduce the amount of time properties are vacant between tenants. Before the solution was implemented, it took between 30 and 40 days, on average, from the time a person expressed interest in a property until the time they signed a lease and moved in. With Effectual’s help, Tricon expects to cut that down to less than 10 days.
With the Alexa-guided tour currently in production, Tricon plans to expand the capabilities of the app-based rental process to bring a greater level of automation intelligence to the home. For instance, in some of its properties Tricon is already using smart sensors to monitor certain appliances and systems, and the company anticipates using these for predictive maintenance, enabling the company to address and remedy potential issues before they arise.
Managed Services Benefits
Effectual has also been able to provide Tricon with continuous cloud management and support services through Modern Cloud Management. In our ongoing work with Tricon, Effectual has:
- Delivered effective and efficient support services, reinforced by support runbooks that outline workload responsibilities, ITIL change requirements, and escalation procedures.
- Implemented a patching strategy and timetable to maintain up-to-date and secure systems.
- Audited resource tagging structure, then designed a modernized tagging system to help strengthen Tricon’s security measures, establish internal accountability, and provide asset cost allocations.
- Utilized AWS Security Hub and Amazon Inspector to detect and address security vulnerabilities.
- Improved monitoring and alerting by evaluating and refining monitoring thresholds across all AWS infrastructure to minimize email notifications and enhance system performance.
- Implemented monitoring of S2S VPN connections for key vendor integrations.
- Developed strategies to improve cost efficiency using AWS Trusted Advisor Priority reports, which:
- Reduced storage spend by approximately $4,000 per month.
- Reduced compute spend by approximately $16,500 per month.
