For all the traditional business verticals that have been disrupted by technology and startups, real estate has been a firm holdout. In the condo space, the promise of ‘smart condos’ – modern connected communities with futuristic IoT technology – has yet to emerge. The reason? Modern condos might be wired with new tech, but they’re not connected.
Toronto-based Evercondo thinks it might know the reason why. The startup has been working with condo boards, owners, and tenants for the past two years to source requirements and figure out what makes a condo community tick. Evercondo co-founder and CEO Grant Yim explained in an interview the company discovered that condo communities function on a bundle of independent systems with little to no interchange between them. What the condos were lacking was a central nervous system connecting all its disparate parts.
Modern condo communities might be wired with new technology, but they’re not connected – and thus, not smart.
“Without a central nervous system, there is no communication and collaboration between all stakeholders,” Yim said. “Without it, residents are not informed of what is happening in the community. It takes days for an invoice to get approved by the condo board, work order requests by residents doesn’t get tracked, and response time to resolve an issue skyrockets because nothing is in place to measure that.”
“With no accountability, no measurement, no connectivity, no collaboration, nothing “seems” to get done. Residents today don’t feel like they belong to a community. They feel like they are just a guest in a hotel building without the hotel treatment.”
Evercondo’s solution is to be a hub between all the disparate systems, acting as both a communication and management platform for the both the tenants and all the stakeholders responsible for keeping a condo humming: board members, concierge, security, cleaning, and so on. To date, Evercondo has signed on over 150 different condo communities across Canada, the US, and Asia.
Yim said that the sheer number of stakeholders involved in a typical condo community can complicate both Evercondo’s sales and product development cycles. “There’s really only one or two decision makers in the end, but in terms of development, it’s about developing a solution that doesn’t only cater to our customer’s needs, but also the needs of the end users.”
To that end, while Evercondo’s platform currently focuses on condo management, and reporting and analytics, the company is already looking forward to becoming the nervous system for any and all IoT devices installed within condos. If smart homes are in desperate need of a platform to connect all their smart TVs, thermostats, and whatnot, then so are condos, which are essentially a vertical stack of smart homes.
“We will basically have given all condos in North America the foundation to become smart condo communities.”