Reva redefines the CRM experience for large multi-tenant real-estate property managers.

July 2015 - Current

As a Reva co-founder and executive leader, I’ve helped build the vision, team, and product from the ground up.

As a co-founder and employee-zero, I’ve been with Reva since the beginning. I’m primarily responsible for the product and design team, but have also worked on sales, marketing, implementation, business development, vendor relations, consulting services, etc. In short, I’ve worn every hat there is… and may have invented a few new hats along the way.

Results

  • For a single, modest-sized property manager, Reva directly yielded a $240M increase in property value and $12M increase in net operating profit for a meager $400k annual SaaS spend. That’s a 30x return on SaaS spend.

  • 18% reduction in marketing spend by improving marketing funnel monitoring and management.

  • 36% reduction in staff costs by centralizing lead development and reducing inefficiencies.

  • 41% improvement in conversion through a combination of automated work management and integrated sales best-practices.

  • 25% increase in net operating income directly attributed to Reva by third-party bankers during a recap of a major, West Coast property worth about $9 billion.

  • 90% or more decrease in training time for a new leasing agent. On other systems, agents take 1-4 weeks to train before becoming productive. With Reva, agents worked through training modules to become productive in a single, independent morning session of 2-4 hours. This industry typically has an agent turn-over of 50-150% per year, so decreased training time substantially improves the agents’ lives, and meaningfully contributes to reduced staffing costs to accomplish business objectives.

  • Novel architecture for vastly more flexible conversational AI. Our approach leveraged off-the-shelf NLU (natural language understanding) to generate structured data. The structured data was combined with preexisting data that fed a rules engine to select an appropriate response and/or next action for the system. This approach also supported advanced marketing nurture campaigns to keep prospects warm or reactivate prospects that began to cool off.

  • Novel architecture to support customized work management solutions per client and situation. By leveraging a decision service supported by multiple technologies, each customer could customize how Reva facilitated customer relationships. For example, how often prospects are contacted at different stages of the process, how leads are scored, or what conditions apply to an applicant screening report. The system standard logic could be augmented or replaced by rules or APIs defined specifically for a customer. So, everybody gets a great experience out of the box, but Reva can be infinitely tweaked as needed for advanced business objectives.

Conclusions

It’s a bit difficult to summarize my conclusions about Reva. This is a monster-sized platform that violates typical software categories. It’s a CRM, but also includes a suite of marketing, sales management, analytics, and resident management capabilities.

For example, a relatively small Reva feature allows dynamic phone number replacement on websites. This is similar to products such as CallRail; however, Reva goes a step further allowing many numbers for different properties to be replaced in a single call while maintaining the principle source. So, even though a customer is visiting about Property A from Rent.com, we’ll still know they came from Rent.com if they call the number displayed for Property B as another option in the area. This is well beyond what products like CallRail can support.

I’ve loved working on this project. The product we’ve built is top-class. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of clever pieces big and small to discuss in Reva.

Most importantly, I believe we’ve built the best team and corporate culture of my career. This team has designed and built a solution that should have required 3-4x more people. We’ve done it consistently faster than expected. I only hope I can work with teams this talented, dedicated, loyal, and fun as often as possible.

Project details

Because Reva is so much larger than anything else on my portfolio, I’ve decomposed the content in several more specific posts. This allows me to go into much more detail without creating an unwieldy, single page. Feel free to peruse only the aspects of Reva you find most interesting or applicable to your needs. These are presented in no particular order.

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