Prioritizing Data Security and Addressing Biases in AI Algorithms with Lindsay Liu, Co-founder and CEO of Super

Nate Smoyer (00:01.48)
Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Lindsay (00:03.822)
Thanks for having me today.

Nate Smoyer (00:05.608)
So how does it feel to be the interviewer as opposed to the, or the interviewee instead of the interviewer for a little bit of a change here? Yeah.

Lindsay (00:13.358)
the other side of the table. You know, I like being in control, which is what happens as a CEO. So this will be fun. Take me for a ride here.

Nate Smoyer (00:22.692)
Yeah, I'll make sure I plug a link for your podcast in the show notes here. And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later. But for everyone listening here, I've got Lindsay Liu, co -founder and CEO of a company called Super Productivity Software designed for property managers assisting with their property operations. You can think about this as like centralizing communications, automating,

triaging and tracking. And so I think this is gonna open up, we've got a wide range of topics that we can dig into in only so much time. And I thought we would start with kind of on the productivity piece, surrounding property managers. And there was something we had gotten from some of the notes pre -show here that you guys had dug up some research revealing property manager spend about,

third of their day on busy work. Let's start there. Can you unpack what it is property managers are spending their time on that's considered busy work? Is it just busy work or is this work that just has to get done and they're the only people who can do it?

Lindsay (01:37.87)
Yeah, it's such an interesting topic because I think this is also the type of work that when you get used to having that in your day, you forget that it's inefficient, right? And so, you know, we spend a lot of time studying and working with our customers to think about what their workflows are, what they're spending time on, and what could potentially be eliminated from those days so that they can get back to the real work that needs to get done.

And so what we've seen is that in a lot of different companies, and obviously every company is structured differently, but the reality is that email and the phone is never going away. So, you know, I talked to our customers a lot about this as much as you can say, I trained my tenants on logging requests directly into the portal. What that means is that a few times a day, maybe a dozen times a day, depending on your portfolio size, you are then on the phone with a tenant saying, can you please log this into the portal?

And so, you know, even that adds up. That is busy work right there. The two minutes that you just had to spend on the phone or writing back an email to somebody to say, hey, I'm going to train you to do this thing. We've done some simple math on this. Fifteen minutes of wasted time a day on kind of activities like that is 65 hours a year. That's wasted on each individual in your company. And so some of those activities that we really pay close attention to are things like,

Nate Smoyer (02:35.848)
Heheheheh

Lindsay (03:04.686)
you receive an email and somebody needs to go and log that into a system. So you're manually taking that email message, copying and pasting it or rewriting and paraphrasing it into another system. That is work that can be completely eliminated. And it's not the type of work that is actually making your team any better and more effective at being a good manager as well.

Nate Smoyer (03:12.296)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (03:25.128)
You mean, you mean like, you know, you have a staff member who gets emailed directly versus like the maintenance inbox that's connected to your management software. And so then they're like taking that email and then adding it to the, the user profile or the unit profile so that there's record of that conversation. Got it.

Lindsay (03:42.35)
Correct. But I would also say that even if you have a shared inbox, so you have like a maintenance inbox, most PMS solutions are not reading email. So if it lands an email, it is stuck in email land. And so we think about that a lot, which is as soon as you have things happening outside of your kind of core PMS,

solution, it is manual work to be able to make sure that that's getting tracked and logged and making sure that you have a complete audit trail of that. And then obviously as soon as something hits the phone or a personal cell phone or something like that, that's also lost as well.

Nate Smoyer (04:19.112)
Yeah, yeah. And then of course, text messages, which if you're on an Apple, it's kind of nice, right? Cause it, you know, you can pull it up onto your screen. I guess if you can eat WhatsApp, like you could have your Android pushed to WhatsApp so you could have it on your laptop. But for a lot of people who don't have maybe a computer in their phone, messages connected, that's even like another kind of annoying layer. And I have never tried to, I've never even bothered trying to sync text message with like,

conversation threads elsewhere, but I can only imagine the annoyance that that creates. I deal with this a little bit myself. We run a self -storage facility. And so I have people who text into our Google Voice, which is nice. I have all one Google Voice. Or they'll email our Gmail address. But the problem is that's outside of my management software. And so then...

I just don't have like consistent threads of record between us to like what happened or who said what. And it's always the ones that have a problem. It's never the ones that want to tell me something good news.

Lindsay (05:28.718)
It's always when it goes wrong. This is exactly it. It's like, sure, when everything's working great, no worries, right? But the systems need to be the best when something goes wrong, right?

Nate Smoyer (05:41.416)
So really what's the solution here? I mean, obviously that's like a softball tee up of like, tell me about super, but you know, what is really the right way of solving this? And also what are property managers concerned about and looking for to solve this? And maybe devil's advocate, one more layer to that question is, are they even looking to solve for this problem?

Lindsay (06:03.79)
I think I'll start actually backwards with this. So I think the reality is we've heard a lot of, you know, right now trending is this concept of shared inboxes, centralization I think is something that's really become a hot topic word in property management, right? As these teams are looking to find efficiencies and to minimize things falling through the cracks with individuals. We're talking about a high turnover industry, right?

and also one that frankly, you know, requires a lot of people to tag in on things. And so I think they're starting to realize that there is a, a huge benefit to being able to have more collaboration tools around communication and to be able to manage, all of these different threads of work in that way. I think what's interesting is that when you've been doing things a certain way for a very long time, and I'll look at things like, you know, I think, you know, again,

I don't think email is ever going to go away. but when you've been living out of your inbox for a while, it's hard to imagine what a different way could look like and where those efficiencies can come from. And that's really where we come in at super is we believe that we should meet you where you are with the tools that you're using. We don't believe that text messaging is going away. In fact, we believe that it's going to be an even greater form of communication moving forward. It's just what tenants are going to expect. from folks is just this easy streamlined kind of.

almost live chat, right, way of being able to communicate. And so why not allow people to use the tools that they want to use, but what Super does for you is we call it all of those communications. So we give you one hub.

that is essentially a shared inbox across your entire team. So that every communication, whether that's an email that lands in individuals inbox, an email that lands in a shared group inbox or a text message is all visible across the entire team. So we kind of really make it very, very powerful for teams to have that information. But as far as how you continue to interact and engage, we try to say, you know, you have your preferred ways of doing that.

Lindsay (08:05.966)
Great, continue to do that if you want to. As soon as you log into our hub, you're gonna get all of this other power attached to it and you're gonna have that streamlined paper trail as well.

Nate Smoyer (08:16.712)
Got it, you got it. Yeah, and that does make sense. And obviously the tool preference of a proper manager is always gonna be secondary to how do tenants prefer to communicate. And I would tend to agree, both from personal experiences, also from talking to many others in the space, text seems to be the dominant. I don't wanna be on the phone, just shoot a message when it's convenient, get back to you, let you know, that kind of thing. It seems to be the way it is.

What I think a little bit deeper and maybe we can kind of like practically unpack some of the capabilities of super here, because you guys do have a broad range of feature sets, I think across the board here. I mean, you can unpack like practically like property manager comes to you guys to, Hey, I need help centralizing my communications. I want help with automation. So what can someone expect when they start using super?

Lindsay (09:13.454)
Yeah, I think the first thing that they can expect is to have a place for communications to become actionable. So I think one of the things I have a lot of empathy for now is, well, it's really hard to be very good at your job when your inbox, your email inbox is how you are taking care of tasks, right? Email is not a task management tool. Email is not a task management tool.

Nate Smoyer (09:34.568)
Mmm.

Can we say that again?

Nate Smoyer (09:41.608)
I'm gonna go.

Lindsay (09:42.094)
We'll make t -shirts later for that, but it's it's but it's the primary way You know, I talked to teens all the time and you're like, how do you all communicate? How do you keep track of things? We email each other still and Again, I don't think that that behavior is necessarily going to go away but I do believe that it is one of the reasons that

Nate Smoyer (09:44.616)
There it is.

Lindsay (10:03.15)
the job has become so complex and difficult to stay on top of. You know, again, tenants and also your owners and vendors as well that you're dealing with, they do not have the same patience that they did even five years ago, right? I think just like post pandemic, just the expectations around how to communicate and the speed.

of things have really changed. And I know we'll, we'll touch on kind of what's happening with AI as well. But like when you have, when everybody has chat GPT at their fingertips and they can get an instant answer on things, they're going to expect the same level of service from the people that are maintaining their homes, right? It's like the most important relationship actually that you have. And so, you know, I think that first thing that, that,

we try to do is make sure that we provide the tools to make that actionable. So you get a communication. The first thing that happens is we automatically convert that into a task. It can then automatically be assigned to a property. So we're able to have the smarts to be able to either look at the contact information for that contact and we know which property they're associated with, or we can look at the content.

of that message and kind of say, this is about this property. And we'll tag it to the right place. And then from there, it can cascade a whole bunch of automations. We can say, who needs to be involved in this, right? Who should be assigned to this? Whether that's you have a portfolio management approach where you have a single person that's responsible for that, or you have a team based approach and this looks like it's a maintenance activity. So I'm going to assign it to the maintenance director. So we have different paths for that.

And then the last thing that we do just kind of out of the box for any of our customers. So like day one, you haven't really set up any of your customizations. What we will do is any new communications that come inbound, whether that's by email, text message, phone call, we'll set an autoresponder back to that tenant or whoever is contacting. So.

Lindsay (11:55.886)
they're getting that immediate feedback, right? I hear that so often from tenants where they're like, it's like a black hole when I communicate with my property management company. I have no idea what I'm gonna hear back. I don't know if they've got it. And so of course that one email becomes two text messages becomes a third call that you're getting all about the same thing. And so that's another area that we can streamline for them is, hey, we got it. It's being tracked. Don't worry about it.

Nate Smoyer (12:00.744)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (12:15.472)
Yep.

Nate Smoyer (12:23.688)
Of course, that only happens when someone's out on vacation. That would never happen during the rest of the week that emails are.

Lindsay (12:29.486)
Well, you know, this is one of the reasons we focus on residential as well as the pain point is so much higher than in commercial. It sounds like you have a self storage business, but, you know, for most commercial, you know, office or retail, people go home after 6 p So if you're getting a call at 11 p it's like a real emergency. In residential, it's like, my toilet's clogged. I just got home. And that's the emergency you're getting at 11 p

Nate Smoyer (12:50.824)
Yeah, yeah.

Nate Smoyer (12:57.32)
But it has to be after work. Well, maybe not. There'll be a lot more people work from home now, but you know, you're...

Lindsay (13:02.158)
Well, that's a whole other thing as well, because they're like staring at every problem in their home all day.

Nate Smoyer (13:06.888)
Yes. Yeah. You know, actually, when I may have shared this on the show previously, but when we first went through like pandemic lockdown, and at the time I was head of marketing at avail, we had an article titled, how to deal with a noise complaint or how to deal with noise complaints. And the idea of the article was, you know, when your tenants are having noise complaints within the building, how do you deal with that as the owner? The, the.

visits that article skyrocketed because the demand for it skyrocketed and it was both residents and owners looking for solutions because of noise at home and it was all because now more people were working from home and I I'm trying to think of like what was the noise was it like the midday CrossFit workout in your living room or was it just someone has a really loud booming voice and his own zoom calls all day long but the the demand for dealing with

you know, noise between residents just like went skyrocketed now that everybody was working from home. All right, I have.

Lindsay (14:10.734)
I believe it. I mean, I'll tell you what, when you're on Zoom calls for eight hours straight, like anything is going to become an annoyance.

Nate Smoyer (14:19.784)
Yes, yes. All right, so I have a devil's advocate argument here. You talked about some of the automations that are possible. Couldn't I just use chat .gbt and Zapier and just build all this myself?

Lindsay (14:22.99)
Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (14:36.878)
If you wanted to go and build it, that sounds like a really fun nights and weekends project. So, you know, report back to me on that. I think, you know, property management is such a unique space and it's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about it outside of the fact that I manage my own properties and that's kind of how I got into identifying that this was a real need. But.

The data structure that's required to make a property management, like any system that's working with property management function in a good way is kind of hard to hack with a lot of these out of the box systems. So I'll kind of address that first, right? Which is in property management, you have the concept of different types of stakeholders, right? A tenant has a different relationship to the property than an owner does.

You have the concept of especially multifamily units, right? So you can have a property that has 200 different sub properties within them and they all have different relationships with the contacts that are associated with that. So that's a really hard thing to try to hack. And we've run into some customers that are really feeling the pain of using some off the shelf tools. Like if you're using, for instance, like a Zen Desk to manage to getting for communications, right? Or if you're using,

a monday .com to manage project management for it, you end up having to create all of these weird workarounds to make it work in that system, whether that's tagging and categories or different boards, for them, that it really does start to break. So we get a lot of customers at that point where they're excited about the opportunities for automation, they're excited about what they can do with technology, but it reaches a point where it doesn't really understand.

Nate Smoyer (16:05.864)
Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (16:24.654)
the way that the data needs to be structured long -term for that to be scalable. So that's kind of the first part of it. I would say the second part is if you want to use, you know, I think ChatGBT is great for taking unstructured data and making it structured. Great for kind of having more conversational type interfaces. I think where you would start to see that breakdown unless you're quite technical.

and able to access the API to be able to do that is connecting these dots, again, across the ability to, for instance, connect an inbox and then parse that content and then have it take certain actions on the back end of it. I think, again, I would challenge someone to try it. I think that would be a really fun project. I'd love to see the outcome of that. I think it would be a bigger project than you think it might be.

Nate Smoyer (17:07.208)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (17:17.296)
Well, I mean, because there's obviously like you have to play with the temperature of like how much you want to give chat the control to interpret the message. And then of course it needs to look for certain types of content. But of course then you're, you're relying on the messenger to supply the necessary bits of content, but that may not be the case. I mean, unit B might.

just send something that is unidentifiable to them from an email address that's not in your system and say, the door isn't working. And what am I supposed to know what that means? Is it the refrigerator door? Is it the washer door? Is it the automated door lock, you know, the keypad or whatever, or is it the building access? The building access itself is entirely out. Like all those pieces of context could be missing and we have no idea.

because it came from a resident who's not in our system. And so then what do you do with that? I think anyone who's ever built or implemented a CRM solution into a business knows is familiar with like the lacking of context that a CRM has to that business specific functions and flows creates in of itself a whole new challenge. And shout out to everyone who's ever successfully implemented.

Salesforce or HubSpot to a context that it wasn't designed for. Been there, did that. I don't wish that pain on anyone, never again. I want to press into the AI side here. This is obviously a topic that I don't think we're going to escape anytime soon. It's really hit all areas of real estate. I think a lot of people have immediately gravitated towards listing descriptions.

it can handle automated communication responses and maybe just like some spreadsheets. When we think about AI to property management, I'd like to hear your take. Where do you immediately think of the applications of what it can do and what it means to property managers?

Lindsay (19:28.846)
Totally. I think for property management, it's a little bit different than some of the other applications we're probably seeing more widely in real estate, to your point on listing descriptions and things like that. I really look at it as a way to boost productivity overall. And so I think there's a lot of things that are these untapped opportunities to take highly repetitive manual tasks and just streamline those.

entirely. So at Super, the way that we think about it is we are building an AI assistant. So what are the things that you might have, you know, an assistant PM today doing that could be automated through AI? And what's really interesting and cool about that is think about having this infinitely scalable team of people that are people, right? Or of these AI assistants that are able to scale as your company.

So instead of having to train an individual every single time on certain processes and to have to get them up to speed every time you have someone on board and off board. On that, having those set of SOPs essentially at the organizational level for you, always being acted on 24 seven. They never take a sick day. They never go on vacation. They're available at any single time for you. And what does that allow for you to unlock?

within your organization. Because I have a really strong point of view on this, which is the businesses that will win in this space are the ones that can really connect with people. And because at the end of the day, it is a people business, you're dealing with all types of personalities, all types of different backgrounds and places they're coming with. But as we mentioned before, at the end of the day, it is their home. And that is probably the most precious thing you can be the caretaker of. So people are gonna take that really, really seriously.

And the best management solutions I think won't necessarily be automating away the human side of things. So it's not necessarily about eliminating that front of staff head count.

Lindsay (21:36.365)
What it is, is about taking the work that actually gets in the way of them spending time with your end customers and providing that proactive level of service. And we hear this all the time from our customers, right? That like, it's such a reactive environment to be in. You are just putting out fires left and right. They don't have time to actually even think ahead of the curve for that, right? So if you're an owner that's engaging with a property management company or owner operator or something like that.

Nate Smoyer (21:55.048)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (22:04.622)
You want your teams that are working with you to be able to actually plan ahead so that that thing that's a small problem right now doesn't become a big problem down the road or that thing that could be a problem doesn't become a problem, right? And you're you're able to actually Use the human Smarts and teams that you have to the best of their capabilities as opposed to having them just stressed and busy

triaging and managing their inboxes and stuck in the weeds on it all. So those to me are like the most exciting solutions. It's not even like the right for me kind of stuff. And there's exciting stuff that's going to happen with that as well. We call that like practical AI, right? Like there's really practical applications, but there's this whole other world that can be unlocked when you think about workflows and what I can do there.

Nate Smoyer (22:58.312)
Now, there's certainly some concerns around AI and I think the property management space, particularly multifamilies kind of been put on notice in a very big way. I'm not gonna comment on any specific companies and cases, but there's some question as to whether or not and how AI is being used for suggesting rent rates and or rent prices. There's also, I know there's been some concerns within...

the governmental bodies of tenant screenings or tenant recommendation engines using AI. So my thoughts here, I kind of go towards like, you know, both to you as a founder and other property founders, like how should they be thinking about safety and implement, you know, implementation of AI tools within the property management space? And then a follow -up to that is what do property managers actually need to know about these tools?

for themselves to maintain safety for their own business.

Lindsay (24:01.838)
Yeah, I would say the first answer to that is as a technology company, your approach to leveraging data and your customers data has to be a number one priority. At the end of the day, any software company is a data company, especially in the age of AI. That is what you are leveraging, right? To be able to use. So I think, you know, making sure that those precautions are.

thought of is really important. You know, we're an early stage startup. We voluntarily decided to go under SOC 2 audits and certification and to go for that because we felt it was really important that we took a stance on data security and data privacy early on versus having a customer request it, right? So that's kind of our point of view on that. I would say the things to think about really carefully is AI is going to be in some ways even more biased than

a human will be at aggregate because it is taking data as a heuristic, right? I think there was this really great article last year as you know, chat GPT was really rising that AI is a blurry JPEG. It was in the Atlantic, I believe, and it was such a great analogy, which is it is down sampling. It's taking a portion of data, right, over aggregate. And so what you're getting is not.

something that looks like the picture, but it's actually a sampling of things. And so when you're dealing with data that might be biased to begin with, it is actually only going to reinforce those biases unless you are actively training it to not do that. But if you're a technology company that has a business model that profits off of enabling those biases to occur, that's a really big problem. You have to really think about your business model.

long -term, right? And I think everything for a business comes down to what is your business model? What are you incentivized by? So if your incentive is to make sure that your customers are not offering the fairest rents, but the highest rents, because if they use you, they're going to make more money. You are probably building an algorithm and training your, you know, the machine that you're, the machine learning that you're training is probably going to bias towards that.

Lindsay (26:24.206)
And that's something that these companies, especially at scale, really need to be thinking about how to make sure that they are actively combating that or else, you know, as all of this gets more mature and as frankly the regulators get more savvy to what's going on, this is going to be a really big issue. And the other thing I'll just quickly raise is that to your point on the tenant screening, right, the HUD recently released some guidance on using AI technology in tenant screening. It's like a...

16 page report, something like that, last month that they released. And basically says that the liability falls not on the technology company, but on you as the owner and landlord, if you engage with that technology company. That's kind of what it says is if that screening system at the end of the day makes a decision that is not seen as fair, that is your responsibility, not theirs. Obviously, I think the technology companies do need to be proactive.

Nate Smoyer (26:53.096)
Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (27:20.334)
about that, they can't just say, well, not my problem. That's a great way to lose a lot of clients really fast. But for the management companies, I think it's really incumbent to actually really understand how the data is being used to understand the way that these algorithms have been trained. I think anything that you can get smarter on in order to make sure you are not introducing another liability into your business is really

really important. And then I think the other thing to think about is how is your data being used? So how are you training those algorithms as well? What is the participation that you're signing up for if you're participating in that?

Nate Smoyer (28:03.944)
On that last bit of how you're training, are you referencing people just using a publicly accessible AI tool such as like ChatGPT where you're using the free version and that sort of, is that what you're meaning by that?

Lindsay (28:15.758)
both. So for instance, if you're using one of those big companies, right, where by being part of the ecosystem, the rent prices that you set are now going into the system for setting the next company's rent prices, right? So I think, you know, with, with some of the, issues that are, are being created right now, we're seeing the property management company is being subject to, having to participate in these investigations, right?

Nate Smoyer (28:27.176)
Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (28:43.79)
And that's because if you own a significant market share, then your data is actually what is setting the market rate essentially if you are the one that's trading the systems in that way. I do believe that something that companies need to be very wary of is how are your individual team members using publicly and open AI tools? So, you know, how are they using chat GPT for instance, if they do not have a paid account? And I just want everybody to be very clear on this. If you are not on a paid account.

with any of these platforms, it is very specifically in the terms of service that you will then be training their AI models with the data that you input. So be very thoughtful about the data that you do input. Do not, for instance, upload your tenant data into there and ask it to do something with that, because now that data could be accessible publicly.

Nate Smoyer (29:40.008)
Yeah, I do think there's probably more work to be done around the general use of AI tools and the safety, especially when it comes to your company data and when you're working with customers such as renters and their data and ensuring that that's not being used and exposed in any sort of public model. This is where I actually really do like that we're seeing more adoption from tools that are kind of

walled off gardens, if you will, with specific contexts built in mind so that the frameworks and boundaries are put in place to really limit some of those outlier biases that could creep into a public model much easier than something that's built for that specific use. I think that's good. And I wasn't where and truthfully hadn't given a lot of consideration previously to this conversation about the liability that individual.

property management companies may hold as a result of listening to tools blindly. I think it's been talked about quite a bit. There's gonna be, and already are, people who have to monitor the outputs of large models to ensure that those biases aren't either unethical or immoral or even at this point, they're not legal. And...

In this instance, it sounds like the property manager still needs to be exercising some discretion with whatever tool they're using in the output that it's providing, especially if it comes to making decisions with regards to perspective or existing renters, is what you're saying, which I think that that's a pretty important note.

Lindsay (31:26.83)
Totally. And I'll just add to that as well that I think we are still in the really early days of what's possible with AI as well, right? Like the outputs that we are getting today, you know, I think just the rate at which we can build today as kind of software people, right, is fundamentally different to be building a company in 2024 than it was in a year or two ago. So imagine, you know, the speed at which we're going to be able to evolve.

Nate Smoyer (31:43.016)
Mm -hmm.

Lindsay (31:55.726)
on these issues is definitely going to far outpace the ability for it to be regulated. And so that means that there will be side effects of that that I think everyone needs to be wary of. And I think there's a balancing that needs to happen as far as the speed of execution and what's actually in the best interest of the customers as well.

Nate Smoyer (32:16.776)
Yeah, yeah. Well, with that, Lindsay, we're going to move on to the bottom of the show segment that I like to call for the future, for the futures. When I get to ask each guest who comes on a show to give their best predictions based on the following four questions, are you ready to play?

Lindsay (32:31.406)
I don't know, let's go.

Nate Smoyer (32:32.872)
Alright, number one, what does Super look like one year from now?

Lindsay (32:38.478)
That one year from now, we want to be the AI assistant for property managers. I think in one year we'll be in a place where every single team member in a property management company can have their own assistant that is doing scheduling, follow -ups, doing initial triage and responding. And I think even more powerful things than that, but like truly giving them the benefits of having.

another team member essentially that can take a lot of these tasks off of their plates. I think that's very, very feasible within this next year that that's only going to get more powerful than what we have today.

Nate Smoyer (33:18.728)
Number two on for the future. Can property managers and I say, I should rephrase this. Can property management companies still succeed without using AI or AI tools three years from now? Why or why not?

Lindsay (33:34.286)
three years from now, is that the timeline? Okay.

Lindsay (33:40.11)
Unless you are working with I would say the only outliers to that that will be able to succeed are those that are not Dependent on margin So I think the reality of what's happening is the industry right and we've seen this this past year The industry has been really squeezed in a lot of ways your basic cost of just staying alive has gone up

Right, insurance is up, I think the average that I've heard is up to 30 % for property insurance. So if you own a property, your cost of just having it has gone up, labor costs going up, right? Every single thing has become more difficult for these companies to be able to maintain. And so in three years,

you know, sure, we can hope that interest rates will go down significantly in that time. That's a whole other prediction. That's coming later. My prediction on that is we're not going to see a two to three percent interest rate environment for a very long time to get it ever. Right. It's just, you know, we're seeing that kind of with the hikes, people are still spending, they're still buying, they still want to buy homes. And so, you know, I think that that's a little bit of a signal on what's going to happen there. And so.

Nate Smoyer (34:35.144)
Fingers crossed.

Lindsay (34:57.934)
If you need to run a business where you are thinking about your margins, or you're thinking about how to offer a good level of service, in addition to something that's sustainable from a business model perspective, the only answer is technology. I think, you know, there's only so much cost cutting that you can do by offshoring labor and thinking about how to scale through those means. And I think that that's been kind of an innovation that's taken the industry quite a bit, but that has its rate limiting effects as well.

Nate Smoyer (35:08.712)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (35:28.904)
I like that take. Number three here, what's one industry trend you think will continue, but you wish would go away.

Lindsay (35:38.606)
great question. I think one industry trend that I think will continue is there will be a bit of a hesitation around adopting new, just new in general, right? I think change has been something that the industry has been cautious around. And I think I totally understand where that comes from, right? Like you manage a very physical asset.

that in itself is not changing as much. And you're also subject to a lot of external headwinds and forces that are not in your control with that, right? So whatever you can control, you want to be in control of. But I do believe that this is an environment where, and I saw this kind of the other day, which was if you're not, what was it? If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

Right. So it's like, if you are not, I think it's like, if you don't choose to disrupt yourself, you will be disrupted by not just the industry, but I think the external forces that are coming this way, as far as kind of the expectations from tenants, from other owners that you might be serving, as far as the broader environment and what it's going to command around how businesses operate in the next few years. So I really hope that that

property management companies start to look at change as a really healthy thing and something to embrace. And so that would be one thing I would hope is going away.

Nate Smoyer (37:13.96)
The last one here, what's one thing you believe will dramatically change or fade away in real estate as a result of tech advances?

Lindsay (37:24.558)
My prediction on that would be that the relationship that sometimes tenants are on the other side, on the opposing side of the management company will go away because technology is going to allow for better, more streamlined communication and to take some of the troubleshooting and...

the initial back and forth that actually makes those relationships a little bit more challenging, right? And I'll tell you, you know, with my own tenants as well, you don't respond right away. They're getting really frustrated because it's an issue in their home. And then by the time you do respond, you're not getting the nicest tone, right? And reply. And so it puts these parties at odds when they actually have the same goal. They want a well -maintained property, right? At the end of the day, those are actually aligned.

goals. And so I think technology can interface on some of those things and remove some of those barriers and frustrations that exist and allow for those goals to actually work in harmony again.

Nate Smoyer (38:30.152)
Lindsay, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for your time sharing about Super, also digging into some of the nuances of AI, specifically with its applications to property management, safety, both for property management companies as well as prop tech companies and how data should be thought about when being used in these models. Before we close out, for those who want to get in touch with you and or learn more about Super, where do they go and how do they do that?

Lindsay (38:56.174)
Yeah, our website is hiresuper .com. So h -i -r -e -s -u -p -e -r dot com. And my email is just lindsay at hiresuper .com.

Nate Smoyer (39:05.704)
Perfect. Of course, as always, show notes will contain those links. You can find them at technest .io. Just look for the episode featuring Lindsay. I hope to see you around, but until then, catch you later.

Lindsay (39:19.374)
Thanks so much.

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