We offer a new way to live, in which renters build wealth while renting.

This sounds like a lofty promise, but real estate company Up&Up lives up to its commitment to help renters build wealth like owners. Instead of a security deposit, tenants contribute to their Up&Up Wallet and can then begin sharing in their rental’s profits and increases in value. At the end of their lease, tenants have the option to cash out — or put the money toward buying the home they’ve rented.

Pioneering and executing on such an innovative business model is no easy feat. Up&Up is a vertically integrated SFR (single-family rental) player, so it performs everything from acquisitions, property management, construction, customer support, and more. Avenue helps Up&Up get alerted when tasks need to happen, provides the team with a detailed SOP for different projects, and ensures accountability.

The challenge: Tracking and setting up rules for operationally intensive processes

Charles Wong, Product Manager at Up&Up, joined the firm because he was excited about the company’s mission. At Up&Up, he is responsible for building internal tools, so he sees — and is acutely aware of — the challenges in many parts of the business. 

“Within each stage of our operations are numerous tasks, sub-tasks, and teams assigned to work on them,” he says. For example:

• After Up&Up buys a home: 

  • The company has to understand what improvements need to be made, develop a scope of work, and then coordinate with vendors to renovate the home

  • Simultaneously, Up&Up needs to initiate utility connections, set up accounts with HOAs, and begin leasing

• After the company leases the home:

  • Up&Up must support the tenants and manage maintenance work orders — each of which must be created, qualified, tracked, QA’d, invoiced and paid for, tied to property accounting, etc.

• When a tenant moves out:

  • Up&Up has to fix up the home and do it all over again until the company decides to sell the property

Suffice it to say, all of these steps require significant coordination between teams. 

Up&Up initially relied on Google Sheets, Slack, and other third party software (like Zendesk) to keep people in sync about what needed to get done and when, but this quickly proved untenable for a number of reasons:

• No automatic triggers: In Up&Up’s everyday operations, hundreds of triggers set off hundreds of tasks — for example, a tenant ending their lease, a refrigerator breaking, or a bid being accepted. Because the company lacked an easy way to create and manage automated triggers, the ops team had to manage triggers manually (or not at all), so things sometimes fell through the cracks.

• No accountability: The ops team had no easy way to automatically track task progress  after it had been assigned to someone.

• Foundational UX issues: There was no centralized place for the Up&Up team members and Charles to conduct task management. Tasks, comments, and attachments were spread across many spreadsheets, tools, and systems.

Dashboard sweeps were the only way operators could stay attuned to what was going on in the business, and the Up&Up team was often lost without proactive real-time alerts and resolution tracking in place. That’s when Charles heard about Avenue from a friend who worked at Valon, a residential mortgage company that also uses Avenue.

The solution: activated operations

Charles started by connecting Avenue to Up&Up’s data warehouse, BigQuery, and having Avenue monitor for common events, such as tenant move-outs. 

Previously, Up&Up operators regularly scanned reports to keep track of upcoming move-outs, but the team had to remember three things: which homes had recently been added to the move-out list, to communicate out the task, and to follow up and make sure work got done. This was mostly tracked in people’s heads — not a scalable solution. 

Now, Avenue watches for this common incident and automatically kicks off a series of tasks, such as reaching out to the tenant and putting the house on the market (or, potentially, selling the property). 

“We can add notes, assign tasks to people, and keep track of what’s already been done and whether our SLAs were followed,” Charles says. In turn, this allows operators to increase their bandwidth and be more productive while reducing stress and burnout.

Up&Up uses Asana as its task management system, and Charles likes how easy it is to sync information from Avenue to Asana. Though many of the company’s team members work out of Asana, Avenue remains Up&Up’s single source of truth.

The ease with which Up&Up can track incidents makes a big impact on the company’s downstream metrics. For example, Up&Up cares deeply about asset performance, as measured by its Net Operating Income Yield. Because Avenue can proactively alert Charles and the operating team of upcoming move-outs, the operations team can quickly take action. Ultimately, this leads to shorter leasing times, less vacancy, and higher yields.

Moving forward: more monitors in more places 

Looking ahead, Charles is excited to use Avenue more as Up&Up grows. “As Up&Up grows its portfolio of homes from hundreds to thousands, we’ll need to monitor for thousands of events,” he says. “We’ll also use Avenue to create follow-up tasks and track progress to completion. Avenue is the only tool I’ve found to solve all of these needs in one place, and I’d love to incorporate it into every part of our business.”

All the while, Charles is confident Avenue’s team will be there to support him. Early on, he noticed a bug in the system, flagged it to the Avenue team, and saw it triaged and addressed rapidly. “I have no reason not to trust Avenue,” he says.