Alan Missen

FirstService Residential

By Leah Etling on Aug 18, 2014 in People

FirstService Residential is the largest third-party manager of homeowner’s associations in the United States, with more than 6,000 properties – and another 600 or so in Canada. So it makes sense that the Dania Beach, Florida-based company would be think big about how to deliver technology solutions specifically for the HOA lifestyle.

Whether you’re a resident or owner of a home in a master planned community, a community manager of an HOA or a member of a community board of directors, FirstService is thinking about how to improve your experience, and give you mobile applications to obtain information and complete neighborhood-related tasks.

“Whatever we can do to make the community manager’s life easier, and do that in an effective way, translates into a better experience for the resident,” said Alan Missen, recently appointed CIO for FirstService. “That’s such a big part of our culture, making a difference in every resident’s life every day.”

Missen talked about the various apps FirstService is developing and how they hope to make the HOA experience more mobile-friendly for everyone involved.

Tell us about your existing resident service portal.

Missen: FSRConnect is our core property management solution. It’s focused on helping the associates to service the property and has a lot of information around the residents, the properties, and it aids in managing much of the activity around amenities. In the HOA world, there’s lots of documents that need to be put in the hands of residents, so we handle document management with this solution. We manage work orders, violations, architectural modifications, and we also provide some financial data that residents can touch. We’re generally more cautious around that, the financial data being more sensitive, so we keep a lot of that back in our accounting solutions. But we do give them some insight to the information that’s important to them – what’s the balance on my HOA account, did you get my last check, that kind of thing.

What about communicating with residents? How is that handled?

Missen: There’s an extension of the FSRConnect platform called Community Website. When we go into a new community, we offer the platform to maintain a community website as part of our services. The website tool sits on top of the FSRConnect solution. It’s very resident centric and has the typical things that you would see in a community website – community calendar, pictures of the community, relevant documents, notifications about board meetings and other activities, and more.

So what are the plans to take these services to the mobile era?

Missen: We’re looking at introducing mobile capabilities in a number of different roles. The first role we’re trying to enable via mobile app is that of the associates and the property managers. We’re trying to raise our game on their ability to collaborate, be efficient, and get access to information, wherever they are. We are also working to develop mobile applications for HOA board members and residents.

How do you anticipate such an application would aid community managers?

Missen: One of the things I’ve learned in my first few months here is that if you spend some time with a typical property manager, especially on the HOA side with these larger master planned communities, they don’t spend a whole lot of their time behind a desk. They’re out in the field, meeting residents, and managing local projects in the community. We need to enable them to have information at their fingertips in an efficient manner. We’re looking at extending what we’ve done in FSRConnect with a mobile capability that gives them the processes at their fingertips, no matter where they are.

Can you provide an example of when this would be useful?

Missen: One interesting request we’ve gotten is from the property/community managers, particularly in the larger communities. They work with quite a few different vendors, who they will bump into when they are out on the site. They often get questions from these vendors. Being able to look up vendor and purchase order information, as well as financial reports, is going to be quite helpful. They’ll also be able to look up work orders on the fly.

We’ll also be delivering some GPS capabilities to support certain activities. One of the things we find – say it’s a golf course community – is that if there’s a violation in a back yard, and a property manager wants to make note of it and move forward on a violation process, the address isn’t visible because they are at the back of the house.  We’re going to supply a GPS capability to make that activity more seamless. These are just two functions this app could assist with day to day. Resident record access, communication capability, document management and a daily task dashboard are also going to be included.

Read the rest of the interview on Multi-Housing News