Tech Trials
Essex remains cautious about experimenting with technology.
Since Essex Property Trust is a public company based in Palo Alto, Calif., home of Stanford University and in the middle of Silicon Valley, you’d expect the firm to be ahead of the tech curve in the apartment industry. Appearances can be deceiving. “We’ve been pretty conservative about jumping into technology,” says Keith R. Guericke, Essex’s CEO and president. “There’s tremendous amount of money spent on early technology, and most of it has been written off.”
But the time has finally come for the REIT to examine its technology. “Right now we’re looking to redo our computer systems,” Guericke says. “We’re looking at new accounting software, management software, new operations technology, and pricing models. We’re early into it and we’re going to try to make a decision in the next six months.”
While Guericke contends that a “black box” won’t be able to make better pricing decision than his best property managers, he acknowledges that it could be helpful to the rest of his staffers.
“In any organization, you have the top third, the middle third, and the bottom third,” Guericke says. “For sure, a pricing model would help the bottom third, as long as it doesn’t hurt the top third. We’re running a beta test on a pricing model. We’re finding that it’s putting out some interesting results. I suspect that we will probably migrate to a pricing model for the entire portfolio.”
