ManageAmerica Offers Ecosystem Of Tech Solutions

by Patrick Revere

WWhat has three parts but no center?

ManageAmerica’s Michael Silverman has been in the manufactured housing industry since 1989. The company was founded by Brooks London at about the same time and is buoyed by his son, Brice London, an attorney and entrepreneur who sees the potential growth of the company only as a matter of time, and inspired leadership. Growth, to be sure, but from where? ManageAmerica, National Utility Billing, and Origen – three companies that intersect and complement each other, all of which come from different places, serve different client needs, and none of which have a designated company operating space. The company and its products help community owners manage properties, assets within properties, and the needs of residents. The utility billing company snaps in to the property management service and tracks the litany of utility services with specific data on each user, in each market, under contract with specific local providers for water, electric, gas, cable, and trash services for instance.

Origen, likewise, integrates to the software for resident screening services. “It’s a very sophisticated system,” Brice London said. “One of the credos we feel strongly about is ‘no redundant data entry’. If you put in someone’s name, for instance, it populates that field and goes to all the other places it needs to be, automatically.

“From that, you spawn residency documents specific to a property, homesite, and home with all the specific addendums for pets and such,” he said.

All of those entries also are populated into documents that residents need to receive or sign.

“It reduces the amount of work, and the potential for an entry mistake, and it all transfers over to DocuSign,” London said. “It all becomes a part of the resident profile. It’s a 360 view of your relationship with that resident through the full duration.”

The ManageAmerica offering also provides an online resident’s portal for increased transparency, and is a valuable tool for planning and managing household budgets. It allows for text pay and app pay options, and provides a map of nearby off-site locations — such as at a big box retailer — to pay rent and bills with cash or money order.

“We now offer a third-party provider that will pay rent for the resident. In turn, the resident pays that provider a $9.99 flat fee and then repays them the amount of the rent through the course of the month, rather than having to pay all at once or get a large penalty for being late,” London said.

The portal flows in the next average rent increase home-by-home, and qualified rate schedules for all »

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variety of homesites whether on the water, water adjacents, or at a wooded lot, for instance.

“You see any changes all set at once by category,” London said.

Expanding to Utilities, Screening

The original ManageAmerica software was designed for manufactured home community owners and operators, and expanded into other areas of multi-family operations. The company created National Utility Billing to offer that service independently, without the property and organizational management aspects of ManageAmerica.

“A big part of our business is utility billing,” Chris Schwarze, director of sales and marketing, said. “Submetering of utilities offers the ability for property owners to track usage off the mainline to individual homesites where it can be billed more directly and accurately to residents.

“Submetering has a huge impact, rather than having water usage tied to rent,” Schwarze said. “That data gets into our system almost immediately. It helps the user to identify if perhaps the meter was misread. If the algorithm finds something out of whack it will ask for a re-entry with a photo to verify.”

London said creating and updating the algorithm for utility building is a near-constant effort. It provides hourly snapshots from multiple utilities in even the smallest of U.S. markets for the best chance of catching potential losses quickly, including physical leaks.

“You want to maximize your revenue but you also want to be compliant,” London said. “There are a lot of rules and regulations and we’re receiving rate structures from thousands of providers all of the time.

“We can take a lot of the heavy lifting off of owners, especially in a rapidly increasing cost environment… you do not want to be behind price increases,” he said. “If you’re not on top of it to implement at the moment it happens, you very likely are going to lose that revenue. No resident wants to hear they owe money from three months ago that you forgot to bill.”

Much of the information available through ManageAmerica and its companies can be viewed on an app, available for iOS and Android. The Origin of Origen

In 2008, London joined his father and the team at ManageAmerica. He had graduated with his law degree in 2004 and was practicing in the corporate environment for the ensuing four years. It was a time of much change in the U.S. economy, in housing, and in automated services.

“I didn’t grow up with a family company that I might go to work for one day,” London said. “The company didn’t come into what it is until I was already on my own path… but at that time, in 2008, I was looking forward to doing something a little more entrepreneurial… It was a good time to look at options.”

That same year, the company picked up its third part — Origen, a provider of automated loan origination services. New regulations that arose out of consumer protection efforts, including the SAFE Act, required Origen to be overhauled. The leadership at ManageAmerica opted for a full pivot.

The industry was consolidating, the prevalence of rental homes was increasing, and the responsibility and risk for owners was on the rise.

“Regardless of whether you’re selling or renting, you’re always looking at a quality screening process,” London said. “That’s become a really good opportunity for us.”

London said his path to ManageAmerica was not linear, but it’s one that suits him.

“I bring some real skills to the table, having practiced law. And beyond that I feel I am very entrepreneurial and strategic, looking to serve our clients in the best possible way. You can’t sit on your laurels, you really need to talk with your clients to make changes that will increase efficiency and maximize revenue,” he said. “How can we help managers working with residents, or regionals working with managers, or help corporate officers running the company… how can they run as smoothly as possible?”

And the answer to the question, what has three parts and no center?

ManageAmerica fits the bill, but ask Google and the best answer is the human brain. MHV