By Rush Blakely

Rush Blakely, President & CEO of RealtyCom Partners, recently sat down with our friends and founders of George Stephens, LLC, to discuss the benefits of VoIP phone systems in apartment communities. Our companies have worked together over the years with many clients to not only increase ancillary revenue opportunities and bring new technologies to your communities, but to reduce telecom expenses and business service costs for your leasing offices and operations teams. Robert George and Dan Stephens work with all types of organizations and below is some helpful information as you consider VoIP systems:

Rush:  Can you tell me a bit about your backgrounds?

Dan:  I have a background that started in operations management with a Fortune 500 company.  I made my foray into telecommunications in 2009 working for a regional provider.  I went on to sell managed communications services before co-founding George Stephens, LLC in 2011.

Robert:  I have worked in the technology field since 1997, and enjoy the inherent problem-solving  aspect of telecommunications.

Rush:  Can you tell me a bit about George Stephens, LLC?

Dan:  George Stephens, LLC was founded in 2011.  It serves as a telecommunications advisory firm for businesses and organizations of various sizes.  Our team maintains a provider-neutral […]

Rush Blakely is at the heart of RealtyCom Partners, managing the entire team, our strategic and financial vision for the company, as well as lending his negotiation skills for our client’s new development projects.

Rush quickly became an integral part of the team after joining RealtyCom in 2015, showing dogged determination with the various service providers to solicit the best level of service and compensation for our clients, while overseeing complex technical projects. He grew our business operations team and in 2016, relocated to our corporate office from Southern California.  In 2018, Rush was promoted to President. He brings diverse experience from senior leadership positions with Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) and Comcast where he led successful multifamily sales teams in Texas, California and North Carolina. He ran all sales channels for Logic/WestStar, a fiber to the home provider in the Cayman Islands. Prior to his career in telecommunications, Rush managed a construction lending portfolio with Wells Fargo Bank. He holds a BA in Finance from Texas A&M University, his birth state.

If you’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Rush directly, his love of motorcycles, poker-playing and fine Cuban cigars has […]

By Rush Blakely

Revenue share and other types of compensation agreements are commonplace between apartment community owners and the telecommunications service providers that serve their residents.  Despite this, there is no one-size fits all program.  Some revenue share plans are based on a sliding scale (higher subscription rates equal higher payout rates), some are based on flat percentage and others are based on flat dollar amounts – either on the total number of units or the number of subscribers of a given service.

RealtyCom Partners manages revenue share on behalf of our clients – at present, we are managing recurring revenue share payments on over 350,000 apartment units.  Most providers have dedicated groups within their company or in their regions/divisions that calculate and produce revenue share reports and checks on a regularly occurring basis.  Despite this regularity, this is not something you want to set, and forget, you should inspect what you expect.

RealtyCom routinely sees between 35%-40% error rate across our portfolio.  These errors can range from incorrect payout rate, incorrect unit count (impacting subscription rates), incorrect products included in calculation to incorrect payee and more.  Just last year, a large provider left out one month in their quarterly reports – this […]