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 […]

A handful of RealtyCom Partners team members attended the recent NMHC Optech Conference in Dallas, Texas.  In case you missed it, here is a brief recap of some of the topics we think our clients will find interesting.  This is by no means a full list of topics, and I encourage you to visit NMHC’s website for more information.

My panel on Tuesday morning focused on how to navigate 21^st Century Telecom issues.  I shared the stage with Greg McDonald of Greystar, Steve Sadler of RealPage, Kirk Taylor of Hubacher Ames & Taylor and Sean Sabia of New York Life Real Estate Investors.

We discussed many telecom topics including:

• Managed WiFi was quite a hot topic at this year’s conference. As more providers are entering the space, property owners are looking at the benefits of a managed internet experience. There is a lot to consider and this is especially true with new construction projects, as managed property-wide WiFi (bulk) means you will often only have one provider onsite.
• 5G and CBRS – Although a real wide-scale launch of 5G is two or three years away, many providers and property owners are talking about its potential to deliver up […]