By Annie Manfredi
CEO

Since we just moved here in August we really hadn’t had the opportunity to meet our neighbors. We had thought that we’d send them a note for a gathering to introduce ourselves and then Covid sort of interrupted those plans!  After watching the news night after night showing the long food lines and so many people struggling, we thought we should try and do something. So we used our HOA roster to send everyone an email asking if they’d like to donate food. We offered them to drop donations off on our doorstep or we’d pick up from their house if that was helpful.  It was lovely to meet so many neighbors and chat with them a bit from their cars as they dropped off their food donations. Many people expressed their gratitude to be given a way to help. The Auburn Interfaith Food Pantry staff was ecstatic and so appreciative of the donations.

By Steve Lefkovits
Partner

I live in a 55 unit condo community, with seven separate buildings. Like many people in commercial real estate, I’ve ended up serving on the condo board by default. Our excellent manager recently questioned a 28% increase in our costs for the eight copper, analog telephone lines that run to our ancient building callboxes, from $63 monthly to $81 monthly. That’s eight total phone lines for the property.

Even by the standards of phone companies, this increase seemed egregious. So I called a company that RealtyCom works with and refers to its clients to evaluate the expense and find us some options. We don’t do this specialty work, but know its importance. Within two days we learned:

• Without changing infrastructure, we could lower our paid telephone expense 66%.
• That savings translates into $6,600 of annual savings on our small property
• Our partner would do all of the paperwork and manage the cost for a 3-year period
• The work that they did inside of a week is completely outside of the scope of anything that our manager, or me as a real estate professional understood.

We will save $120 per unit per year from a third-party audit.

In 2018-2019, this same telephone […]

By Cristy Boucher

We understand our clients have a lot on their minds during the COVID-19 pandemic both personally and professionally as we navigate shelter-in-place orders and self-quarantine. We realize the impact this virus has at your communities, rent delinquency and potential mortgage deferments, as well as your leasing operations and on-site coordination/office closures within your teams.

RealtyCom continues to advocate and speak with Service Providers during this uncertain time, educate ourselves on pain points for our clients and remain solution-oriented for any broadband issues.  To that end, these past weeks we’ve participated in every one of the NMHC webinars, spoke with leaders at each of the major telecom companies, participated in an industry roundtable meeting with Owners and peers, and analyzed all our client’s bulk agreements to ensure adequate Internet speeds are being delivered to your residents.  We also support the NMHC in their efforts to maintain housing availability and security via their #ReliefStartsAtHome campaign to ask Congress for further relief for renters and property Owners from COVID-19.

More than ever before broadband availability and connectivity is needed for telecommuters, students, and general entertainment. As a general industry update, in mid-March the FCC chairman Ajit Pai asked Service Providers to opt […]