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 […]

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 […]