SmartRent, Inc. (SMRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome. Thank you. So great to have you here. We're finishing up the conference. Hard to believe 4 days, as extremely busy conference activity. My name is Rod Hall. I cover hardware technology, but also really infrastructure, technology and consumer systems for Goldman Sachs. Very pleased to have SmartRent here, Lucas Haldeman, the CEO and founder of the company. So Lucas, thanks for coming. Really good to have you here at the conference.

Yes, it's great to be here. Thank you for having us. Yes, it's been a great conference.

Yes. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation because we get to dive into the real estate market a little bit, which is something we don't get to do too much online. So -- and I'm very interested in that market.

Yes, it's an interesting market.

I thought that maybe the best way to start this would be to have you give an introduction of yourself and the company. Just kind of explain what SmartRent does for investors that might be listening in or watching who aren't as familiar with the company. You could start there.

Yes. Yes, fantastic. And thanks to everyone who's here for coming, and we're excited to be here. So we started SmartRent really as frustrated real estate operators looking for a technology platform that we couldn't find. And it was really around harnessing the power of smart hardware, smart technology. And what we found, as operators, what was missing was there was really no enterprise management of these systems. There were lots of good devices, and they were great for your house or my house, but no one ever thought about, well, how do I manage 50,000 or 100,000 or 1 million of these. And so at its base level, that's what we've created SmartRent to do is to be primarily hardware-agnostic, work with lots of great brands of smart hardware, but tie it all and harness the power so that owners can actually benefit, real estate owners can benefit from the data and actually make things actionable. And then sort of dovetailing off of that thesis was around, we also have our own hardware division where we build some of our own hardware. So we're hardware-agnostic, but there were gaps in the product line, and we needed to go build some of that, so we do that. And then the last piece of our business, we know from being operators, you can't mail a box of smart home stuff to an apartment and expect anything to happen with it other than it becomes a doorstop maybe. And so we have a large professional services, field services team, we can do the installation and the training.

Yes. It's like most businesses, as an analyst, you start hearing about it and you say, "Boy, this is awfully complicated." Kudos to guys like you that go out and do this from scratch, it's kind of unbelievable to make it happen.

Yes.

But the other thing that I'd say is that the hardware-agnosticism we've always thought was a great idea, you focus on what you're good at and let the hardware guys design the hardware.

Yes. I mean we get the benefit from every major consumer brand, Amazon to Google to Honeywell to Yale, we benefit from all their R&D. And so we felt like others have taken the opposite approach of being a very closed system, and we just -- we feel like philosophically, that's the wrong approach to take in this day and age.

Right. Yes. We tend to agree with that. The value proposition to the operator, can you talk a little bit about that? Why does somebody who's running a multi-tenant sort of a building want to work with SmartRent? What is it about this that appeals to them?

Yes. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of this business is there are so many different ways you can get ROI. And so it kind of goes to both the P and the outside of the P&L. And so on the revenue side, this is having a smart apartment is something that residents want and will pay you more for. It's like if you have hardwood floors or a granite countertop or a view, you get more in rent. And this is an amenity that residents want. So that's the easiest one to kind of describe is, "Hey, your residents will just pay you more rent." And we have some great public companies that have come out in our earnings calls and given us that data. So we have real data we can point to it so that you're getting $35 to $50 a month rent bump per unit per month. And so that's the one side. The other side that I think is more impactful, but harder to underwrite is around how smart devices can better protect and better control our assets. And if you think about leak sensors, if you don't spend a lot of time in multifamily, it may not be intuitive, but 70% of the damage done to apartments is caused by water. So it's not like, oh, that's a trivia little thing. Like that's the #1, #2 and #3 reasons that apartments get damaged. And so putting in leak sensors and writing an emergency work order when that gets wet, that has real substantial savings to the owner. And then the other thing I'd touch on is before SmartRent and I came from the single-family rental side, where we pioneered this idea of a self-guided tour where you could prequalify yourself and go visit the home without meeting a leasing agent, without meeting someone. And so we've now seen the multifamily industry really embrace that. COVID was actually a great catalyst for that, where people who had been doing business one way for a long time, someday they said, "I can't just keep doing business the same way", and so opened their eyes to these new things. And so we're seeing some owners that are saving 30%, 40%, 50% of their labor costs by embracing technology.

Interesting. What would you say the biggest challenge to getting people to adopt this in the industry?

Well, I would have a different answer before we had the supply chain issue. So like let's say the supply chain was normal, what would -- really, I think what we fight in the real estate industry in general is just inertia. And so it's trying to get someone to think outside of the way they've always done business. It's not an industry that likes to be a leader in innovation. It's a follower. And so if we can sit down and actually go through the value with people, it's a very easy conversation. But initially, it's a little shocking to say, well, I've always done it this way and why would I change that?

And you've done it smartly, partnered with some big developers that big operators, developers that I think probably helps with that as well. You get kind of some scale adoption within those?

Very much so. So when we came to market, we targeted the largest real estate owners first for one obvious reason, which is they have scale. So if you own 100,000 units, that's a great account to get. But the other thing that isn't as obvious is the top 15 or top 20 real estate owners and multifamily are really on the leading edge, and they're a great marketing tool for us, where we actually say, don't take our word for it, look at UDR, look at Essex, look at MAA, these companies are a great source of marketing for us, and it tends to be when you look at the real estate world, it's a very long tail of institutionally managed apartments. There's thousands of owners that own say, 5,000 or more units, but they all look to the largest operators for what they're doing, whether that's smart apartments or CRM or anything that they're sort of the leading edge.

And my understanding of the industry to the owners, the properties transact a lot. It's kind of a liquid market. And so if these major owners start adopting your technology, all of a sudden if you want to sell to them, you probably want to have the same technology. Is that the right way to think about the industry or…?

Yes, that's the right way to think about the industry. We definitely -- as an industry, there's so many variables that go on when we're managing assets that are all around the country that you crave homogeny wherever you can find it. And so we don't run 2 accounting platforms. We don't run 2 operating systems, and we don't have 2 different smart home vendors. And so that's -- for us, it's a great benefit that every -- our natural growth happens just as our customers buy more properties that we do without going back and reselling anything. We just literally every week get new orders in from existing customers. They say, "Well, we just bought a building, let's go do it."

So one of the things that probably most people when you talk about automation, home automation, building automation, they immediately think about locks. But there are other things that SmartRent offers as services or products that I don't think are as obvious. I wonder if you could dig into some of the different offerings you've got, particularly things like parking and so on that are, I think, interesting and innovative?

Yes. Yes, you do -- when you think of a smart home, you think of the home, but it actually -- it's a great point, right? It does start outside the home in the parking lot. And so even if you just think about the friction, whether you're in a multifamily building or even at your office, like if people parking in the wrong spot is a huge headache. And we've always relied on humans to have to go solve that issue. We now can augment that with technology. So we have smart parking. We have a smart video intercom. So when you approach the front door, you're able to get in and then common area access control, we think of separately from unit access. And so that's more like parking garages and elevators and front doors to the lobby, that's a different product line as well. But it really goes from the curb to the couch as we say that all the way through. And as another benefit of being hardware-agnostic is we can take all these different great devices that have been created and put them into this one platform to manage.

And I know, you and I talked about this parking opportunity. It could be turned into a revenue source for owners as well. Is that correct?

It is being turned into a revenue source for owners. It's a great point. So really, one of the interesting trends we noticed when we started building this product is the construction rules haven't changed. You have to build the same number of parking spaces as you always have in the past, but residents own fewer cars. And so there's this excess inventory of parking spaces in a lot of these properties that aren't being filled by residents. And so we can turn that, monetize that into guest parking for the owner, so they can actually put that into a parking platform, and we handle all the transaction of -- you pull in, you put in your information, you rent it out. We're seeing some owners, a lot of properties that we have are nearby stadiums or ball fields, and they're doing gameday parking and they're making some pretty amazing revenue off of spaces that are just sitting there. So every owner hates rentable -- hate space that isn't rentable, right? If you're in the rental business. And so it's a very attractive entry. So what if you had some parking that's sitting there, what if that started generating revenue? It's exciting.

I think it's related because we -- I just signed up for Cruise in San Francisco has fully roboticized cars. There's no drivers. You can go and order a car, it's very limited right now. But you wonder, well, you know that world is going to grow. Where do those cars park? What if they're -- they need to be parked somewhere and you think, well, this would be a fantastic and it could be automated. It's really an interesting area of development, I think.

I think it's going to be a huge part of our growth going forward for sure.

So let's talk about the pipeline a little bit. Could you just kind of give us an update on the committed units pipeline? Supply chain has been affecting some of this as well, but how does that pipeline look today? Anything else you want to say about the outlook there?

Well, we're seeing -- every week, we see stronger demand than we did the week before. So it's a pretty incredible macro wave that we're benefiting from of everyone -- our platform is broad and has different points that are appealing to different owners, but every owner is interested in some product that we have. And whether it's talking about using less staff to manage your property or talking about better protecting your asset, the demand continues to be incredibly favorable for us. And so we have a backlog of committed units of over 700,000, 780,000 units that in the next 2 years will be coming onto the platform. Even beyond that, though, our current owners own 6.6 million units. So the pipeline going forward even past the 2 years, we just have this, some of this we've been talking with some of the investors today is like there's just a natural growth that's coming. Like we've already done all the acquisition work, the hard cost to say, like sometimes I'm not going to actually do it, but sometime like I say, like we can actually stop selling, this would still be a business you would invest in. And of course, we're not. We're out selling every day, but that just makes it more and more interesting.

So we were yesterday talking about the real estate market in general, and I'd like to maybe get you to give us a little bit of a backdrop because I think a lot of investors that look at technology areas may not be as familiar with the shortage of housing and so on. But then could you give a little bit of that backdrop? And then talk about the macro sensitivity of the business and what happens if we do get into a recession next year, what would you expect to happen to SmartRent?

Yes, I think it's something that's on all of our minds because of the macro backdrop. But when you're looking at it today, apartments are printing -- apartment owners are having some of the best results they've ever had, partly a by-product of inflation, they're raising their rents. And so even like last quarter, you could look at a UDR who's public and they had 13% same-store growth. These are massive numbers. Like we don't -- MAA in Q1 had 12% same-store growth. We never heard numbers like that. I mean that's incredible, right? And so…

What's a normal number?

4% to 6% would be a great year, right? I mean if you used to say, I can grow rents at 4% and grow expenses at 2%, it's like…

That's a really good year.

Yes, that's a great business. You're happy with that, you're getting your bonus. And so these numbers are large. And so that creates a backdrop where it's a very -- there's a huge demand. And it comes back to what you alluded to, which is we have a shortage of rental housing in the -- we have sort of housing period, but rental housing in the U.S. And so we still have demand outpacing supply. And so that being said, what I think is interesting about SmartRent is the other side of it is, if we did go into a recession, where your rents weren't growing and they were flattening, then everyone, and we've seen this in other cycles, everyone goes to the expense side, we help you run a more efficient business. I can take away half of your leasing cost out of the expense side to better protect your assets against water. So with the ROI that we drive, it's not really -- we won't be subject to that fluctuation in cycles that you'll actually -- always have a reason to roll this out.

So right now, you've got this backlog, but then it should be the case that if things get worse from a rent point of view, you get more demand to reduce operating costs?

Yes.

Talk to me a little bit about the installation process for the product. You started off with that when you were talking about the business and setting it up. Can you get into a little bit more detail on that? Like how does the professional services side of the business work? What's required here to actually get the product installed?

Yes. It is one of our sort of moats that we've built this large field services team that is an incredibly talented group of individuals. It's a very hard role to fill because if you think about what we're asking the person to do, they have to be mechanical because it's a construction project, you got to take the lock off, you got to take the thermoset off. So you got to be a mechanically inclined person. It's technology. It's smart devices, so you have to be technical. And then the third one is you're in someone's home. It's occupied. You have to be personable. So I have to like having you in my house. And to find all 3, that's a unique skill set. And so the way our model works is we have what they're called field install manager, they're essentially a little general GC of a job and they stay at one property. We always have one at every property, and then we augment that with contracted labor. So he's a local general contractor to bring in labor. But we have one person there who is going to do all the pairing, all of the quality assurance and run the project.

So that person is the face of SmartRent with the people, the tenants and the property owner and so on, and then you have contractors come in and do the manual labor?

Yes. And that person, we also have a separate team that does the training. So while I have someone else at the property, it's actually there just to train. We sit with the staff and show you how to use your new operating system. And what we found is we can't get utilization of these platforms if we don't have a really good training because it's not something that you can just say, "Here's your new iPhone, use it." It's like we're actually going to say, "Okay, when this happens, this is the new process." So we train the leasing staff, we train the property management staff, we train the service staff. And then we're also there to help train the residents and help them understand the benefits that they're getting from these devices.

So what about the -- the competitors do this sort of thing as well or not at all, they just kind of throw it out there or how does the competition respond to what you're doing in that respect?

Yes. No one has duplicated what we're doing. They're now -- all of our competitors have now started to hire people, but they're way behind. I mean that was -- I think the difference was we are coming from being operators, and we just intuitively knew there's no way to not do it this way. Like it wasn't even like a real clear decision to say we should have a field services team. It was like, we know this isn't going to work without it. And so we're now seeing because we've scaled faster than everyone and grown faster, certainly, everyone is taking note of how we're doing it. But now we're out ahead, and we've got that lead.

And I guess that since you started off this way, you have processes in place to train people and so on. That all takes time, too, right, that of materials and training and so on?

Yes. And actually, even the contracted labor that we bring on has to be certified in our platform. And so you have to go through a training module and you have to go, well, that needs to be built and understood and you can't operate at the scale we're operating at and continuing to grow that scale, if you don't have a really good institutional underpinning, right? We've got hundreds of individuals now out installing every day, you can't solve those problems with a notepad right, like it's got to be a durable system.

Since we're on the topic, how is the labor market? In fact, that's been very tight. Is it tight for this sort of person or are you finding it difficult to hire people or can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Yes. We're fortunate that we're not -- it's not difficult to hire people, but the cost is certainly going up. And it's more pronounced with our contracted labor, general contractors. And that's actually, I believe or I hope I'll say, has peaked and it started to come back down. So as construction got tight in single-family homes before we started seeing interest rates rise, our labor skyrocketed. Some markets were 80% month-over-month cost difference. So you've paid someone $50 and you're paying them $100 the next month is pretty shocking. So our W2 staff that our field and cell managers were able to attract and retain those people, we have some really low turnover there. And there's a few things that we do that drive that. But the cost of labor certainly shut up on us.

We'll talk about that. How do you keep people -- how do you reduce turnover. Is it top secret or can you talk about...?

It's sort of top secret. No, it's not top secret. So I mean, one is, I think we've always had a culture of people who come from multifamily and even in our field team, we hire them. And that's -- I think building that company culture has been really vital that where every one of us from myself to COO, anybody, we could go do the install. If you said to me, "Go do these apartments", I'd say, "You got it. Let me take my sport coat off, but I'll go do it." And so I think that permeates to the team. Another thing that we've done, which I've talked about elsewhere, but I don't think people quite understand the impact it has is we pay 100% of health care for every employee and their dependents, 100%. And so whether you're a software engineer or a field install manager, we're taking -- or customer service rep, we take care of that. And I think that's been one of our biggest drivers of low turnover, that the cost of the business, if I gave you that in a raise, it wouldn't be as meaningful as saying I'm taking care of your health.

I guess I might want to apply for a job after we get done with this.

Yes. How are you at installing smart devices?

Yes, not that good. I do a little bit. Okay. Well, that's -- and so you're saying all the leadership team have to go through training for the installation process and...?

Well, yes, most of us who are the original ones. But yes, no, we do -- not necessarily, I wouldn't say everyone has to go through our training module, but everyone on the senior team has been there and been in the weeds. And we send every new employee out for a week to be in the field to actually experience. I don't think -- if you haven't lived that, you don't really know what this team is experiencing, and you can't really be empathetic to what they're going through. It is a very, very difficult job. There's a lot of things going on that you're trying to manage.

So when you guys started this, you were actually out installing it?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yes.

So let's talk about supply constraints a little bit. Supply has been a problem for everybody. Every one of these conversations I have, I've had 17 of them now, supply is a topic, and you've been affected by it. So can you maybe give us an update on what the status of it is, what you're seeing, what's hard to get and how you think it progresses from here?

Yes. I think this will be similar to the other 17 version, you heard of this. But it certainly is not that there is no supply of anything, but there are isolated instances where we're still having issues getting the hardware we need. And so in certain cases, like if you talk about our smart home hubs that we put into every unit, I have as many of those as I want, right, there's no supply constraints at all. We're fully back to sort of a normal world. Haven't totally seen the cost of the chips come back to where they should be, but at least they can get them. And then there's things that we install really around the common area access product, which is a really important piece. If you're thinking about self-guided tours, you can't do a self-guided tour if I can't get you in the front door. And so it's sort of a key component. The supplier of those boards that we use has been a global shortage now coming on 18 months. We're just starting to see that start to improve. We're getting not as much as we want, but more in. And so now the next phase of this for our business, in particular, is we -- even if you said tomorrow, here's the supply of everything you've been wanting, we still have to then go out and finish all the installation. And so every day that we don't have full supply continues to push out that backlog for us. And it will take us into sort of probably middle of next year before we really come out of having being impacted by the supply constraints. And we don't anticipate supply will be constrained until middle of next year, just to be clear. But even when we get the supply, we still have to go work through our backlogs.

You've got to work through all the backlog?

Yes.

So are you seeing a falling of the supply at this stage or what you're feeling for what...?

Yes. I mean I would be -- I actually would be curious to see it. I mean, I think you've talked to a lot of companies. But yes, it feels like it's slowing. There's still weird shortages and it's sort of like whac-a-mole, like something comes up like now we maybe are going to have a real strike. So it's like, please, can we just go back to normal? So I think we're feeling optimistic, but not out of the woods. Other than in certain cases, we are out of the woods, but to be truly through it, it's going to take a little while.

Yes, the consumer electronics end of the world is definitely PCs, in particular, very, very weak in terms of demand. So there's supply coming available, but most companies on the other side of that aren't seeing a benefit yet. So everybody is looking at that and saying, "Well, I should be feeling a benefit, but I don't feel too much of a benefit yet." But things are getting a little bit better, I'd say, generally.

Yes. And we've seen -- well, we've done it ourselves. We've changed components on our hardware. We've seen other vendors that we use hardware manufacturers willing to change their product and say, okay, if I can't get an ST arm chip, I'll get a Nordic chip. And there's work to make that happen, but we're seeing that happen, too, which is helping.

Yes. Yes. Competition, let's talk about that a little bit. Who do you see as your competitors and who do you see most in the market?

Yes. It's a straightforward question that has a more complex answer than you might expect. And this is -- it's especially complicated with our acquisition of SightPlan. So in March, we acquired a pure software company that sells to the same customers, multifamily, software, all SaaS, no hardware. So that's great in these supply things. But that broadens our breadth to where there's really no one that compares to us and lets you go up to like a RealPage. You say a large property management company. And that we've taken a big step towards being -- we've always been the most comprehensive platform. That was -- that's sort of what set us apart from the beginning is we have the most breadth and we have continued to add to that. And I know that sounds like I'm not answering that question, but if I will. So on the smart home side, the IoT side, we do run into RealPage. They acquired a company called STRATIS, who is a competitor of ours, and they acquired a company called WhiteSky that has a competitive WiFi product to ours and so we see them. And then most of the other companies, there's been consolidation, like IOTAS was a competitor that now is owned by ADT. They sold to ADT. We've seen some consolidation of mergers. But it's still amazing to me, I would have told you 2 years ago by this time, we'll have a really strong competitor. It's a huge opportunity. There's 29 million apartments institutionally managed in the U.S. alone, less than 1 million of them have been upgraded to be smart. There's a massive greenfield opportunity, but we haven't seen any of our competitors be successful at copying our playbook and being able to scale.

Yes. Simply, it's pretty tough to develop, to do all of this installation plus have the technology layer and so on.

Yes. Yes, I always would say when I was in the property management -- private management business, it's a simple business, but it isn't easy, and that's true of our business as well. It's not wildly complex, but it's very hard to replicate what we've done. It's not easy.

Yes. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about the longer-term growth expectations you've got for the business? How fast can this thing grow? Let's say, supply fixes itself by the middle of next year like you say. But as we look out further, what do you see the growth rate being for the business? What's the ballpark? And how do you think about profitability too within that?

Yes. Well, I think I'll start with the profitability and work my way there, because I do believe it's very important that we get this company profitable. It's not today. And we're on track to cross into profitability in sometime in next year, and that's what we've sort of guided publicly. So that has a bearing on how fast we can grow because we do need the staff and this team out there, I can say if I have 200 installers, one argument and say, "Go add 200 more even if you don't need them." And that way when supply frees up, you can grow much faster. We don't actually think that's prudent. And so we're not doing that. But it will mean that as we grow our monthly units, you'll see it grow in a nice pace. But the macro view of that, too, is that if we're doing 20,000 units a month on average today, you can see a time in the not-too-distant future, that could easily be 200,000 units in a month. There's enough demand and enough supply out there that we could go do that.

Are there any other property tech proxies? If you look at other PropTech companies that have seen that kind of growth or do you think -- or is it such a new area that you really don't have it? There are good examples, historical examples for this kind of progress?

Well, I think the best historical example that I could share is just when we saw accounting move to computing, that in the '90s we went from a lot of literally ledgers to -- then that's where you see Yardi and RealPage are the 2 dominant property management accounting systems and that really from a time of, I'll call it, '95 to 2002, basically every apartment in the country went to some system and had growth in that. We haven't seen it really in our vertical because there are no existing smart devices out there that owners were putting in. I've been doing this long enough. I at one time had a meeting with an investor. We've been on the brand a long time and we sit down and talk about the company pulls out a paper spreadsheet and lays it out and start asking you questions and erasing and writing in pencil on the spreadsheet.

Yes.

And that didn't last long. Everybody got away from that. I would look forward, I was like, boy, that is a lot of work.

Yes. Let's talk about M&A. On M&A, I'd like to back up the SightPlan and have you maybe do a little bit better, broader explanation of what SightPlan does just for investors that may not be familiar? And then talk to just a little bit more about M&A, too. Are there opportunities, other opportunities out there think that you could use maybe technologically that are available?

Yes. So SightPlan was a really important strategic acquisition for us that we've made in March. It was a unique situation where we've been technically integrated with this product for almost 3 years because we had a pool of shared customers, 39 shared customers who use both SightPlan and SmartRent. And so we had firsthand knowledge of -- we knew from these customers, SightPlan works better with SmartRent. SmartRent works better with SightPlan, totally complementary. What SightPlan focuses on, similar background to us in terms of operators that came out of the operations side of the industry. Terry Danner was -- ran Riverstone, which is the second largest fee manager in the country and had a passion for trying to improve this process. They started out by working on the resident engagement and work order side. And so some of the products that we're still offering there today is around if you need a repair done in your apartment, the work order module that we offer is a much more robust system than you're going to get from one of the incumbent property management systems. And so we also build software at SightPlan that we're integrating into our overall stack that helps with the -- what we're talking about a little bit earlier, which is operating property with less staff. So the idea that you would have our answer program, the SightPlan product called Answer, allows you to have a centralized staff and smartly route calls depending on what type of call it is. So you may have one HVAC guy who's at a property 2 miles away and with an HVAC question, will automatically route to him. And then the other piece of the software is around audit and inspections of assets. And so when you think about that, it dovetails nicely with what we do, an important product if you're buying or selling a property, which, as we talked about earlier, this is a very active acquisition/disposition industry.

So was it just happenstance that you kept bumping into them in the market or did you know them before or how did the relationship evolve with SightPlan?

Yes. I've known them before, I know them for a long time actually. Terry and I go back to the late '90s is when I first started working with him. And so I was always excited and we always had a good relationship when it was 2 separate companies. But we took -- we both took backing from real estate Technology Ventures, a venture capital fund that their entire LP base is multifamily owners. So if you're looking to get into multifamily, if you're on the PropTech side, this is sort of the preeminent fund that you want to take money from because they have that. Those customers are LPs. And so we've known them through that for a long time. And we always had on our road map, we wanted to move into the work order and resident engagement to answer. And we just realized that we're not -- we're sort of blocked by them to move into that because we have all these shared customers. So if I called MAA and said, "Hey, I've got a new great work order property." They'd say, "Well, we just put SightPlan in place. I don't need to talk to you about that." And so we realized it was a great opportunity to grow it. And then also the team -- I mean we're retaining the team, we now have an office in Orlando, which is great. So we have our Scottsdale headquarters and our Orlando headquarters, and that gives us bicoastal office presence, great software development team, great product management team. And then we announced publicly that -- so Terry Danner, who I've referenced a couple of times now, taken over our combined SmartRent sales and SightPlan sales team and running sales. So it was a great software and a great team.

Okay. Interesting. We just got a few minutes left. I want to see if anybody in the room here has any questions. So anybody have a question? If you do, let us give you a mic and then just say who you are and you do need a mic because there's people listening to extreme.

Could you talk a little bit about -- I think I'm guessing the range is for one to how many different devices are in a property and then maybe force rank the top 5 that you see uptake across your properties?

Sure. Yes, the question is around number of devices and top 5 that we put out. So I'll try to give a concise figure. So really, if we're talking about in-unit hardware, the most important pieces of hardware that we typically deploy are the smart unit lock, so smart lock to get to control access, smart thermostat to control and monitor utility usage and then leak sensors, which I brought up again leak -- water does a lot of damage. So I think those are the 3 where there's a tremendous amount of ROI for the owner. It's easy to kind of show where you wouldn't want any property without that. And then after that, it comes down to typically lighting control is the next most requested thing. There's not a great ROI case there than residents love being able to turn their lights on and off, obviously. So most of us who live in smart homes get used to that. And so that's for the end unit. Then I think as you go out to the property, it's sort of really around access is the primary use case and water damage, water leaks, wherever there's a water line running.

Great. Any other questions? Do you have a question? Okay. All right. Let me -- I want to come back to make sure we touch on the long-term vision for the company. Because you just were talking about the SightPlan acquisition and this idea of anything that makes it more efficient to operate a multi-tenant building like that. Is that kind of your vision? It's not just strictly an automation thing? Is there any technology that makes that easier? Is that the way you think about it or how would you articulate the long-term vision you got for the company?

Yes, that is how we think about it. And that was always really our founding philosophy when we came up with the name SmartRent, we were actually talking about -- we weren't talking about IoT devices in particular, but having it be a smart experience. So we feel like the process of owning, managing and renting an apartment is largely dysfunctional and sometimes broken because we haven't embraced technology. And so really is around how can we help owners operate more efficiently and how can we make renting a more delightful experience as a resident. And so everything we do has that lens on it. It doesn't strictly have to be hardware related. It could be just like we talked about your work order. So that is the vision of that. We're really looking to change the experience of operating and living in an apartment.

Right. I've never owned or operated apartment. I have rented them.

Yes.

I'm wondering what are the other pain points? Like if you look at the other things that could be done here, what else is there to do?

Yes. Well, the next phase that I think you'll see us opening, there's a lot, there's more than we can go through and so I'll just point you to one which is really around we -- the first step is around the self-guided tour, but around the prospect management. So actually pre-leasing and using that. And even though you largely have the living experience is taking care of with SightPlan and SmartRent together, most of that product is there. And then the other hardware things that I think are going to be interesting macro trends that we'll look to embrace, I think it's kind of like we were talking about earlier with the self-driving cars, the other side of that is electric vehicles that we still are very short on vehicle chargers. And if you're really going to say more than 1% of your population has an electric car, you're going to have to solve that. Other things we're passionate about at SmartRent is around embracing the E part of ESG and helping our customers be better stewards of use less utilities, replace less water damaged apartments. And so I think those are interesting trends to us, solar battery backup, these are all sort of interesting things that are out there.

There's a lot to do then?

Yes.

Are there companies doing some of these things or there's not many people doing a lot of the things you've described?

It's similar to what we found when we got into the IoT space is there's companies doing them, but they're very narrowly focused, and owners don't want 30 different vendors to do one smart project. So I think for us, that there's an interesting opportunity to say though, just like we didn't invent the smart lock, I don't have to invent a smart EV charger, but I can actually be the conduit to help getting those in and be the -- vendor fatigue is a very real thing in multifamily. And so being a competent vendor is very important to owners and having someone you trust.

Great. Last thing I'll ask you, we've just got a few seconds left here, but lightning round. So acquisition of the renters is not -- it sounds like that process is not particularly technologically automated. Is that correct? There's no weed generation or anything like that that's being done out there?

There's a lot, and a lot of PropTech money has flowed into that. I think it does come down to -- we want to be playing in that field as well, though. So I think there's some -- and that kind of goes back to your M&A question of there's interesting ways we can accomplish this goal. Not everything has to be built in the workshop necessarily.

It almost sounds like you could have a life cycle management of a renter. If I rent one place, you could learn about me and what I like and then know, well, I'm going to like that building over there if I move to new city and manage all that?

Yes.

Even I can start to see possibility.

There you go, see, I love it.

Great. All right. Lucas, this is great. We're out of time. So thank you very much. Good to have you.

Thanks for having me, Rod. Thank you, all.