Buildium finds shift in the R.E. market helps it grow
The nation's sluggish real estate market, coupled with a shift upstream to a larger market, has helped a young Quincy software firm grow its business.Buildium LLC was founded in 2004 with software aimed at landlords, but changed its target customer last year to small and midsize property managers just as residential real estate brokers began expanding into property management to offset a loss in business.
The combination of the two changes is now fueling a 10 percent to 15 percent monthly growth in the number of Buildium subscribers, co-CEO Michael Monteiro said.
He declined to disclose the number of customers Buildium serves, but said its web-based software manages 55,000 residential units nationally.
The company's technology, which is designed for managers of 100 units to 1,000 units, is priced according to the number of units. For example, the fee for 150 units is $75 per month, or $800 per year, Monteiro said.
Buildium customer Rebecca Marston, president of Boston property management firm Marston & Voss Realty and an 18-year industry veteran, said web-based applications such as Buildium's reduce the number of mailings while enabling her customers (landlords and condo owners) to monitor financial information.
About a dozen-vendors now provide online property management software, which has grown to be popular with property managers. Just three years ago, this type of technology wasn't available, said Sylvia Hill, past president of the Virginia-based National Association of Residential Property Managers.
Neither the Virginia association, which claims 2,000 members, nor the National Property Management Association Inc., which claims 4,200 members, could provide the total number of units professionally managed in the United States.
Monteiro estimates there are about 150,000 property managers in the United States.
Buildium's origins started in 2002, when Monteiro and two former co-workers at Cambridge-based Sapient Corp. needed a tool to help them manage residential properties they owned in Providence, R.I. After commercializing it, they realized that landlords with just a few properties didn't need such extensive applications, and large property managers (5,000 or more units) were already served by software developed by Yardi Systems Inc., a California-based company.
So Buildium split the two markets to find its sweet spot, Monteiro said.
"We decided to move up the value chain to people who need the software for a living -- that was a space that was being ignored," he said.
Several Boston-area companies have developed technology for marketing and managing real estate and properties including Cambridge-based rental property tool FlipKey Inc., which plans to publicly launch this spring.
Others in the real estate space include Newton-based Investment Instruments Corp. and Boston-based facility management software maker VFA Inc., a 140-person company whose software enables automated capital planning.
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