Automating Community Inspections

(00:00) INTRO: It's time for HOA solutions today. This is where you'll find news, tools and trends for condominium and association leaders.

(00:08) PREVIEW WESLEY HUNT: Ultimately, the idea came when it was like, what is? The manager didn't have to spend as much time in their car.

(00:13) PREVIEW PAUL K. MENGERT: Kind of looks like the Google car you see driving around mapping. Is that right?

(00:20) SPEAKER: And now here's your host, Paul K. Mengert.

(00:25) PAUL K. MENGERT: Good afternoon. This is Paul K. Mengert with HOA Solutions Today podcast. I'm very honored to have my friend Wesley Hunt with us today, who has a really exciting product out in the community association industry that I'm excited to share with everybody. Wesley is located down in Florida. He's a licensed attorney and a community association manager and shares my love of aviation. Wes I don't know if you know that I'm a commercial pilot, as a sideline to my work in the community association industry.

(01:05) WESLEY HUNT: I did not know that, although I have noticed that you have quite a few awesome hobbies that probably align with what I like to do as well.

(01:14) PAUL K. MENGERT: Well, excellent. We're super glad to have you here today to talk about how your group is really revolutionizing the covenant enforcement space in the community association industry and tell all of our listeners a little bit about what you're doing and what your company's all about.

(01:37) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah, so, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity to be here and it's a pleasure getting a chance to talk to you about our program. You know, compliance 360 is something that I always joke was born out of my past, which was as a property manager. I was extremely, I guess, annoyed at times at the way certain things were done in the industry. I saw it as somewhat antiquated and I always thought, hey, there's just got to be better ways to do this. And ultimately the idea came when it was like, What if the manager didn't have to spend as much time in their car? Behind their, you know, windshield Right? What if they could actually spend more time in the office answering homeowner concerns, budgets, financials, vendor management, all those things that are really the important, most important aspects of community management versus being out in the community, taking pictures of trash cans? I always thought that it was a very time-consuming process doing it the old way. And so what we thought was, well, what if we could actually bring the community to the manager instead of the manager going to the community? And what if they could still do all their inspections? Basically, virtually. So about four years ago, we started working on this product, which we call Compliance 360, and the concept was using 360 degree video cameras on top of our cars. So it's our car, our equipment, our drivers, our software. And the idea is our cars drive through your community and they capture a 360 degree video. That video goes up into our software. The manager is able to then log in and actually do their inspections virtually.

(03:05) PAUL K. MENGERT: I'm going to help our listeners have a picture of what you're doing. This kind of looks like the Google cars you see driving around mapping. Is that right?

(03:16) WESLEY HUNT: Very similar. We always use that as a kind of an analogy to when we're kind of introducing our product for the first time as if you've seen the Google cars, you kind of have an idea of what we do, except for Google takes thousands upon thousands of images and stitches them together. We actually use interactive 360 degree video. So it's a little bit different, but very similar in design. One of the things that you mentioned earlier was the covenant enforcement side. I always clarify that because I think our initial design was for covenant enforcement like the initial concept was for covenant enforcement but one of the values of our product is that you can actually do a lot more than just covenant enforcement. Landscape inspections, streetlight inspections, roadways, infrastructure. So there are a lot of additional features that come with our product besides just covenant enforcement. And the reason I make that point clear is, you know, a lot of people say, hey, well, covenant enforcement is not a maybe attractive side of the industry. Right? It can be something that a lot of homeowners may or may not like. There's always a group that says, I want my house and my neighborhood to look one way, and then you've got the other group that says, hey, this is, you know, it's my property, and I should be able to do kind of the things that I want to do. And there's that tradeoff when you live in an HOA. So one of the things that I always try to make clear is that it's not just like a tool for covenant enforcement. I mean, it's a full community inspection that allows your manager to actually see and do a lot of different things from their desks, saving them hours and hours of windshield time. So I always point that out as we're not just here to be the bad guys, right? We're trying to add value to the community and to the management company.

(04:58) PAUL K. MENGERT: Absolutely. Well, what I think a lot of people will be excited about is that this is really something new in our industry where there are not a lot of new technology products over the last ten years. And this is something that seems like it's really a different idea that's out there. Talk to us a little bit about what has made this possible technology wise.

(05:25) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah. So obviously a couple of things. The evolution and camera technology. So what's really interesting about it is, you know, iPhones right now have 40 time Zoom or whatever it is. And so 360-degree cameras, because we're using a lot of times several lenses and you're recording video at several different directions, those files are huge. You are limited to some extent and early 360-degree cameras were limited in quality and kind of depth. The new 360-degree cameras have improved significantly on that. That's one reason that this product has been able to kind of take off. The other one is the cloud storage side of it, these files are huge and early on cloud storage was extremely expensive. But because of the bidding wars between Google, Amazon and Microsoft, that's driven the price of cloud storage down significantly. So it allows us to store these videos in bulk without costing the client an arm and a leg. So those two things have definitely helped and I think ultimately the other side that's driving it is just some of the labor issues that the management industry is experiencing right now. So when you combine those three things, it kind of is a perfect marriage.

(06:45) PAUL K MENGERT: Very, very interesting. So again, I just want to paint an image for our listeners. These are automobiles that have a camera mounted on the top and the camera spins around, so it goes through a community or it turns around or it has lenses that are -

(07:01) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah, it actually has six different lenses, so it doesn't actually move. The camera doesn't move. It just shoots in six different directions. And then through the software program, we stitch all that together to make an interactive 360-degree video.

(07:13) PAUL K. MENGERT: So it follows that GPS path so you know exactly where the video was taken. Well, very interesting. This certainly is new technology. Wes, during our podcast, we have a couple of news breaks for our listeners and our news break that's up next is out of, I think, an area you're familiar with, Volusia County, California, where residents are still dealing with flooding impacts days after the hurricane.

(07:44) SPEAKER: And now it's time for your HOA Solutions Today newsbreak.

(07:48) NEWSBREAK: High water and power outages were made in the 55 and older community. It was estimated that about 400 homes were affected. An HOA owner admitted that many of his residents were having to use kayaks to get around. They were having to use airboats from the game and Wildlife Services to rescue residents. It was estimated that it took about five days for the water levels to drop. You can read more about this on HOAsolutionstoday.com.

(08:14) PAUL K. MENGERT: So we're back from our news break now we're talking with Wes hunt today, whose company is really a pioneering new technology to do video recordings in communities where it can be used for covenant enforcement and other purposes. Wes, tell us a little bit about how the technology's working today and what are some of the results your clients have gotten. How has this worked out for some of the communities where you've already implemented it?

(08:46) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah, so I think our clients for the most part would say that the product has been a significant improvement over the old way of doing it. When we talk about the old way of doing it, you talk a lot about a manager physically going out to a community, walking that community, driving that community. Our mission was always to make life safer for the managers and the residents. We always thought the old way of doing it, of driving your car down the street, taking a picture with your camera or trying to, you know, look down the street houses to see things was always a hazard because when you're driving a car, you’re supposed to pay attention to the road. We've started kind of showing the benefits of that of our program by saying, hey, you no longer have to worry about the dangerous aspects of driving and taking pictures and working an app on your phone or camera and all this stuff captures that for you. So one, that's been an improvement, right from that standpoint. The other side is to improve workflow and the efficiency of the product. For a lot of managers, they can get back to doing things like actually managing. When a homeowner sends an email and says, hey, I've got a problem, they can now address that problem. They're not driving down a highway at 75 miles an hour trying to respond to an email or waiting until they get calls. Even if you are doing that, the response is always one that I was curious about because how are you checking a contract? How are you looking at the insurance certificate? How are you doing X, Y, and Z from your car at 75 miles an hour down the road? So some of that’s not having the community manager back where they can be in front of their desk so they can have access to their shared drive and all the files they need and homeowner records and communicate with their team efficiently. That's improving the product for both, I think the resident as well as the community manager. We talk a lot about community managers and kind of the work-life balance. You see that at a lot of the CAI events, they talk about work life balance. For us, if you spend 6 hours out in the field all day and then you get back and you have 200 emails, you just put in a 12 hour day. And if you do that every single day, that gets old pretty fast. And so our thought was, hey, what if we can kind of give these managers that time back, improve their workflow and improve the efficiency of which improve the efficiency in which they work? So far the results are pretty good. We're in about seven different states now, seven different markets. So we're seeing about over 500 some communities that we're currently servicing with our product. And the feedback has been overall overwhelmingly positive. I always say that there are communities where our service may not work and that's fine. There you got some of these counties that have five or six-acre lots and these houses sit, you know, they sit a mile back from the road. You know, that's hard to see from the road with the naked eye, let alone, you know, these 360 degree cameras. For the most part, any of these masters or these planned communities where the houses are all stacked on each other, It's been a very positive response from our clients there.

(11:55) PAUL K. MENGERT: Of course, a lot of our listeners are board members and they do care very much about retaining good managers. One of the challenges to retaining good managers is giving them real work expectations. Whenever there's a product that comes along that might enhance the manager's efficiency. And I see this as something that could really create a lot of efficiency and at the same time create kind of indisputable evidence about what is out there. You know, because a lot of times when you just have sat in a lot of adjudicatory hearings, as we call them here in North Carolina, you know, it's not unusual to have somebody come and say, no, I didn't do that or my car wasn't parked there or my garbage can wasn't in the street. And with this, you have evidence that is, you know, pretty indisputable with the video that.

(12:56) WESLEY HUNT: Our entire system is G.P.S. enabled so we know where the camera is at when it takes a photo. It knows the exact GPS coordinates that it took that piece of the video. Which ultimately translates to the picture that's being sent in these letters. But it also is date and time stamped as well down to the second. So we actually know the date that the photo was there, that the car was there. We know the time that it was in front of your house to the second, actually. We know that GPS coordinates to prove that the date and time that we say we were there, we're actually in that location and it is your house. So those are all to your point, the benefits of the program. The other side of it is that everything is GPS enabled, even work orders, which has been a huge benefit to our landscapers, especially here in Florida, where we have a lot of all-inclusive. We could take a picture of a dead tree and submit that work order to a landscaper and they actually get the date time and exact G.P.S. coordinates and where that dead tree is on their work order.

(13:59) PAUL K. MENGERT: It also kind of takes a manager or board member out of being the person who's reporting this. It makes a third party saying, “hey, here's what was presented to me”, because I think it's better when the board members and the managers aren’t the police officer and the jury, so to speak. It lets the board remain in a decision capacity rather than a fact-gathering capacity. So I, I think this adds some serious benefits to that. So, Wes, tell us again the name of your company.

(14:31) WESLEY HUNT: The company is compliance view 360 out of Jacksonville, Florida.

(14:36) PAUL K. MENGERT: But you operate mainly along the East Coast or what are the states you’re in?

(14:40) WESLEY HUNT: Interestingly enough, we joke all the time that we're a West Coast company with our home base in Florida. Texas is probably one of our biggest markets right now. But we're also in the Denver, fort Collins area. We're in Seattle, Portland. We have a small presence in Pennsylvania. We also service all of Florida as well. So we have a couple other states that we're getting ready to start right now, and those will be announced on our social media shortly.

(15:10) PAUL K. MENGERT: Excellent. I've heard a rumor, you might be able to do things in the Carolinas if you get the right requests.

(15:16) WESLEY HUNT: Yes, we absolutely have been looking at the Carolinas and we know the growth that's happening there. My sister lives in Charlotte and we've been out there all the time. I just see the explosion of communities in that area too so we are diligently looking at the Carolina markets for our one of our next stops.

(15:34) PAUL K. MENGERT: Well, I'm excited to have you here with us today on the HOA Solutions Today podcast. At this time, I'd like to go to our second newsbreak today.

(15:45) SPEAKER: And here's another HOA Solutions Today newsbreak.

(15:49) NEWSBREAK: A homeowner is being applauded for parking his truck outside the HOA president's house in revving his engine. This came after the homeowner received a violation, stating that his brand new truck had been parked in his driveway for two days without moving and was thus considered not running. The homeowner posted his plan on the subreddit page “Malicious compliance”. It received over 12,000 upvotes. This was the homeowner's third strike and he'd previously received the violation for having his grass not be “green enough”. The fine was dropped. You can tell us your thoughts on this homeowner's malicious compliance by heading over to HOA Solutions Today.com

(16:30) PAUL K. MENGERT:

Wes, we hear all kinds of things about enforcement. Unfortunately, some overstep making it hard for those that are really middle of the road and just trying to keep communities nice. It makes it a little harder for them. I know you probably hear about these things every day as somebody who's creating evidence for what's actually happening in the community.

(16:56) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah, it's trying to find that fine line between what it is I would call over enforcement and also, you know, keeping your property values upright. And so everyone moves to an association and there have even been studies by the CAI, you know, the Institute for the Foundation of Research saying, hey, people want their community to look. well. They have rules here. The overwhelming majority of people move to these types of communities for that reason. You know, and it's just walking that fine line between what's reasonable and unreasonable.

(17:33) PAUL K. MENGERT: It's a huge balancing act. Every day I'm talking with our clients about wanting to balance the rights of one person with the rights of the other person and not overstepping. It certainly is important. Well Wes, I do want to get into asking you a little bit about what some of the future opportunities your compliance model or covenant violation - tell me the right words to describe your product.

(18:00) WESLEY HUNT: We generally market it as a property inspection system or a property inspection platform because, you know, we again, as I mentioned earlier, we do more than just compliance for these communities. And I think that's one of the most important points to take away.

(18:15) PAUL K. MENGERT: Okay. So property inspection platform. Talk to us a little bit about the automated intelligence that may lie ahead that could really take this to a totally new level.

(18:30) WESLEY HUNT: We've been developing and testing A.I, but the use of machine learning basically to post process are videos, run them through an algorithm on our servers where it would go through and identify certain violation types. So right now we have our proof of concept that's available that we show to the public from time to time. We show that it can go through and it can actually pick up. We've trained it on five or six items right now - trashcans, boats, basketball hoops, parked cars, things like that. So what we're really trying to do is train it, or at least to start on the really egregious violation types that you see all the time when you get the most complaints about them as a property management company. So that's where we're at right now. Our goal was to kind of roll that out maybe in Q1 of 2023, having a live on a limited basis, right? It would know a limited number of items. But ultimately what that means is the managers no longer have to watch the videos to do their inspections. They would actually get a report at the end saying, hey, we found 32 items we believe are violations. Can you go in, review and approve them? The manager would then be able to say yes, no, yes, yes, no. Right. So, again, when you talk about time-saving efficiency, a huge step forward there, but it's also a huge undertaking. Machine learning is not simple. It's not something that occurs quickly. There's a lot of training that goes into helping the system identify different things. There's going to be certain things where the system is just not going to be great at identifying some of these really, you know, “are there weeds in the flower beds?”. Determining a weed and a plant is going to be something we're going to work with.

(20:14) PAUL K. MENGERT: One of the things I hear often from folks that may have a violation is, hey, I've had this boat in my driveway for a year and you never complained about it before. I don't think this is something that consciously that people say, oh, we're going to overlook it for a while. People may just not notice it when they drive through the community and it may not get reported right away. So frankly, I think if you had a reliable system that would catch certain things, it probably would increase the satisfaction of the of the homeowners as well as the kind of community as a whole, because it is bad politics to let the boat sit there for a year, then all of a sudden say, oh, no, you can't have a boat here. So I think making these things more systematic would really benefit everyone. Is there any video available of how that works that maybe you could share with us? We could put a link to.

(21:12) WESLEY HUNT: Oh yeah. We have a proof of concept video that we show and I can send it over to you and you could kind of see it in action. it's what I call raw data, a raw video just showing the video and then watching it go through the inspection process. You can actually see the video and you can actually see it identifying things like trash cans and open garage doors, things like that. So again, it only knows a couple of items right now, but we're happy to share.

(21:38) PAUL K. MENGERT: So that I think I saw that at one of our industry conferences. And it's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing stuff. Well, I certainly appreciate you sharing all of this with our listeners. We're going to go to our third news break today. This is Paul K. Mengert with the HOA Solutions Today podcast. We're pleased to have Wes Hunt as our guest.

(22:04) SPEAKER: And now our final HOA Solutions Today newsbreak.

(22:10) NEWSBREAK: In Newland. North Carolina, a property owner discovered flooding in his backyard that had not been there before. By looking at the flat, he found his property backed up to an old flood plain and the flooding was due to storm drain runoff. In 1987, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that HOA’s are not responsible for damages in this situation. Head over to hoasolutionstoday.com and tell us what you think about this and if you think the HOA should be responsible to pay for this person's damages.

(22:43) PAUL K. MENGERT: We're back today with Wes Hunt, who's talking about his new platform for property inspections that automates a lot of the process. Wes, we appreciate all the information you've shared with our listeners. I wonder if you have some final words or final thoughts you want to share with folks in closing out today's podcast?

(23:07) WESLEY HUNT: Yeah, no, I again, I appreciate the time, I appreciate the opportunity to be here and just discuss what we're doing. We look forward to continuing to breaking new ground in this industry. We think it's one of the things that was a little bit lacking. I think the biggest takeaway for us is there's a lot of tools for homeowners, there's a lot of tools for the accounting side but, what we really felt was missing was that tool to really help the property manager. That's what we think we've built. That's what we're kind of pushing for. Our focus is on that machine learning side, and obviously we'd love to use autonomous vehicles in the future as well, where we almost have rovers that just do this work. But that's, you know, several years down the road, I think. But that's kind of a long-term goal for us is ultimately to give the property managers their life back. That's that's what we're here to do and that's what we're trying to accomplish with our product.

(23:57) PAUL K. MENGERT: And of course, as a property manager, we're always looking to give more value and better value to the board members and the community. And this is something that is on my radar as a new technology that is going to perhaps be quite impactful to our industry over the next several years. I know some of your colleagues shared some great statistics with the time savings that the product your product is for the communities as well as the increased compliance that it may lead to and the documentation of conditions. So a lot of exciting stuff.

(33:41) SPEAKER: Thanks for listening to HOA Solutions Today. Find more information on today's topic online at hoasolutionstoday.com

Key Notes:

• New interactive 360° video technology may be coming to your community.

• It offers more than covenant enforcement. It can look at landscaping, streetlights, roadways, and infrastructures.

• Time saver for Community Managers – lets them improve their work time efficiency.

Volusia County Residents Facing Damage to Homes from Flooding

Volusia County, FL residents were still dealing with flooding impacts days after Hurricane Ian. High water and power outage remained in a 55 and older community with almost 400 homes. It was estimated that more than half of the residents lost their homes due to historic rainfall from the hurricane. The HOA President expressed devastation for his community and stated many residents were kayaking to get around and were still evacuating residents with airboats from the Florida Wildlife people. It reportedly took 5 days for the water to go down. Click on the link to view the full story.

Man's Comeback to HOA Fining Him Over His Truck Applauded: 'Motivation'

Newsweek.com reports a homeowner being praised online after confessing to parking his truck outside his HOA’s president’s home and revving his engine daily to annoy the homeowner association after receiving a violation. The resident shared his plan and received over 12,000 votes in less than a day on a SubReddit section called “Malicious Compliance.” According to the homeowner, he received a letter regarding the fine, from his HOA stating that his brand-new work truck was in the driveway and had not moved in two days and therefore was considered “non-running” and in violations of their rules. Apparently, this was his third strike since he had previously been warned about his grass not being green enough. Despite his technique not being a favorite for the HOA, Reddit users were left applauding the unconventional response. The fine was dropped shortly after. Let us know your opinion by leaving us a comment.

Increasing Events of Extreme Rainfall and Flooding Cause Headaches for HOAs and Homeowners:

A homeowner in Union County, NC reported damage to his backyard due to heavy flooding, notably that had not occurred in the past. The plat maps revealed that a portion of his lot was located in a flood plain backing up to a stormwater drainage easement on an HOA-owned common area. The HOA had done nothing to redirect the water flow away from the homeowner’s property. Since a 1987 North Carolina Supreme Court case, North Carolina law states the HOA is not responsible for paying to fix the problem. Let us know at thoughts by leaving us a comment.