After spending 20 years in the industry, SmartProperty CEO Damian Esparza, spotted the opportunity to simplify the asset maintenance management process through its innovative cloud-based software.
Founded in 2016, Esparza’s prop-tech startup provides community and home associations, property managers, and others access to its first-of-its-kind real-time database platform allowing users to save thousands of dollars annually, according to the company.
“The problem impacts approximately 1 out of 5 homeowners today. There are approximately 55,000 property managers and about 10,000 thousand property management companies we’re solving this problem for right now,” said Esparza, founder of SmartProperty.
A participant in San Diego-based EvoNexus FinTech accelerator program, SmartProperty is making a name for itself in the local startup ecosystem. In addition, SmartProperty was recently selected as one of six finalists for the 2020 San Diego Angel Conference where the company will compete — “Shark Tank-” style — for a $200,000 cash prize in late March.
To date, Esparza said up until this point the company has been primarily bootstrapped. It will prepare to raise its seed round sometime this year. Currently a team of three, he said one of the biggest obstacles his company is facing right now is building out its software engineers and sales team, however, raising, a capital round will solve that, he said.
Competitive Edge
As the company prepares for bigger players to enter the space, it said it has a reservoir that contains about $170,000 of physical assets in their database. Having a first mover’s advantage, they also have inked several strategic national partnerships to increase their distribution footprint, the company said. Esparza declined to provide names of strategic partners.
One of SmartProperty’s first customers, Trilogy at Glen Ivy, saw a significant return on investment from the company’s live forecasting and dynamic funding plans feature, the company said.
“We helped our clients mitigate increases to their assessments, by $100,000,” Esparza said, “There’s more and more value in real-time planning. The better you can do a job at planning and building a capital plan to your needs — instead of it being some static third party report — the more effective job that you can do in managing your property, and the more you can optimize what those assessments really need to be.”
Business Model
SmartProperty’s business model is a SaaS (software-as-a-service), the company charges the end users a software subscription fee. Currently, their customers are in two segments, property managers and individual customers such as the condo association, the company said its initial target customer is property management companies. Esparza said being in the well-respected, local accelerator has played a big role in the company’s ability to meet their milestones.
“I’m super grateful for being a part of EvoNexus, it’s been a huge support for us to grow, the coaching and mentorship has been amazing” Esparza said, “We made more and more progress in six months than we did in two years. They’re very supportive.
