Thinking Outside the Box

Nathan Lichtenstein is all about better living through technology. The New Jersey native, 28, earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Rochester Institute of Technology before moving to New York City in 2017, where he works as a solutions architect advising start-ups on cloud computing. Lichtenstein and his husband share a one-bedroom apartment in a seven-story, 42-unit co-op in Hell’s Kitchen, where he has put his tech expertise to use since joining the five-member board as vice president in 2020. He spoke with Habitat about how going digital makes running a building easier and more efficient.

Beeline to the board. After I joined the board, my first thought was figuring what communications tools I could bring to improve how shareholders reach out to the board. I bought our address as a domain name, 315w55.com, and set up an emailing platform where people could send an email and it would blast to all five directors on our personal emails, which is a much easier way to get hold of everyone instead of stopping us in the hallway. 

Better balloting. That was also the first year we couldn’t hold our annual meeting in person because of COVID. While helping to prepare for elections on Zoom, I discovered the prior process was a bit of a mess. Shareholders were emailing votes to the management company, which hadn’t verified their email addresses in 15 years. People didn’t seem to know how many shares they had to vote. I wasn’t confident that management was tabulating properly since the system wasn’t automated and there was a lot of room for human error in a complicated process like that. So I worked with other board members to bring in the digital voting platform ElectionBuddy, which I configured with an updated, verified email list and the correct number of votes to shares as defined in our bylaws. On election night things went very smoothly.

Time for a change. One thing led to another, and I started looking for a new managing agent. Our longtime board president was hesitant, but this new tech-driven company, Daisy Property Management, had reached out to her on LinkedIn, and the president asked me to check it out. They came in and pitched us this vision of how every other industry has been digitally revolutionized, and now they’ve done that with property management. Daisy has created its own platform to interface with its clients. It’s a portal where everything about your building, from finances and local law compliance to maintenance and vendor payments — all in real time — is consolidated, and boards can access it. Then there’s the app, which sends notifications to shareholders, like when the water will be shut off or whatever. If the upstairs toilet is leaking through your ceiling, you hit chat, let Daisy know, and they get back to you quick — not just your building manager, but the whole operations team. So it’s a process where people and technology get married together, which is the coolest feature for me. The board unanimously decided to take a chance on making the switch, and we’re glad we did.

Future plans. At that time, we had just filed our facade inspection report and needed to bid out an engineering firm and have it bid out subcontractors. Things got gummed up by the pandemic, but the facade repairs are scheduled to start this spring. We don’t have a hard number yet, but I’m shooting for it to be below the six-figure mark — given that scaffolding costs more than the repairs. 

There are a couple other projects in the works. We just installed new video intercoms but kept our old key-fob entry system, so now we’re switching to keyless, which will cost $5,000 to $10,000. A much bigger job will be relocating our laundry room to a new space in the basement. We did an oil-to-gas conversion and ended up with a rarity in Manhattan — a giant empty room — when we got rid of the oil tank. After debating about installing storage lockers and other things, we decided the best thing to do is to give everyone a new, bright laundry space with more elbow room. And it’s in the early stages, but I am doing research on rooftop solar, both to meet the carbon-emissions laws and cut costs. My hope would be to roll the meter all the way back to below zero and sell the energy back to the grid.

Money in the bank. As for funding, we had imposed a capital projects assessment before COVID, so the money’s been on hold and is all there. We were very fortunate to do a great refinance on the underlying mortgage and take some cash out, which was dumb luck. Nobody knew mortgage rates were going to jump, but the board looked like financial geniuses because we got a sub-3% rate locked in for 10 years. Going forward, I’d like to do small-step maintenance increases instead of trying to forecast what we need in the future — the standard 2 to 3%, or something like that. But I’d like to get that down to half that. 

Forward thinking. I’m happy to say that all our board members, some of whom have been serving a very long time, are unanimously in favor of bringing in more technology. There’s no entrenched resistance to changing the way they’ve been doing things for years. It’s been satisfying to see my own perspective help make tangible improvement in people’s lives.