Company Name
Kipee International
Door Count
200
Portfolio Type
Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2024
Company Name
Kipee International
Door Count
200
Portfolio Type
Mixed Portfolio
Buildium Customer Since
2024
When Yelena Pesic became CEO of Kipee International, a Santa Clara, CA-based property management and investment business, she didn’t realize it had been leaving rental income on the table for years.
Started in 2002, Kipee has a complex portfolio that includes residential and commercial rental properties in both the U.S. and Europe. To help handle that complexity, Pesic turned to Buildium.
Buildium’s platform gave Pesic the visibility to see just how much unpaid rent and maintenance costs were hurting the company’s bottom line (Spoiler alert: More than $100,000 was leaking out of their business each quarter). It also gave her the tools to reverse those trends and reach a new level of profitability.
Before Buildium, Kipee relied on legacy systems: spreadsheets, paper files, QuickBooks, and a patchwork of emails and other communication. This led to gaps in records and a lack of visibility that was ultimately costing the company large chunks of money every month.
Late and missing rent payments were a major source of this missing revenue. Keeping track of monthly payments and other fees meant that Pesic and her team had trouble knowing who was and wasn’t paying rent on time. Finding important leasing details meant scrolling through messages and spreadsheets. Inevitably, details fell through the cracks.
“I would say 95 percent [of tenants] were not paying on time,” reveals Pesic. “We even had some tenants, for example, paying on April 1st for the month of March.”
Maintenance spending was also becoming unruly and hard to track, with property managers and other team members using (and maxing out) their own credit cards each month. This made it difficult to keep track of receipts, prioritize projects, and know where to rein in spending.
“There were a lot of gaps or red flags when I was reviewing the P&L. Having to catch up to [and] verify the information was not easy.”
In 2024, Pesic brought on Buildium to get better visibility into operations and win back control over her business.
She used Buildium’s work order management system to transition Kipee from its informal in-house model to a more organized approach to maintenance, where each request could be logged, reviewed, and assigned to a vendor in one place. Her vendors now knows which requests to move forward with quickly and which they need to drill into to get the most possible value.
Invoices are now uploaded to Buildium, simplifying their process for billing and handling payments. Kipee moved from manually entering and looking up details in spreadsheets to a more streamlined and automated rent collection system. Notes, outstanding balances, P&L statements, and other details are now accessible in their central dashboard.
As soon as she implemented this new system for rent payments, Pesic discovered that a large majority of her tenants were somewhat late on their payments, some having not paid their rent for almost an entire year.
“I can see rent coming in,” Pesic explains. “If there’s late tenants with outstanding balances, I can ask my property manager to send an email, [see] what’s going on, and get the update. I know what questions to ask because I have the information there.”
The team was able to not only get on-time payments up past 90 percent but they can now also offer tenants a variety of payment options, such as ePay through Buildium and can assign late fees and send out reminders automatically.
Pesic can also pull up communication logs and other records quickly, without having to sort through email chains. This, combined with a more convenient payment system has helped improve experiences for tenants and cut back on the team’s workload.
“I don’t feel the pain anymore of the manual nature of property management,” says Pesic. “We all have the same information at the same time within the portal without having to rely on spreadsheets, long threads of emails, or difficult conversations on the phone.”
Kipee’s process for inspections has seen similar leaps in efficiency. The company now uses HappyCo’s inspection capabilities within Buildium to keep all their relevant notes and files labelled and organized. They no longer have to sort through records and images manually searching for timestamps. That means the team can complete inspections in a fraction of the time it previously took them.
Since introducing Buildium, Pesic has seen some remarkable results and gained the oversight into her business that she was looking for.
The new work order management system, supported by Buildiums tools has resulted in a close to 50 percent reduction in maintenance costs—more than $100,000—over the past three months. “Now I have the work orders in front of me and I know exactly what’s going on,” Pesic reflects.
With newfound visibility, Pesic was able to take action, using Buildium’s ability to automate late fees, send out reminders, and offer a greater variety of payment options to turn things around. Now, the company’s on-time payment rate is between 90 and 95 percent.
Using HappyCo for inspections has also resulted in big wins. Instead of spending 8 to 10 hours inspecting a 20-unit apartment building, they can now inspect 80 units in under two hours, an 80 percent reduction in time spent per unit. This faster process has come in handy for requests that were unexpected or required a quick turnaround.
“When the city came and wanted to inspect our commercial buildings, I had to inspect 80 offices for the pre-inspection,” says Pesic. “To be able to do that very quickly, easily and have that go into the building—that’s a huge time saver. I could not imagine doing that without Buildium.”
For Pesic, all these benefits have made it possible to steer her business confidently toward long-term success, giving her entire team the ability to both live and work on their own terms.
If you’re ready to discover the blindspots in your business and start growing your revenue, try out Buildium for yourself with a 14-day free trial or guided demo.
