A decade of accomplishments calls for reflection!  At eProperty Innovations, we are celebrating 10 years of building and enhancing ePropertyPlus, which was first launched in 2014. Simply put, the time dedicated to community development and property revitalization has flown by! In this post, we reflect on what motivated us to build ePropertyPlus, and what keeps us motivated to earn the partnership of land banks, local governments, and others engaged in revitalizing property as ePropertyPlus celebrates this milestone.

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Origin Story - ePropertyPlus and Hurricane Katrina

Our origin story is that of a company that built software for public sector organizations. Back in the mid 2000s, we built a program for the State of Louisiana to help them manage an inventory of properties being returned to the state via a post-Hurricane Katrina buy-back program. This program offered to take back properties from flooded-out property owners, but the state did not have a software system to keep track of all of the assets it quickly accumulated.

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 Our work in New Orleans brought us into contact with the Center for Community Progress (CCP), which was also working in New Orleans. At that time, the CCP was also assisting with the launch of the state of Michigan's first land banks and asked if we could design a software application to support the work of land banks. We said yes and working alongside several of Michigan’s land banks, we built ePropertyPlus.

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Software with a Vision - Property Management Support

As we started building ePropertyPlus, we had a clear vision. We wanted to create a software for end-to-end property management support. We wanted to host our product “in the cloud,” even while most public sector applications were based on local machines and servers. We knew our software would need to be able to support a typical land bank’s business processes, but since land banks were relatively new, it was not entirely clear what those processes would be. That meant the solution had to support a land bank needs "out of the box", but also be flexible enough to evolve alongside our partners. From the get-go, ePropertyPlus was created as a cloud-hosted solution that included both a Staff Site for managing data and processes and an integrated turnkey markating website (Public Site) for advertising properties and accepting offers to purchase or lease property.

In the ensuing few years, we added a Sandbox for training and testing and a Mobile App, so users could access and update data and records from a tablet or mobile device. We also continued to tinker with ePropertyPlus, pushing it to do more from within the same user-friendly interfaces. To do this, we focused on organizing ePropertyPlus around "the property lifecycle." This is the idea that a property has a past, current, and future life - that all comprise its lifecycle.

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You can think of it this way:

A land bank encounters a property in a distressed state. The factors that caused it to become distressed – foreclosure, financial hardship of an owner, lack of maintenance and upkeep, or issues with title, etc. – all describe aspects of its history. There is data and information that helps document that history, so the system should be able to capture all of that data.

Once under the care and control of the land bank, various remediations to the property are applied: the title is cleaned up, the physical condition is stabilized, or perhaps the dilapidated structure is removed. We think of these activities as services that are being performed on property, or the property records. So we built ePropertyPlus to manage the data and information -- images, documents and other key data points -- which come from the activity of putting properties back to productive reuse.

As our partners are preparing a property for its next chapter, they want to be able to share information about the property with someone else. This includes marketing a property, taking offers for its reuse, and arranging for its transfer. Once it is transferred out, our partners may want to continue monitoring the property to make sure its new owners give it the care and attention it needs. This is where the Public Site and ePropertyPlus' built-in reporting tool help fulfill the needs of community developers.

While the many tools included with ePropertyPlus have been significantly modified during the last ten years, the basic vision of supporting the essential activities and processes of land banks and other community developers has remained the same.

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ePropertyPlus: Past. Present. Future.

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Over the past decade, we learned a lot about how our partners wanted to track data and information about a property as it moves through the property lifecycle. We saw that some partners needed to track tens of thousands of properties, so we made ePropertyPlus highly scalable. We also learned that each organization has different business processes, so we made ePropertyPlus highly configurable. We also identified that our partners were accountable to different stakeholders, so we built ePropertyPlus around the concepts of transparency, standardization, and accountability. Lastly, we learned that our partners have too many tasks and not enough time. We simplified the process for launching ePropertyPlus, made it easier to update and manage data, and added customer support services, all within the same affordable software-as-a-service subscription.  

Today, ePropertyPlus remains the comprehensive, cloud-based property management system for reactivating property. It’s flexible, affordable, and can be deployed quickly and with minimal disruption. Its utility is demonstrated by its adoption by cities, counties, and land bank clients across the US. Its flexibility is demonstrated by how it can be easily adapted to meet diverse and evolving use cases, spanning the gamut from permitting to real estate asset management and all the way throughout the process of land bank operations. As ePropertyPlus enters its second decade of service, it is clear that it has evolved tremendously since its launch in 2014. But at its core, ePropertyPlus continues to be a nimble software solution for managing property, property data, and the business processes of community revitalization.

As we embark on our next decade, we will continue to explore new ways to increase ePropertyPlus’ operational value, while maintaining its low cost. This will include exploring ways to integrate ePropertyPlus with other software solutions, building out new features such as ePropertyPlus auctions, and continuing to lean into needs of our community revitalization partners by delivering on our partnering model. We learned a ton from our land bank and local government partners over the last decade, and we put that learning into a product we are immensely proud of. But we are not resting.

If you would like to learn more about ePropertyPlus, or the strategic consulting services we offer, please get in touch. In the meantime, thanks for sticking with us to this point.

Onwards!