Welcoming Eden to the Fifth Wall Portfolio

Today we’re excited to announce the newest addition to Fifth Wall’s expanding portfolio of Built World technology investments: Eden.

Eden is the first fully scalable, tech-enabled property management platform, and the first viable marketplace within the property management services sector. They have built the most promising communication infrastructure for property managers and landlords to meet the needs of their tenants — by providing direct visibility into tenant status.

If you’re an office manager, property manager, or even an owner with a small portfolio of offices, here are some things you probably already know:

• Communication breakdowns between tenants and property managers happen far more often than they should, leading (in serious or chronic cases) to increased turnover.
• Property managers’ and landlords’ time is not best spent dealing with routine issues, like cleaning or basic maintenance.
• Ticketing, as a system to triage the needs of individual tenants, is one of the clearest ways we know that real estate has failed to keep up with technological innovation.

And if you are a REIT or an owner/operator of a larger portfolio of real estate assets, you might also agree that some buildings in the portfolio are insufficiently serviced despite your most diligent attention and best intentions. Given our LPs are some of the largest office portfolios and servicers in the US, Fifth Wall began to explore solutions to these pressing problems rooted in tenant-landlord communication and responsivity, incidental underprovision of services, and outdated service delivery models. We found Eden exciting for a number of reasons:

1. Existing customers were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the service. Over the course of numerous conversations, we quickly understood how easy and automated the service was, especially with regard to the seamless user experience.
2. Eden manages vendors with little operating leverage, without sacrificing safety. The platform leverages technological innovation through an online office/building services marketplace as opposed to a wage-intensive W2 model. While marketplace models — in ridesharing or other “gig economy” roles — may have some drawbacks, on balance they allow incredible organizational agility, make expansion and rollout into new markets fairly simple, and fundamentally democratize a fragmented industry at scale.
3. Vendors benefit from improved marketing. Eden funnels demand to vendors, and vendors are able to increase their visibility and marketing channels.
4. Property managers benefit from high tenant satisfaction, while helping PMs better allocate their time and resources. Even though tenants sit in the driver’s seat with Eden, this improvement in customer service carries over into the tenant-landlord relationship. Over time, this increases reputational equity, decreases turnover, and relieves pressure on PMs who needn’t manage the Eden-tenant relationship directly.

Because it’s so scalable, Eden helps large portfolio operators cover a full portfolio with equal quality and attention to detail, by offloading and outsourcing services no matter the desirability or holding period of the asset itself.

We’re thrilled to support Eden as they scale beyond nuclear offices and office managers to commercial real estate properties and property managers, and congratulate their team on a successful Series A! Read more about Eden in today’s TechCrunch story here, and listen to our podcast with founder Joe du Bey on the Fifth Wall podcast on iTunes.