Alan Missen Aug18

Alan Missen

FirstService Residential is the largest third-party manager of homeowner’s associations in the United States, with more than 6,000 properties – and another 600 or so in Canada. So it makes sense that the Dania Beach, Florida-based company would be think big about how to deliver technology solutions specifically for the HOA lifestyle. Whether you’re a resident or owner of a home in a master planned community, a community manager of an HOA or a member of a community board of directors, FirstService is thinking about how to improve your experience, and give you mobile applications to obtain information and complete neighborhood-related tasks. “Whatever we can do to make the community manager’s life easier, and do that in an effective way, translates into a better experience for the resident,” said Alan Missen, recently appointed CIO for FirstService. “That’s such a big part of our culture, making a difference in every resident’s life every day.” Missen talked about the various apps FirstService is developing and how they hope to make the HOA experience more mobile-friendly for everyone involved. Tell us about your existing resident service portal. Missen: FSRConnect is our core property management solution. It’s focused on helping the associates to service the property and has a lot of information around the residents, the properties, and it aids in managing much of the activity around amenities. In the HOA world, there’s lots of documents that need to be put in the hands of residents, so we handle document management with this solution. We manage work orders, violations, architectural modifications, and we also provide some financial data that residents can touch. We’re generally more cautious around that, the financial data being more sensitive, so we keep a lot of that back in our accounting solutions. But we...