Yellowstone Club is a 13,600-acre private residential community in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. More than 335 privately owned vacation residences, with several hundred more planned in the near future, currently comprise the community, which provides unmatched personal service as well as membership in the world’s only private ski and golf community and access to other outdoor pursuits including fly fishing, horseback riding, kayaking and snowmobiling.
Yellowstone Club Residential Services manages 220 luxury properties totaling 1.2 million square feet for its residents. The residences, valued between $1.9 million and $20 million, range from 2,000 to 12,000+ square feet. As an additional service to residents, Yellowstone Club runs a members-only rental program for 80 of these properties. Its 45 property managers use the Inspections app to walk each unit weekly as well as to conduct arrival and departure inspections. The HappyCo platform ensures Yellowstone Club provides a superlative experience for residents and saves the Club more than $100,000 annually in inspection-related costs.
Yellowstone Club residents are high-net-worth individuals with busy schedules and high standards. As a result, the Club prioritizes exacting home maintenance standards throughout the year and provides extensive hospitality services for residents including grocery shopping and car delivery. Property managers conduct weekly walkthroughs of each property as well as perform arrival and departure inspections to ensure a constant state of home readiness, as residents may arrive without significant advance notice.
During these inspections, Yellowstone Club property managers assess hundreds of items per property. A typical residence includes five to six bedrooms with premium high-end amenities like home theaters, game rooms, extensive landscaping, pools, and luxury vehicles which make timely inspections challenging. Previous to implementing HappyCo, property managers conducted these inspections on paper forms, and they had to return to the office to process these forms, reconcile photos to properties, scan reports, and email them to owners and senior management. Preparing and scanning 220 weekly reports plus arrival and departure inspections became a clerical challenge that resulted in thousands of hours wasted in low-return paper pushing. Yellowstone Club implemented HappyCo’s platform in August 2013, and today its entire team of property professionals conduct their inspections electronically.
With the Inspections mobile app, inspectors perform their jobs more efficiently, and using a mobile form ensures that inspectors collect consistent and complete property data. The Happy Manage web control center gives management the ability to monitor inspection compliance, customize inspection forms to resident preferences, and instantly deploy updated forms to users.
“Using these inspection templates allows us to save 65 minutes per residence turnover. This time is vital for same day turnovers where the departure of one guest and the arrival of another can be separated by as little as three hours,” reported Ben Whaley, Head Property Manager of Residential Services. Happy Manage also empowers Yellowstone Club to control access to specific information to protect its data. For example, more senior property managers have access to copy inspection data while junior managers have restricted access to previous reports.
In addition to eliminating thousands of hours in clerical work annually, HappyCo has also improved resident satisfaction by providing property owners with full visibility into inspection and repair records.
“HappyCo's Inspections app allows us to easily and effectively provide a record of our inspection services and historical issues at the property. This has been very well received by our clients who regularly review our inspection reports,” said Ben Whaley.
“The Inspections app has allowed us to create visually appealing, clean and concise reports to submit to our clientele. The reports we are able to create with Happy Inspector are head and shoulders above our competition. Our clientele have positively responded to our new inspection reports versus our previous report format.”
Ben Whaley
Head Property Manager, Residential Services
The adoption of the HappyCo platform has produced tangible financial benefits for Yellowstone Club. Kenny Holtz, Yellowstone’s Director of Residential Services, reports that both field inspectors and office staff save an average of 10 minutes per weekly inspection. In addition, Yellowstone Club saves 65 minutes per residence turnover — 20 minutes per arrival inspection and 45 minutes per departure inspection. Labor hours saved annually equate to more than $100,000: 3,796 hours for weekly inspections ($68,328) and 2,345 hours for arrival/departure inspections ($42,210).
Compliance with company inspection policies has also skyrocketed. Prior to HappyCo, weekly inspection report completion rate averaged 65%. Following the deployment, inspection compliance completion increased 46% to 95%, positively impacting client satisfaction and decreasing the number of avoidable incidents with the potential for property damage.
“We are incredibly pleased with Inspections by HappyCo and can’t imagine running our business without it,” said Holtz. “It’s critical to keep us on top of managing our residences. We’re always looking at what other companies in the space are doing, and nothing comes close to feature parity or the flexibility of the Inspections app.”
“We’ve saved thousands of hours and more than $100,000 annually with HappyCo. Happy Inspector eliminates unnecessary clerical work that our inspectors previously performed. And with inspection compliance up 46%, we’ve improved resident satisfaction for our property management services as well.”
Kenny Holt
Director of Residential Services
