Calgary-based Hope Street Real Estate Corporation is putting its best foot forward as it continues to grow its presence and business in the British Columbia marketplace.

“And the way we do that is with technology,” says Shamon Kureshi, president and CEO of the residential property management firm.

“Property management is very much a high volume, low profit kind of business. The only way to make the business work is through automation and high volume. And the way we’ve been successful with is by automating everything with super high tech innovation. That’s something that a lot of clients seem to respond to because the stereotypical image that comes to mind when you hear or think of a property manager is the chain-smoking granny who vacuums the hallways of an apartment building and has several cats.”

But Kureshi says some of the company’s initiatives along the technological front are decades ahead of its competition.

After completing an English degree at the University of Calgary, Kureshi founded Hope Street in 2005 with a main office in Calgary. Today, offices are also in Edmonton and Vancouver.

Hope Street basically connects tenants and landlords and it focuses on executive-level homes.

“We know that advertising a property and getting a good tenant is perhaps the most important piece of the whole business cycle,” says Kureshi. “When we list a property on our website, our website will then talk to 20 other websites . . . and it will automatically populate the data from our listing to their site. So we only have to list our property once and all of a sudden bam it’s spread out all over the sites all over the country knowing that there are people who are moving to Calgary, or Edmonton, or Vancouver from other cities.

“And it’s just blown the roof off of our turnaround times for finding people tenants. From the consumer perspective, the place gets rented quicker and in most cases their place gets rented for more money because we’ve got a greater market to peddle it to.”

Kureshi says Hope Street also has a very advanced owner’s portal so an owner can log into their account and get any amount of data that they want about their house at any time.

“One of the things we hear from clients who have come to us from other managers is that communications is lacking and it’s often the most important thing in the relationship . . . So we have this portal where the owners can get everything in real time.”

Hope Street moved into the Vancouver market at the beginning of 2017. Kureshi anticipates huge growth for the company in British Columbia.

“The whole B.C. market is like the biggest garden with the richest soil just waiting to be harvested,” he said. “With respect, we’re going to blow the roof off the competition. They won’t even see what hit them. We anticipate we will gain 500 new clients in Vancouver over the next 12 months.”

The company has about 2,000 clients in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver with about 250 in the West Coast city.

Mario Toneguzzi is a Calgary based journalist.