Dive Brief:

• Property operations technology company HappyCo has acquired Banner Technologies, a provider of capital expenditure management software for institutional real estate owners and operators, according to an Oct. 29 press release. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• HappyCo said the acquisition “advances” its operations and asset management platform, which will allow customers “to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a property,” starting with due diligence and capital planning through maintenance operations and capital expenditure execution, according to the release. 
• In September, Lone View Capital made a “significant investment” into HappyCo, according to the press release. HappyCo Founder and CEO Jindou Lee says the capital infusion is helping power the firm’s growth through product investment and strategic acquisitions. “This has all been made possible through a very aligned capital partner,” he told Multifamily Dive.

Dive Insight:

HappyCo’s products let apartment owners inspect properties, run maintenance operations and track assets and inventory, per the release. Banner helps them plan, budget and execute capital projects.

Right now, it's difficult to connect property maintenance needs with capital planning, vendor sourcing and project execution. “Customers want a way to roll up the data and view the data in a very cohesive way,” Lee said. 

By combining with Banner, HappyCo is trying to close the gap between maintenance and CapEx planning. 

“Banner has done such a great job at making sure the owners have the visibility,” Lee said. “But the challenge is, they then relied on the owners to feed them data. You know what? That comes from our system.”

HappyCo will also integrate its artificial intelligence products into Banner’s products to help customers automate capital management workflows and access project and cost information.

“We see a very big benefit of AI as being able to clean up some of that noise of the data and being able to present it in a very consistent way, or being able to sift through messy data and package it up in a much more cohesive way,” Lee said.

HappyCo and Banner will continue to support their existing products and customers, while investing in features and deeper integrations, per the release. Part of that is simply automating how people upload invoices, for instance.

“People are manually keying in invoices, whereas you can just take a photo, extract all the information and pass it through the system,” Lee said.

With the Lone View Capital partnership, Lee said that HappyCo is “looking at a lot of different things at the moment” and will be on the hunt for other acquisitions.

“We've always seen a lot of opportunity,” Lee said. “We just never had the ability to go and act on all these in a very quick manner.”

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