Riverstone Communities
Fast-Growing Real Estate Company Uses RingCentral to Make Communication Easier Across Its Dozens of Offices
When we moved our headquarters, we gave everybody a work-from-home day. Thanks to RingCentral, the whole team was able to stay connected and get their work done off site. And what could’ve been a really difficult transition was actually smooth and painless.
Adam Witkow
IT Manager, Riverstone Communities
Twenty years ago, the founders of Riverstone Communities discovered a winning strategy in real estate: purchase a manufactured housing community, keep the existing staff, and work with them to maintain an outstanding property that enriches the lives of its residents. Repeating that same strategy, Riverstone Communities has grown into a national company that owns and manages more than 70 mobile home parks across a dozen states, serving 12,000 families.
But that success can also create growing pains for a business. “At one point I counted 46 different software tools our teams needed to access on a regular basis,” says Adam Witkow, IT Manager for Riverstone Communities. “We also had inconsistent technology and communication setups across all of the offices at our 73 housing communities. We needed a more streamlined, simple, and reliable platform.”
INDUSTRY
Real Estate
HQ
Bloomfield Hills, MI
YEAR FOUNDED
1998
EMPLOYEES
150+
The search for a unified communication platform comesto an end
After investigating several phone service providers, Witkow and his team discovered RingCentral.
“I really liked that RingCentral consolidated so much of what our company had previously needed many different tools to do,” Witkow explains. “With just one login from any device, our employees can now manage online meetings, receive and send text messages from their business number, take and make cloud phone calls, manage their voicemail, send or receive a fax online, and even collaborate and instant message each other using RingCentral Video.”
The team can finally dump some outdated and costly hardware
To cite just one example of the many ways RingCentral has helped the company, Witkow explains that he was able to get rid of dozens of fax machines that were sitting in Riverstone Communities’ offices across the country.
“Right away, we started saving about $400 a month just by getting rid of fax phone lines, because RingCentral gave us all internet faxing from anywhere,” Witkow says. “Not to mention the money we’ve also been saving by not having to maintain and repair those aging fax machines.”
I really liked that RingCentral consolidated so much of what our company had previously needed many different tools to do.
Adam Witkow
IT Manager, Riverstone Communities
New communication channels help the company improve its business
An even more significant benefit from RingCentral is that now everyone on the Riverstone Communities team has cloud-based text messaging from any device.
“We had desktop phones in every office, but our employees had no SMS capability on their work phone numbers,” says Witkow.
Now that everyone has a RingCentral cloud phone number, they’re receiving texts from residents, and they can view and respond to those texts from anywhere, on whatever device they’re using.
As Witkow points out, “Sometimes these text messages are requests for help from residents, and that’s great for customer service. Other times, they’re inquiries from residents about available homes for people they know, and that can actually help with our occupancy rates and revenue.”
Streamlined, reliable communication gives Riverstone Communities peace of mind
Witkow also points out that one problem the company had always faced was the possibility of a power outage at one of its locations, which span all the way from Arizona to New Jersey.
With landline phones, physical fax machines, and employees tethered to their offices, an outage could mean an office is effectively offline and unable to do business. “That could disrupt operations for our whole company,” Witkow explains.
But these issues don’t worry the team anymore. “With RingCentral, any employee can just pull out her smartphone and work from her RingCentral app. Or she can take her laptop and headset to the nearest Starbucks and take a call right on her computer.”
Here’s how Witkow sums up why he and Riverstone Communities have been so happy with RingCentral: “So much of what our team does every day—phone calls, texts, faxes, online meetings, managing projects, and sharing files—is now on one platform, and our staff can do any of it easily, even if they’re not in the office.”