Every Third Tuesday at the Housing Innovation Alliance, we dial in to our network to connect the dots on big ideas, identify new connections and help facilitate realistic innovation. You can count on us to host timely, insightful and actionable conversations that build into real value for your business.
This online round table discussion was held for our network in January of 2022. The version you're hearing has been edited. Find the full archive, snapshots + video on our website.
Listen in to hear a brief snapshot from each of our panelists as well as Q&A. They'll be sharing what they're doing to drive the future of housing, the benefits they're delivering to homeowners, the industry and the environment, and how you could partner with them.
Hosts
Panelists
Every Third Tuesday at the Housing Innovation Alliance, we dial in to our network to connect the dots on big ideas, identify new connections and help facilitate realistic innovation. You can count on us to host timely, insightful and actionable conversations that build into real value for your business.
This online round table discussion was held for our network in January of 2022. The version you're hearing has been edited. Find the full archive, snapshots + video on our website.
Listen in to hear a brief snapshot from each of our panelists as well as Q&A. They'll be sharing what they're doing to drive the future of housing, the benefits they're delivering to homeowners, the industry and the environment, and how you could partner with them.
Hosts
Panelists
Dennis Steigerwalt (00:00:00):
Dennis Steigerwalt, president of the housing innovation Alliance. Glad to have you here as part of our third Tuesday series, this is the first one at 2022. We have a real exciting panel where we're gonna get into some core innovations in core building systems with a, a group of entrepreneurs from around the world. Before we do that. And for those of you who may be new to our network, I just wanna provide a little bit of background about who we are and what we, so at the housing innovation Alliance, we're all about increasing the availability of attainable housing for the middle market. We do that by leveraging the production home builders scale and volume throughout the marketplace. We're about 200 companies strong and just over a thousand or so individuals driving that change. And we do that by leading market engagement activities, just like the one we're hosting today.
Dennis Steigerwalt (00:00:41):
All of our market engagement activities throughout the course of the year are made possible by a fantastic group of financial supporters. That is our transformation, our innovation partners. We wanna thank them for the support throughout the course of that last year and look forward to more with them next year. So at the end of last year, we had our future of housing conversation in the, in the course of that discussion, we had about a four hour dialogue around how we can paint some broad concepts around where the industry's going over the next three, five and 10 years in doing that. Greg and I had a chance to brainstorm a bit well cuz of fifth wall's involvement in those sessions. And, and it was, it's great to have directional guidance, but how do we provide some near term near term solutions? It could be adopted and drive that change.
Dennis Steigerwalt (00:01:21):
So what we wanted to do was have a follow up beginning of this year to those sessions with a group of entrepreneurs that are bringing those solutions to market, and that's really where we are and how this came about today. So consider this an extension of that conversation and a way to start taking measured steps towards driving real change in the residential built environment. Greg's joining us as fifth walls. Co-Lead on the clean tech group. They're one of the largest fundraisers in decarbonization in the residential built environment. So we're excited to have him here from that participation. And before fifth wall, Greg was a big part of BMW's Ives group leading their sustainability practice. So Greg's perfectly suited to help guide us to these conversations, but that take it away,
Greg Smithies (00:01:59):
Greg. Thanks. And thanks everybody for, for taking the time today and, and also thanks to to all of our panelists. Yeah, so just a, a little bit of background here on on fifth wall, if we can hop over to these slides in, in case any, anybody is not familiar with us. Fifth wall is the world's largest venture capital fund. That's focused on, on what we call the built environment, but really think of that as construction real estate infrastructure and more and more so energy just given how much energy buildings consume we've got about 3 billion under management. And probably what's most interesting to the folks on the line is similar to the housing innovation Alliance, the money that we have pulled together here to go and invest in breakthrough technologies for our industry is coming from the industry itself.
Greg Smithies (00:02:43):
So we pulled together about 90 of the world's largest owners, operators, and developers of a commercial and residential real estate and infrastructure around the world. There, there are some of their logos up here on the slide we're across about 15 countries. And just to give you a feel for sort of the size and the scope of the consortium that we've pulled together we account for about 20 to 23% of all of the homes that are built in the us about seven and a half billion square feet of commercial real estate about one and a half billion of industrial I think one and a half million in hotel rooms, one and a half million multifamily units. So a very sizable consortium, we invest across a number of different these here and we are investing in the next generation technologies to help our industry.
Greg Smithies (00:03:28):
We've got a north American real estate tech fund. That's doing a technology such as, you know, software going into buildings. We've got a similar fund in Europe, that's doing the same thing. We've got a retail fund, which is doing next generation direct to consumer technologies and, and people for our corporate LPs who own retail assets, for example. And then what's relevant today is that fourth leg of the store there, climate tech, the real estate and construction industry accounts for about 40% of all of the CO2 emissions on the planet. Right? I think if you ask the average Joe blogs on the street, who is the big, bad Wolf industry, and most people would think it's transportation, but it turns out it's actually us, right? It's it's real estate instruction. We are the big, bad Wolf. And what is quite shocking for us as an industry is even if we realize that we are the problem, we do not have the technology at hand to solve that problem for ourselves.
Greg Smithies (00:04:20):
Meaning even if we go out and install all of the best technology available to us today, use the best construction materials, all of those things, we can only probably solve about 50% of that problem. Right. So that is why we think it's incredibly important for us to be as a venture capital fund investing in new technologies because we need new technologies to solve the other half of the equation here. And then also to bring with us the industry at large, because it doesn't matter if we can invent the technologies, if the industry doesn't wanna buy those technologies. Right. So we rarely do see this as bringing industry and startups together through a venture capital fund. And that's the background there. So just a little bit of, of a high level on the folks who are gonna be talking today.
Greg Smithies (00:05:09):
In alphabetical order, we've got Mehrdad Mahdjoubi, who is theCEO of orbital systems. I think you're gonna see a, a theme here. We've got a lot of rocket science around here. Orbital systems is doing,water recycling systems,and it's technology that was originally spun out of NASA. Uand,Mead, thank, thank you very much for doing this late night. He's actually in Sweden at the moment. Uand he has a background in,in industrial,design out of lunch university. He's a guest lecturer at Stanford's graduate school of,school of business as well. Uwe've also got Arch Padmanabhan Rao. Arch is the CEO of span who,makes smart electric panels,in transparency, fifth wall, our investors in span. We are not investors in the other two companies today. Uand arch has a, has got a, a very interesting background having,survived,I think close on five years,reporting to Elon Musk as a head of energy products at Tesla.
Greg Smithies (00:06:10):
I had a lot more, more hair before I worked for Elon. I dunno how how archery, you know, still, still has a full head of hair there after so many years working for the man. And then last but not least, we've got Michael SASI who's the CEO of dandelion energy dandelion are working on ground source or geothermal heat pumps for, for buildings. And this is also a very storied company. It's a spin out out of Google's moonshot factory or Alphabet's moon and moonshot factory. And Michael's had a fantastic career in and around the the energy and efficiency space spending, I think close on about eight years at O power which is a company that I'm sure lots of folks will know. And he's a a reformed lawyer. So, you know, maybe, maybe he can tell us why you go and get a Harvard law degree if you're not gonna go and go and use it. So with that would like to hand it off to to arch, to talk to us about span. Thanks everybody.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:07:11):
Thanks, Craig. Thanks for inviting me to join. Thanks for supporting our, our adventures and Dennison Betsy. Thanks for having me on as well. Well, it's nice to meet everybody here. I think the common theme across dandelion orbital us is we're all painfully aware, aware of the need for decarbonization. And we like Greg have seen that the empirical data points towards us having to rethink our built environment or how we power our daily lives. And that's, that's part of the, the core mission here at span. So support of the next slide here is the core, our reason on Detra at, at span here is we, we want to accelerate electrification. Electrification is, is the exercise of essentially transitioning all of our appliances from, from fossil based sources, like natural gas to fully electric sources.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:08:04):
And this is driven by the, the belief that if you, if we generate enough clean, renewable energy then we, we, and if you can convert all of our loads from gas to electric, then we could have a largely decarbonized built environment. And having spent the last decade and a half in the energy space in the renewable energy space, ranging from wind power generation to energy efficiency, to commercial energy metering to then subsequently spending some time at Tesla designing and developing energy storage systems. I came to the realization that if, if we cannot enable homes and our everyday lives to be less carbon intense, then we're really missing the boat here on our effort to, to buck the trend on climate change. And to enable that if you look at the home as an ecosystem, it becomes very painfully obvious that the home electrical panel is one that has seen very little innovation in nearly century now.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:09:00):
And that is often the bottleneck for customers making that transition to a fully electric home. That's where we started about three and a half years ago. And, and I'm happy to share a bit more about our products. Dennis, if you go to the next slide here what's been helping us over the last decade. And more importantly, over the last half a decade is the, is not just the adoption of technologies like solar, which allow us to generate clean electrons on our rooftops, but the adoption of electric vehicles, which actually help us step away from our, our dependency on, on petroleum, on fossil fuels for, for everyday transportation or the ability for us to store those electrons locally with home batteries, and then displace loads in our homes with all electric alternatives of natural gas appliances. So if you think about it every day, when, when we cook, when, when we when we hit our water, when we hit our our living environment, we're actually consuming a significant amount of, of fossil fuels.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:10:00):
So you combine what we consume in an average American home with how much you drive that actually represents about 42% of all carbon emissions that, that we see here in the United States. But now that there are technologies like solar, like energy storage and like electric vehicles that are accelerating quite rapidly from an R and D standpoint, we, and from an adoption standpoint, we've seen that the cost has come down and that's, that's not driving a very unique problem that homes are not currently designed to be able to accept the vast or those significant pace at which these technologies technologies are being deployed in home. And very simply put it's a problem of the traditional electrical panel was not designed for a home that had a 10 kilowatt or a 20 kilowatt charging system for your car. It wasn't designed to have a 15 kilowatt hour or a 20 kilowatt hour battery in your home, not to mention, of course, another 10 kilowatt R solar system on a roof, the largest appliance that was construed of a decade or couple of decades ago, excuse me, was an air conditioning system, right?
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:11:02):
There was roughly a five kilowatt air conditioning system. So often we found that the whole electrical panel is, is something that, that needed to be upgraded or replaced. And that, that became essentially the, the hypothesis that we've been proving out of the last few years is if you have to change your home electrical panel, why not make it a more capable, why not make it a smarter electrical panel that provides you both the visibility and the control required than fully decarbonize, or the next slide here. And this is sort of illustrated in this very simple line diagram. The, the electrical panel is a very unique place in a home and on the grid, right? It's not just the device that sits between the energy coming from your utility and all the energy being distributed within your home. It's also the device that serves as the connection between renewable generation like solar and all of your emerging load, psych electric charge.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:11:58):
It's also the device that connects all AC device AC appliances, like your refrigerators, your, your air conditioning systems, your washer dryers, but also increasingly DC devices. Like again, your solar system and your DC fast chargers in your home. And it's also uniquely positioned to be a device that can be you know, owned or co-owned by utility, but also provide value to the homeowner. It sits that physical interface between the home and the external grid. So for a lot of reasons, this, this seems like to us, this seemed like the most obvious device that was ripe for disruption. And over the last three and a half years, we've been we've been reinventing the panel to be a whole lot more than just a safety device or a, a fault protection device. So let me tell you about what, what our panel can do today.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:12:44):
Dennis, if you go to the next slide. Alright. So what does it mean to reinvent the electrical panel? So those of you that are in, obviously in the construction space and build homes are, are very aware of the fact that this is a necessary part of your, your design states. It's a very necessary part of your electrical build out. The panel receives a you know, between 104 hundred AMS of power coming in from the utility as its main feed. And then it has a bus bar that then distributes the power down chain to all the different circuits in your home, be your lighting circuits, your receptacles in your home and all of your large appliances. Traditionally, this has just been a a passive analog device with circuit breakers that can trip in the event that there is a fault event, like when there's over current being drawn or a ground for, or an art fault, that's detected.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:13:32):
What we've successfully done is we have embedded into this panel, a, the ability for us to very granularly measure every single circuit, but also to control or turn off every single circuit without having to trip your breaker. What this allows us to do is not only disconnect circuits when it's not safe to operate, but also give customers a tremendous amount of flex flexibility in terms of what circuits in their homes are powered when you're in an outage, for example, which we're seeing increasingly often now, what we've also successfully done is embedded this, this panel with what we're calling a grid disconnect. So instead of having to get a whole lot of additional equipment, to be able to transfer power from the grid to your onsite, local power, we've built into it. An automatic grid disconnect that senses when your external grid is either about to fail or about to when you burnout and then switches gracefully to local power that you might have in the form of solar or storage as the case may be.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:14:31):
In addition to that, we believe that there's an incredible opportunity for us to make this sort of central gateway for all forms of data and energy going in and out of your home. So we we've placed in it a very capable high end compute that can communicate over wireless over cellular. So no matter what the stage of power is, no matter what the state of your, you know, internet service provider is, you're able to always stay connected to your home. You're able to always stay connected to the appliances in your home, through our product. I think we have a short video that describes what you can do with it through an app. One of the incredibly important things to do when building new technology and I learned this firsthand building products at Tesla is to make them sexy. And I think our hardware is an incredible improvement or, or was not a very tall, tall bar to cross with a traditional electric panel, which is just a gray sheet metal box, but we've also spent a tremendous amount of effort to ensure that the, the, the technology, the software that the customer engages with is really, really powerful.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:15:31):
So for us, we have tried to stay away from inundating customers with charts and graphs, but instead focus on the things that matter most. So giving them real time visibility and real time controls or what's happening within their home, but also start to engage them in ways that energy management systems traditionally have failed to do, which is give them information that can help them improve their quality of life. For example, what you might have captured in the, in the glimpse that you saw in, in the video here is we're now try now starting to identify anomalies in behaviors of devices in your home. So if your refrigerator has a compressor, that's about to fail, or if your air conditioning system is, has an imbalance in voltage between line one and line two, these are things that we can push as a notification to the homeowner, but it can also be served up as a notification to service providers be it the, you know, the, the, the home builder, or be it other service providers that the homeowner wants to share that information with.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:16:23):
One other feature that you probably saw over here, which is perhaps the most compelling feature for our product set available in the market today is if you have a storage system, this is the only product in the market that allows you to dynamically reconfigure what subset of your home is power during that outage event. And this is something, unfortunately, I've endured firsthand about three times this past year, when, when in Northern California, we had rolling outages sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days at a time where it gives me span, gives me the ability to not just see exactly how much power I have available or how much energy I have available and how many hours and minutes I have available for my battery backup, but also switch to circuits that are important for me to keep on at that point in time, as opposed to every other solution out there today, which gives you only a static, certain number of circuits that can be backed up during an, out, during an outage.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:17:17):
Thanks Greg, for feeling questions, as I'm speaking here, I'm obviously happy to come back to some of these questions towards the end as well. So we're really excited about this product that we've had in the market now for for a year and a half or so. We've, we're actually already in our second generation product. And we're, we're now actively scaling up deployments to a large number of partners, mainly partners that have been deploying solar and storage, but that, that solve for the retrofit market. But one of the reasons why this housing Alliance call is exciting for me and for span is we're looking to engage with partners is we scale up beyond traditional energy providers to now home builders and service providers as well. If you go to the next slide so that's the product that we've, that we've had.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:17:59):
This is the video. Again, if you go to the next slide you done this, the panel is the product that we've had in the marketplace for some time. We, we enable a lot of capabil functionality, both through the hardware and the software and by design. This is a piece of technology that keeps improving over time. So it's designed to receive over the air software updates. It's designed to understand your home better over time, and it gives you complete transparency and control in real time. But thinking about products going beyond the panel, if you go to the next slide, Dennis we are working on, or we just recently announced a home EV charger. And as you can probably tell, like we, we are more than just an electric panel company, we are a company that's focused on enabling homes to be fully electric.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:18:42):
And imperatively and just looking at the market data, you can, you can see that one of the first steps that most people take towards decarbonizing is switching from a, a petroleum or a diesel car to an electric car. And that's why we built a device that can pair incredibly well with our panel. That's a level two charger, and this is we announced this late last year, and we're gonna be bringing this to market here in just a few months. And this we think is an incredibly important piece of technology for every single home. Most customers that want to adopt an electric car are often stymied by the fact by the cost and the limitations of what their home can offer in terms of a charging infrastructure for the electric cars. So it's not just about having the vehicle. It's also knowing that 80% of these electric car owners are going to charge their cars at home.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:19:30):
We, we designed a product that again, far surpasses what's out there in terms of home charging. And we think this will provide the best charging experience for the customer at home. And this is attained by doing two things, one because of the amount of control we have both in the panel and in our charger, we can ensure that either retrofit homes or new built homes do not require an upsizing of the service. So you don't have to go from 200 amps to 400 amps just to be able to move to the next you know, margin and electric appliance. And second, because of the fact that we can control every single appliance to circuit within the panel, we can allow you to charge in a much smarter way. So depending on how much, how fast you want to charge, we could either turn off or turn down certain appliances in your home, and we can apply the same degree of control to the rate of charge through our charge as well.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:20:21):
So we think this will be a fundamental unlock for a lot of customers that, that want to move towards a, a more, a carbon neutral lifestyle. And we're really excited about these two products, but a whole host of other products coming down the pipe. And we're looking to partner with with if, look at the next slide we, we've got a few hundred partners that are already deploying our product today, and these are these are channel partners that can that can buy our, buy our hardware and bundle it to their customers, either as a finance solution or as part of a new bill or as part of a solar installation, or in some cases as part of you know, a heat pump installation. And we're looking to expand this network as we, as we try to decarbonize and electrify more homes. I think I'm pretty much a time here. Thanks so much for your time. I'm obviously happy to answer questions that you guys have either now or towards the end of the rest of the talk.
Greg Smithies (00:21:11):
Yeah, I think there a bunch of questions that folks have I I've ran out of all of the information I have as not being the CEO of the company. So maybe you can go in there and answer some of the more technical questions. We'll also come back, come back to verbal questions towards the end. Okay. Handing off to Michael for dandelion.
Michael Sachse (00:21:33):
Great. Well thanks for having me guys and excited to share more about dandelion. If you could go to the next slide, please. So dandelion was born inside Google X and really what the problem we're focused on solving is finding a source of sustainable heat for homes. When you look at how we heat our homes, it's primarily by burning something. We burn a lot of natural gas to heat our homes in the Northeast where I am we burn a lot of fuel oil and propane, remarkably, even wood. And then when you look at electricity there the electric options have some limitations. So you know, electric resistance heating is really inefficient and air source heat pumps, which we're huge fans of but they, they cause potentially grid challenges. We're not built for a grid that is all powered by air source, heat pumps.
Michael Sachse (00:22:34):
And they also struggle with extreme temperatures. So if you go to the next slide, please you know, we've so, and we see this as something where it's not just us, but it is large institutional players who are looking at this dynamic and changing their strategies. So, you know, for the folks on this call who are focused on, you know, building homes, as I suspect, many of you are, you know, one thing I think you should have a strategy for is what do you do when the grid doesn't extend when the natural gas grid is not gonna extend to a new development. And we are seeing that already in parts of the Northeast, the chairman of ConEd is that, you know, we're not gonna be investing further in these types of resources. And there's a good reason for that. The reason is that, you know, utilities and the regulators expect natural gas resources to earn a rate of return for 80 to a hundred years.
Michael Sachse (00:23:32):
And I think very few of us believe that we are likely to be using natural gas maybe to hundred years. So we need to find a new direction. Next slide please. And in particular for dandelion, that need is most focused within the Northeast. So it's really staggering just when you look at how many homes continue to PA or continue or heating their, you know, themselves today with fuel oil or propane, there are 3.1 million homes just in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. And if you look at a county by county map, it really runs right along the Ella corridor. These are generally in suburbs of large cities where there were huge numbers of homes built in the fifties, sixties, seventies and you know, they're burning a fuel. That's very expensive, that's inconvenient for them. I can tell you a lot of people in the Northeast ran out of fuel oil this weekend.
Michael Sachse (00:24:37):
It was quite cold and it's been hard to get deliveries out. And then we're seeing as part of that, a broader expansion into where utilities are reluctant to extend natural gas. So that's the market that dandelion is focused on. And if you could go to the next slide and so really we're the technology we're focused on is one that's been around for some time but has never really been brought brought to scale and that's geothermal or ground source heat pumps. So ground source heat pumps are known to be the most efficient way to heat and cool homes. But the big challenge has really been the upfront cost. They simply you know, cost more to install, and then you see the benefits over the lifetime of the home. So we have, we have made this much simpler for homeowners and you know, our product approach really focuses on three things.
Michael Sachse (00:25:37):
If you could go to the next slide. So first is, you know, one of the real drivers of cost is is that most ground loop systems for geothermal are oversized. The there's good reason for that because the, so a geothermal system really has two components. There's the ground loop, which is the heat exchanger buried in the ground. And then there's the heat pump, which is inside the home for the ground loop. You most installers just simply don't know what the properties of the soil are that they're digging into. And so they use a rule of thumb, they plan for the worst case scenario, and that leads to a higher cost we're. We have software that is proprietary to us that is used by most commercial geothermal installers and really it provides the accuracy of a soil sample without doing the work.
Michael Sachse (00:26:33):
And that allows us to be the low cost provider every time. And really our goal is then to compete with the, you know, smaller companies that are out there doing this, but just bend the cost of this product overall down to a point where we are competing consistently with natural gas and data is a big part of that. Next slide, please. Another big part of that is simply the size of the equipment. So most geothermal systems are installed using wheeled water, well rigs, they weigh 50,000 pounds. They have a 43 foot turning radius, and they simply cannot access most homes. You need a, quite a large home or a home that has a fortuitously situated driveway in order to allow a wheeled rig onto your property. We have been bringing much smaller equipment. This is equipment that's not proprietary to us but it is a reflection of our business model.
Michael Sachse (00:27:32):
And really what that allows us to do is get into much more typically size suburban homes. And you know, this is something where this is the approach that has been you know, used for a decade in Sweden and other parts of nor in other Nordic countries. We are constantly pushing the drilling industry to adopt this type of equipment and we will send them jobs all day long. But it's a really critical component because smaller equipment gets into smaller yards and half the jobs we sell require smaller equipment. If you go to the next slide, please. And then the last part is really around the heat pump itself. And you know, traditionally ground source, heat pumps, really all heat pumps have been focused on air conditioning first they're designed to be installed in new homes and you have very large companies for whom this is a fairly small part of the market.
Michael Sachse (00:28:33):
We are in the process of developing a proprietary heat pump built from the ground up. It's designed to be a heater. First, it's designed to look to the home like an oil furnace. So an oil furnace distributes air at 165 degrees air source or heat pumps typically distribute air at 110 degrees. Our heat pump will distribute air at 125 degrees with 200 CFM. And that's gonna make it work in a number of homes where they currently don't have the duct work to, to fit with fit with a heat pump. And so that will be coming to market very soon. Next slide, please. I, our approach with customers is that, you know, this is as much as I'm motivated and many others are motivated by you know, decreasing our footprint and having a positive impact for most customers.
Michael Sachse (00:29:33):
This is a dollars and cents issue. It is a question of, you know, how, how long is the payback gonna be? And how does it work for the economics of my family? And really there are two parts that are critical here. You know, first if you're financing, you save money on day one second. If you're paying with cash, it's a seven year payback. And increasingly there's evidence showing that this is resulting in higher home values. And I'll say that for those in the new construction space you know, we're, we are developing a lease model that will allow us to own the ground loops. That means that the cost is comparable to, to a traditional H V a C system. And we will just act as the utility for the homeowner. And that's something that we're excited to be able to do going forward. Next slide, please.
Michael Sachse (00:30:30):
Finally, like, you know, you know, we see this as something where it's got to be it's gotta be customer friendly and you know, these are difficult projects to install. It's, you know, it's easy for customers to have a negative experience. We're very focused on that and we see tremendous customer satisfaction scores as a result. And you know, really like our, and the number one thing actually that we hear is that customers are surprised by how much more comfortable their home feels with ground source heating. It's hard for us to quantify exactly what is the source of that. But we believe that it's a, a reflection of the fact that instead of having, you know, a furnace cycling on and off all day long and having very hot air, and then it cooling off with lower humidity levels that the more constant temperature of a heat pump is is more, more comfortable to live in. Next slide. I think this is my last one. Yeah. And that's it. So thank you very much. Happy to take any questions sorry. I couldn't offer the dance music that arch did, but but looking forward to talking with you all over in the next hour.
Greg Smithies (00:31:46):
Yep. Thanks, Michael. And, and folks just a reminder, you can, you can throw your questions either into the chat or into the, the Q and a, if we can't answer them in, in the chat by text, we will be going through them towards the end of this call verbally. And then last, but certainly not leastMehrdad fromOrbital systems,over to you.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:32:08):
Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here. I have tested negative each day, the last three days, but I think I have the seasonal, you know, flu instead. So my sound is a little bit worn off. Wait, let me see. Can you flip the page please? So I founded orbital back in 2012. At the time I was based out of Johnson space center in Houston and Texas looking at designing ways, which we could sustain an earthly living standard when we colonize Mars. So a little bit background around that is that we don't typically think about the facts that most astronauts are spending time wearing a diaper and eating food through a straw. And, you know, it's, it's doable if you're a professional, you know, up in, you know, couple of weeks, but if you're gonna sustain a complete life on Mars or even just this journey of a couple of years, you would wanna have a bit nicer, more relatable lifestyle.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:33:13):
So I was spending my time looking at how we could enable such thing. And one of the methodologies let's say when at NASA was to let's look at how we solve these issues on earth, and let's not repeat the mistakes basically. And in terms of water, which is basically what we are doing, we're working with, if you flip the page, please. Perfect. So I think in order to understand the massive opportunity around demand side water, the easiest way is to look at the journey we've walked in terms of the energy sector. We're just a couple of decades ago. All of the money spent the engineering you know, power spent everything in terms of energy was focused on the supply side. If you were, you know, didn't matter if you were a bus, you, you were a businessman or an engineer, basically you were focused was how to, how you could increase supply a couple of decades ago.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:34:24):
We realized that it's not just enough to pump up more oil and gas. We actually need to be more efficient about how we use the energy. Similarly, if you look at the journey we've walked in terms of the water industry we haven't really done anything on the demand side yet the water towers are basically the same kind of principle as the aqu that are zero thousand years old. And we kind of just pass this book to you know, taxpayer funded utilities. And this is where comes in. We are essentially driving a paradigm shift in what we call the demand side of water. If you please flip the PLA page, our first product is the world's first circular shower, meaning that it loops the water in real time. And by looping the water in real time, we can save more than 9% of the water, 80% of the energy used.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:35:25):
But most importantly, at the same time, we can increase the user experience and the user experience in, you know, when using water in our homes can typically typically be defined in three parameters. Number one, you wanna have clean water in that sense, our water is cleaner than regular tap water. The second one is flow rate where our flow can be double. What is mandated, you know, legally allowed in the state of California, for example, where you have quite crappy, you know, flow rates due to all kinds of legislation. And the third one is temperature stability, where it's much more precise than regular showers because it's digitally monitored and digital controlled. Please flip the plate page you know, comparing this kind of technology to other similar investments into the home. I, you know, you'll see that the ROI is quite different. Obviously there are a bunch of financing solutions and government incentive models that could come with other kind of technologies.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:36:27):
But I think what this slide illustrates the most is that what has, what currently has faster or wise one example would be LEDs are not really considered technology anymore. They're just considered you know like it is like they're just taking for granted. And I think also what this slide shows is that we've kind of picked the low hanging fruit in the energy side. And now we're on this long track of trying to really you know, climb up the tree while in terms of the water. We're still flushing our toilet to drinking water. We're still flushing, you know, 50 gallons for a, you know, 20 minute hour. So way easier to dig on those, on those lands. Next slide please. So we launched our first commercial product back in 2018. We've seen a pretty significant growth driven mainly by fundamentals, like saving water, meaning, you know, saving on your utility bill.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:37:35):
If you're a real estate owner, you can increase your net operating income, which obviously is a benefit of your value, your a portfolio based on your NOI and in places where you can't really trust the source of the water. You know, this will guarantee that there's a clean water all the time. And the main issue we get, you know, the best feedback on is really the user experience, similar to what I, you know, just heard that even though we are rational, we, we wanna believe that we are rational human beings. It is most of the time, the emotional response that is you know that is that we're getting the most feedback on. Next slide please. Yeah, so we're launching our second product this year. So what we are seeing is essentially doing what I did for NASA basically tying the whole you know, demand side of water.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:38:39):
So we drastically reduced the personal water use on a daily basis. And again while lowering resource resources use always making sure we enhance the user experience, because as soon as you compromise on the user experience, you're gonna miss out the mass market. And there are tons of solutions out there where you are asking people to be more green or more, you know, save more resources, but at the cost of compromise and then yeah. They simply haven't really been so attractive in the market. Next slide please. Yeah. Oh, that was the last one. Thank you. Happy to take questions.
Greg Smithies (00:39:34):
Fantastic. No, no, thanks very much to, to Moda and and Michael and arch this was great. So encourage everybody to, to throw any questions you have into the, into the Q and a, or the chat. But whilst you're waiting for that to happen, I am just gonna do a little bit of a lightning round here around questions to everybody. I've I've noticed a, a bunch of questions that are basically sort of the, the standards on, you know, how much and how many of these things can you make and sort of where are you and go to market. So let's just do a, do a first question in, in the order you guys presented in. So, so arch Michael, and then Medad on commercialization, you know, do you have product in market? Where are you selling? Are you supply constraints? Just yeah, those sorts of items.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:40:19):
Yeah, we, we are in market with our second generation panel. The EV charger will be in market in Q2 this year. We we've already deployed a large number of, of panels and we are actually not supply constrain cuz we anticipated this year would be a growth year for us. And we have we, I think we positioned ourselves reasonably well to, to supply, you know, 10,000 to 20,000 systems at least this, this upcoming year, this year 2022. In terms of I think somebody had asked about the price, our, our panel retails for $3,500. But needless to say, when we work a channel partners, we have a, a channel partner price or a wholesale price. If it's a distributor and our EV charger is set to detail for $500 as an accessory to the panel. Happy to talk more about that as well.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:41:06):
When we think about you know, new home bills and especially when we're talking about a large number of new homes being built simultaneously in terms of markets been available in, we are actually available across the us right now, we've already installed systems in over 30 states here in the us, including Puerto Rico. And we are either able to offer it just to the hardware solution or in some cases we're able to partner with electricians where we have a network of growing network of electrical contractors that can do the installation on on your behalf if you like.
Greg Smithies (00:41:38):
Thanks. Great. Thanks, Michael.
Michael Sachse (00:41:41):
Yeah. so, you know, we are we are focused in the, in the Northeast New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts at present. We are seeing tremendous demand. And so we do have a, a few supply constraints like our, you know, our year in many ways is largely booked from a revenue standpoint, not not unlike what Murad was was indicating. So like, you know, our challenge is to, is to deliver on that revenue. And so we are extraordinarily focused on, on scaling that. And then you know, I would say that the other thing that we are very focused on you know, is really like expanding our relationships. So like we do, so we have products in market. The heat pump I described as not yet in market, that's something where we have prototyped it con like, like tested out the performance of it and are now working with a contract manufacturer to bring that one to market. And you know, I'd say the other, the other thing is our capacity is greater on the new construction side, where there are economies of scale that come into play. And so yeah, we are certainly interested in those conversations.
Greg Smithies (00:43:00):
Great. Thanks. And me
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:43:03):
What was the question, Greg?
Greg Smithies (00:43:05):
<Laugh> yeah. Sorry. It's been awhile. Where are you in terms of capacity? Are you selling product right now? And where are you selling?
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:43:15):
Yeah, yeah. So we've been selling the last couple of years. We're mainly selling in Northern Europe. The pandemic made us kind of roll back and focus on our core markets. Currently in Sweden, as you know is an American company, but engineering and HQ is in Sweden. I would say our main constraint of bottleneck would in general be installers installers in new regions. Mainly because yeah, I mean, I don't see at least for the next couple of years production be a constraint. I don't see, you know, we have more demand that we can then we can find third party installers. That would be the best way to phrase it. And it's not that it's a hard product to install, but one needs to take, you know, taking into consideration that every project is a bigger project than just installing our tech.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:44:14):
Typically it's either a full refurb of a bathroom or it's a new building in general. And because we are not running around installing ourselves there, there are investments into each region we wanna be active in before we can get the ecosystem up in, you know, running by itself. So installation and, and similar to what I heard art say is like our natural channel partner would RA would be someone like a solar panel installer or someone that is installing battery packs rather than the classic retailer let's say that is just warehousing products and, you know, selling eyesight shelves or, you know, back at the store shelves. So and those I would say are pretty regional, you don't find installer firms that are like nationwide or across a, you know, complete continent. You, you typically find them, you know, dominant, but only within a small city, you know, either a state or a city or part of a state. So yeah.
Greg Smithies (00:45:24):
Yep. Great. and then I'm gonna take this one in, in reverse. But what do you think the real impact of your, of your product can be over the next five to, to 10 years sort of macro scale, but then also on a micro scale on a, on a per, you know, home or a per development project sort of sort of basis and I'm, I'm mode out. I'm gonna start with you because you are the one who's kind of not energy here. Right. And, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about water, but, you know, I'm, I'm sitting here on on the west coast of America, the town just north of me Mendocino this summer, the whole town ran out of water. They were trucking water in. Right. So yeah, I think may, maybe let's start with the water thing because not a lot of people think about this.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:46:08):
Sure. So, I mean, when it comes to water, it's you know, like obviously I'm biased, but I <laugh>, but I, I can tell you that this is pretty revolutionary in terms of the sheer amounts, because two thirds of the water is going to agriculture and that's kind of fine because it's going back into the groundwater and coming back up with the rain, or, you know, whatnot about 20% goes into what is called, you know, it's, it's, it's labeled as industry, but that can be anything from, you know, paper plans to genes manufacturing in Bangladesh to farm industry. It's really, really broad, about 10% goes into what is called the home. And almost half of that is the shower. And then another, you know, 25% is toilet and laundry, et cetera. But that's what I'm just telling you about the averages in terms of, you know, human society.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:47:03):
But if you, if you zoom in to a city where there's not that much agriculture going on, you know, within the city center, you can imagine how much, and, and, and you don't have any paper plants, or, you know, genes, plants within a city. You suddenly are looking at 80, 90% of that. City's water being used in the homes. And by radically being able to make that water used more efficient, it alleviates the overall stress on the infrastructure. And that's basically where I'm going at. Like, because the last couple of hundred years, we've just taken for granted that every person in us is gonna use about a hundred gallons a year, a day. And then as urbanization has increased we've just increased the size of the plants of the utilities treatment centers and, you know, increased tax, increased the water tariffs. And, you know, didn't, haven't thought more about it, but like, what this will change is that instead of just investing more into the supply, we, you know, we can unlock more by making the demand side more efficient. And that's basically where we are going. And I, I view, view this as pretty straightforward and a win-win solution, but the reason why it hasn't been done before is that it's not a a problem of, you know, like personal fault. It's more of a, you know, system error, design flaw that was done, you know, a couple hundred years ago. And we simply haven't, you know, addressed it since, because it's been, you know, run by other people paid by other people, et cetera.
Greg Smithies (00:48:44):
Yep. Yeah. That's fascinating. Huge, huge potential impact. Yeah. And, and yeah, I also didn't mention, I live on a farm with a well, and my well was dry all of the summer. So I've been tracking water in I'm, I'm kind of living on the front end of this. It's like, if it's just not fire, I've run out of water. And those two things don't go well together. Okay, Michael over to you sort of overall macro impact that you think your, your product can drive and then maybe on a more microscale on a sort of per house basis.
Michael Sachse (00:49:11):
Well, first of all, it sounds like Greg also happens to live in a beautiful place. So like
Greg Smithies (00:49:17):
Yes <laugh>.
Michael Sachse (00:49:19):
But so look like here's how I think about this. Like, there's a lot of discussion appropriate discussion about electrify everything because, and the reason to do that is because, you know, our electric, like the real thought there is we electrify everything. Then we make the electric grid a lot more efficient. And then that becomes the way we get to a sustainable position from a climate standpoint. And if you look at you know, some of the research, like some of the stuff SA Griffith has put together, one of the core assumptions in there is that heat pumps are gonna double in their efficiency. How, how are they gonna do that? That's not an easy thing. And so, like we talked I won't name names, but you know, the senior vice president for planning at a large Midwestern utility electric utility, mind you who you know, was like, look, electrifying, everything is great.
Michael Sachse (00:50:19):
But if we electrify everything with, you know, air source or comparable technologies, I need five times the peak capacity of what I have now. Like, that's just not gonna happen. They're not gonna be able to build five times that five times capacity. So like the, so we really have to look at this in my view from the efficiency standpoint in conjunction with the electrification standpoint. And ultimately, you know, geothermal is an efficient technology because it's exchanging heat with the ground. So we see it as, you know, if we really want to electrify everything and we're really serious about it, then there's, you know, we really don't see another option. Geothermal uses 20% as much energy to heat and 70% as much energy to cool. That's a big impact. If you wanna think about it from a more micro standpoint, there's was frankly a very real life test case.
Michael Sachse (00:51:20):
So you know, last winter Texas froze and, you know, millions of people lost power. There's a geothermal community down there called whisper valley, which some of you may have heard of, or been involved with whisper valley didn't lose power. That's not because they're you know, they were on some separate independent grid but among other things, they that's a geothermal community. And when the system operators look at what's going on, they see, okay, I can get 500 homes over here for a unit of energy, or I can get a hundred homes over there. I'm gonna choose the 500 over the hundred every time. And so like, to me, that's how we, you know, that's the calculus that I think everyone is gonna end up doing, unfortunately. And then, you know, for builders you know, it really is just a question of lining up the cost because if you can get it so that the customer is paying in line with, when they're seeing the benefits, it's a no brainer because you know, you've set up a system that is more stable that's more stable and costs a lot less to operate.
Michael Sachse (00:52:28):
So that, that's our perspective.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:52:33):
Yep. Perfect. I love you. Arch, do you refresh on the question? No, I think I'm, I think I remember I'll, I'll pontificate in the general sort of direction that Michael and have been doing. So look, I think the, the, the, the general consensus is that it, this is an infrastructure problem. And I think rethinking aging infrastructure is a fairly complex problem to, to overcome easily, right? Much like the water supply system hasn't been rethought of in, in generations. Now, the electrical supply system also hasn't, and the way we rethink it, like Michael suggested, or Michael indicated is you go talk to an electric utility. They're gonna say, hang on a second, I'm going to beef up my supply to think about the worst case scenario. That's gonna cost me five times as much money as I've already poured into and otherwise failing infrastructure. Right?
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:53:19):
So I think the, the crux of it is we have very unique opportunity, not just as technology companies, but as suppliers of homes, right? To address the opportunity directly where the demand is. So homeowners are going to want a few fundamental things. They're going to not want their convenience to be impacted in any way. They're going to want to continue to adopt technologies that they think are neat and cool and sexy. These are going to be electric cars and heat pumps, and you know, better shower systems, right? And those things cannot be gated by traditional infrastructure limitations. So the only way to address that is I think for home home builders, like you guys, to sort of lean into it and say, we're going to give the customers the most flexibility. And if you give them that flexibility and choice cost no longer becomes a barrier, especially when you think about a new bill where you're spending, you know, where we live a couple of million dollars per home, or even several hundreds of thousands of dollars for middle income households.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:54:15):
It's, it's no longer a factor when you're saying we're gonna put in the smartest piece of technology. Like let's say a span panel in your home at the outset, because when you think about the lifespan of a home, like a 30 year lifespan, a few thousand dollars is marginal cost, or in fact it ends up paying back for itself very easily because you no longer now have to update your entire service just to get that electric car charger or heat pump installed in your home, right. Or that you avoided, you know, even two outages in a five year span. And that is, has protected your family in, in a critical event. Right. So I think that's how we approach it. When you, when you look at it from that point of view, there's single family homes alone in the us. There's about 72 million single family homes.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:54:54):
And if we, if we, and if you think about multi-family now you're talking about north of a hundred million homes that can be in in fact should be electrified and electrification is not a one or zero value proposition. It's not like you're either fully electric or you're not, these are going to happen through different little journeys. And that's really what span is set out to do. And we expect to be in a couple of million homes in the next, or the course of this decade. And that's what I'm sure our friends here at Dan line in orbital are setting out to do as well.
Greg Smithies (00:55:22):
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thanks arch. And actually you alluded to something yeah. That, that I think maybe we haven't touched on, which is multi-family versus single family. I think a lot of the, the conversation to date has been just about single family or, or the examples I been single family, but I know the, just given the audience here, we do have a significant number of of multi-family folks on the line as well. So if we could also just do a quick run through and you could give the, your applicability to multi-family versus versus single family, and that might have starting with you.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:55:52):
Sure. I mean, majority of our clients or, or, or the multi-family homes either owners or builders because, and, and, and the reason why is simply because everything, all the benefits also scales <laugh> with we, you know, as the building gets larger. So for example, the easiest, most straightforward example I can give you is that if you're building a, you know, your own or, you know, your own Villa, and you, you have a, you know, a hundred gallon boiler, if you're putting in an orbital, you know, systems product, you can decrease the size of that boiler, you know, 10 times, because there is no other single product within the home that is in need of such amounts of hot water. The same applies. If you're building a, you know, hundred, you know, a unit multi-family home, you can decrease the whole size of the hot water system within that.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (00:56:54):
And if you are renting it out and you are valuing your real estate based on the net operating income, which is what athletes, what they're doing here in Europe the savings, you know, you have the ROI or, you know, payback time, you know, that's one thing that could be slightly longer in terms of a multi-family home, because not everybody's taking a shower, you know, every day. But on the other hand the multiple you're getting on your NOI when you're pricing your real estate, it's you know, 20 times, 30 times. And that that's, so that's one of the reasons why it's been so popular within the larger multifamily home builders. Yeah.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:57:38):
Yep. Great. Michael.
Michael Sachse (00:57:39):
Yeah. so, you know, ground source heat pumps can, you know, can be used in multifamily. And you know, that right now is not our sweet spot, just to be perfectly Frank about it. You know, we you know, our, our, our success is gonna be when we're doing, you know, a few thousand maybe a 10,000 single family homes a year, but it's, it's a hundred percent applicable. And one of the things we will be considering is whether, you know, if multi-family installers want to use our heat pump in time, then of course we'll be open to that. I have to say also, I want I want span and orbital for my house. It's I love hearing about this stuffs. So
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:58:25):
Happy to set you up with one, my, yeah, the question about multifamily, Greg we, you know, like, like many earlier stage companies, we're, we're starting with the, we started with a relatively premium version of the product targeted at a market segment that, that tends to be price and sensitive. We are now ready. We're getting to that stage of company now where we already just start partnering with multi-family builders to talk about how we, we we deploy our gen three next generation product that we're set up set to launch early next year, which from a project development standpoint might line up well with some of the projects you guys are working on. It'll be a smaller version of the panel, therefore cheaper because most apartment apartments don't require 32 seconds. You're you're fairly well serviced by a 16 or 20, a 20 breaker panel circuit.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (00:59:12):
And what's really need is we're actually designing these to also be interoperable. So it'll be a network. If you have a hundred departments with hundred span, hundred span panels in them, they all communicated one another. And and has that added benefit of lowering your service capacity? Again, very analogous to what Meda talked about, where you can lower the size of the, the large, large scale heating system you have for the water water in the building. So we'll have a product for this early next year. We're happy to start talking about partnerships now so that we can be lined up to deploy these at scale when, when projects come online.
Greg Smithies (00:59:46):
Yep. Great stuff. And okay. Let's, let's maybe do one, one wrap question before we before we lose everybody. And this would, would just be kind of a arch, you started talking about this, but next sort of five, 10 years, what do you think the, the, your product evolution looks like? What are the products do you have on the sort of more distant roadmap? And yeah. What, what can we, we look out for in the future from you? And we'll just go starting with arch here.
Arch Padmanabhan Rao (01:00:16):
Yeah. I don't wanna disclose too much of our roadmap, but I think at a high level, we, we touched on the fact that we're gonna need products that, that can, that can go into every type of home. It's not just single family homes, but multi-family homes as well. There's, there's a similar sort of need for electric vehicle charging or having to upgrade service requirements and commercial, or at least small commercial FIEs. So you can at least think about verticals, market verticals that will go into with panel and panel related products. We intend to also have a newer versions of home home, EV charging somebody in the chat asked about bidirectionality. I think the ability to be able to not necessarily power the grid from your vehicle, but at the very least power, some portion of your home from a vehicle will be an attractive feature. And we, we fully intend to support that initially with a small subset of OEMs with overtime to be agnostic of the vehicle itself. And then I think we, we see a continued proliferation of large DC appliances in your home, right. Being paid solar generation home batteries, EB charging, and then, and then some, and will enable that both through hardware, innovation, but also software integration with existing existing technology leaders be folks like dandelion or other home appliance and control solutions, like, you know, Google, Amazon, et cetera.
Greg Smithies (01:01:30):
Great. Michael.
Michael Sachse (01:01:31):
Yeah. I'm happy to jump in. You know, we, we think about it really two components. So the first is the hardware and we're gonna be looking at improving the grounded exchange. So the anything we can do to make that you know, not less drilling dependent is going to just expand the potential of the market for us. And so that's something we're very, we're doing a lot of investigation around and then we will be involving, sorry, evolving the heat pump you know, going to a split system moving components outside so that there can be easier easier and easier installation. That's the way we're looking at it on the hardware side. And then, you know, the other part that I think is important that I've, I've touched on a few things times is just like, we really believe financing is critical to how everything like this operates. You know, I switched, I switched cell phone carriers recently cuz my daughter lost her phone and we needed a new one. And at no point was I ever like I'm gonna pay Verizon $17,000 over the next seven years. It was always like, I'm gonna pay them 160 a month. And like that's how people are gonna think about these in their home as well. And so that, so, you know, continuing to be creative and thoughtful on the financing side is gonna be a continued focus.
Greg Smithies (01:02:55):
Yep, absolutely. And take, take us home here.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (01:03:00):
Sure. Within five years we'll be like span, but for water, <laugh> no drugs aside. No, essentially. So we, we are launching what, what we are doing is the orbital core has, has the capabilities of purifying water to you know, cleaner than tap water. It has the abilities to in real time analyze water quality 20 times per second and modifying the temperature the flow rate. And essentially we, we are launching first we're launching applications. So, you know, we have the orbital shower. Now we're gonna launch orbital, tap the orbital laundry, but essentially going forward five years or even know five to 10 years, it will be the again, it's not, it's not, you know, that far off what you know, span is it's gonna basically be the demand side management of water. So instead of having drinking water now in the toilet, you're gonna have clean enough water to flush the toilet.
Mehrdad Mahdjoubi (01:04:05):
Instead of having drinking water, when you're washing your clothes, you know, you don't need drinking water to wash your clothes. You need clean enough water to get your clothes, you know, clean. So basically partitioning the water for the home for each you know, purpose of use. So, and, and so what that makes it possible. So the benefits is that you're gonna have a better experience and less resources used and, and you can't get there with an app, you know, like there are tons of apps that are, you know, gonna guide you or whatever nudge you, but like you actually need to be in the home. You need to purify the water, you need to pump the water, manage the, you know, thermodynamics and, you know, with the first product we've already put in all of the tools. And now it just for us come up with modules, basically valves and electronic boards that are connected. That's where I see orbital.
Greg Smithies (01:05:00):
Yeah. That's that's great. Well with that, that is a a wrap. So first off, thank you to all of our panelists especially for Moda doing this so late over in Europe but very insightful comments and some truly exciting products. And Dennis, back to you.
Dennis Steigerwalt (01:05:19):
Yeah, no, thank you, everyone. This was this was fantastic. Really appreciate you taking the time. You did a great job of kind of keeping track of all that conversation that was happening in the chat box. So appreciate you interacting there. One of the things we will do here in the near future is we we'll circulate if it's okay with everybody contact information as, as introductions come through us and, and Greg not to put you on the spot, but just to kind of wrap up, we were able to, to fire off to everybody else, but I'd love to hear if you have kind of a, a concise key takeaway or an action, let's say a call to action for the industry here in our network. As, as they walk away with, after meeting these three entrepreneurs, getting it connected yourself, you know, what's kind of a, a call to action we can share with our network.
Greg Smithies (01:05:59):
Yeah, I think Moda actually said, said something very interesting, right? When, when you have a more efficient building, typically your net operating costs is, is way lower. And most of us, if you know, we are, we are owners of large portfolios, right? That's flowing straight directly through to your, through to your nav. And then that has sort of knock on effect through the rest of the market. It, it increases home prices, it increases rents. All of these things we're also seeing pulled through from the, from the consumer side of the equation, which is your renters and people who are built buying houses are looking for these sorts of technologies and they have different reasons for doing it, right? Like archers saying, you need a sexy product, right? Absolutely. There's, there's a certain level of sexiness back in a lot of these things where you can give someone a demo on a walkthrough on a brand new house of, you know, adjusting what, what plugs are getting backed up and believe me, that's going to allow that house to show very well.
Greg Smithies (01:06:51):
So long story short is that many of these technologies that we are seeing in this market are no longer just an ethical imperative, like on a P and L basis for you as a building owner on a sort of margin return. If you're a building a construction and just selling homes many of these, these technologies, like the three that we've shown today just make good dollars and cents cents, right? They allow you to sell these buildings for more. They allow you to operate them more cheaply. They allow you to access lower cost of capital, you know, potentially lower insurance, things like that. So long story short, I think we're at a, we're at a bit of a tipping point here where no longer is it that we just need to do these things because it's good for the planet. Obviously it is good for the planet. But where they're starting to just make a good economic sense.
Dennis Steigerwalt (01:07:43):
Okay, great. No, I appreciate that. It's right on. It's all about the, like you said, it's flowing through the P and L now, so it makes it much easier conversation internally. So with that, I, I just wanna say, thanks again and wrap everything up here. Appreciate all of our presenters participating. I appreciate Greg, you helping us line us, align this conversation up. Look forward to all the follow on content that comes out of it.