Ep #110: Leveraging Technology to Communicate with Residents When Impactful Weather is a Risk – Hazard Call

In this episode of the Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, Kevin welcomes Gene Norman. Gene is a senior meteorologist and the VP of marketing at HazardCall. HazardCall is a system developed for manufactured homes wherein any community can give their residents alerts and notifications that help them make decisions about approaching impactful weather events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and ice storms among others.

Gene explains how and why HazardCall came into fruition and discusses the value in their messaging system that comes from procuring their services. Gene also provides a step by step illustration of HazardCall’s system and how it works. Kevin and Gene also talk about pricing, extra features, and other details about HazardCall.

Quotes:

“One of the biggest challenges of course, is telling people what to do when there’s an emergency and where they should go and that they should even have a plan.”

“When your phone rings at 2 in the morning, you’re likely going to pay attention to that and we got urgent messaging that tells them there’s a storm threat but it also gives them instructions on what they should do.”

“If the community manager finds out from the local emergency officials or from the power company that the power will be back on at such a time, we can type out that message on their phone and all the residents who were displaced would get that.”

“It doesn’t happen everyday so we’re not calling everyday but when those things are happening in your neighborhood, when the phone rings then we’ll get your attention and hopefully that will incite and send you to take the safety action that you need. Each unit, so to speak, can have up to two numbers assigned to it.”

“The biggest challenge a home community owner will have will be collecting resident information. But once you do that and put it into the system, you know maintaining this is fairly easy to do and we help you every step of the way..”

Discussed in this Episode:

  • 5:40 What is Hazard Call?
  • 13:06 The messaging system and weather alerts
  • 18:57 Gene explains how their system works [see link to presentation slides]
  • 23:21 Pricing
  • 26:36 Gene talks about “PR insurance” and other system features


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