I received a FedEx delivery today. Some important Kibin mail came in that I didn’t need immediately, but I also didn’t want waiting until I return home on March 17th. Our team at Kibin is fully remote, so we have a TravelingMailbox account. They scan our mail for us and notify me via email of new items, the image showing up right in the body.
I can decide to have them trash it, open and scan it, forward it to me, etc. I love it. When these two items came in I decided to have them forwarded to where I’m staying here in SoCal. They were here in two days. It felt magical to input a new forwarding address I’ve never told them to send mail to before and have important docs I would have had to wait weeks to receive.
It’s tempting to set this up for my personal mail, but the few items we receive that are artificially time sensitive seems to make it prohibitive yet (think Christmas cards birthday cards, etc). I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but I’m not sure I could sell Kaitlin on it yet.
I also managed to coordinate a locksmith and my friend, Keyonte, meeting at a house we purchased at auction to change the locks. After a handful of texts, a quick call, and some photos, it was set. The occupant moved out yesterday and we were able to finally get possession today. The house doesn’t even look that bad. Win!
The key to working remotely is great tools and great people. At Kibin we communicate with Slack via text and video calls. We rely on TravelingMailbox for physical mail delivery, Grasshopper for our phone system, Trello for collaboration, GSuite for doc sharing and email etc., and a handful of other services I’m forgetting right now.
But none of that matters if you don’t have great people you can trust. I never worry about anyone at Kibin getting their work done. Butt time in seats does not equate to productivity, and I believe physical presence can actually better mask inefficiency than purely working remotely.
When it comes to real estate, I’ve been lucky to find and meet great people. Adam, my locksmith, has done several jobs for me. I trust him enough to re-key a house while I’m out of town. I trust my friend to hold onto that key for me until I return. That said, it would be difficult to develop those relationships without a local presence. That’s something for the out-of-state investors to think about.