Common Living doubles in size with a customer-centric growth strategy.

Founded in 2015, Common Living is a residential brand that makes rental housing easier for city dwellers through community, technology, and people-first property services. It designs, operates, and enables dozens of apartments across the nation.

“We make the experience of city living as easy as possible,” Eric Rodriguez, Senior VP of Operations, said. “Along with convenient amenities and an easy-to-use app, we offer fully furnished, all-inclusive units and private apartments.”

For their coliving units, Common even manages utilities and supplies shared goods like paper towels and toilet paper, cutting out the major hassles of roommate living.

• Common’s portfolio of 94 properties spans 14 American cities
• It is expanding to serve more renters across additional markets
• From securing real estate partnerships to designing and furnishing individual units to matching prospective renters to the right home and roommates, Common does it all.
• Common adopted Salesforce in 2018

Before adopting Salesforce in 2018, Common suffered from problems that are all too typical in growing businesses. For one, the sales team was getting bogged down by manual processes that worked well enough in the early days, but slowed considerably at scale.

“One of the things that was really hard for our sales team was that they would need to manually follow up with every single one of the people that was looking to live at our properties,” Rodriguez said.

As Common scaled, that meant pursuing thousands upon thousands of new leads — a difficult task, to say the least. Common uses Sales Cloud to automate parts of the follow-up and nurture process, freeing reps to focus on high-value leads, while entering other prospects into an automated buyer’s journey.

Common had another challenge — information was getting trapped in silos, creating issues when prospective customers converted to paying members. Combining Sales Cloud with Service Cloud lets information flow so everyone inside Common has a complete 360-degree view of each customer.

“The baton passes from the sales team to the member experience team, and they’re not starting from scratch. They know who the member is and they can cater to that person’s experience because of Salesforce,” Rodriguez said.

Now, Common captures information about every lead, starting from the moment that lead first visits the company’s website. “We have all the information about what they were looking for in a place to live so that we can make their experience better once they move in,” Rodriguez said.

Heroku also plays a key role in keeping Common’s operations running smoothly. The cloud platform lets Common’s developers build, deploy, and scale new features, without worrying about the technical infrastructure itself. For a small business with limited resources available at any given time, that’s a huge burden lifted.

“We don’t have to manage infrastructure or worry about our service being up because we know Heroku will take care of it for us,” Adam Gotterer, Chief Technology Officer said. “That saves us money on DevOps folks, too.”

One Heroku add-on, Heroku Scheduler, plays a particularly important role in Common’s technology stack, driving automated scheduling of property tours across the country.

“It’s the biggest integration that touches all parts of the business,” Gotterer said. The broader ability to extend Common’s product functionality through AppExchange is also proving key to the company’s drive to continually improve its member experience.