Out with the cold (city), in with the new neighbours | Bazinga! brings out the social networking side of condo living

By Gillian Shaw

Knock on any condo door in Metro Vancouver and you’re liable to hear of horror stories, hurt feelings and other fiascos. At best, you’ll find residents living in virtual isolation, often not even knowing their next-door neighbours.

These stories about “condo hell” prompted Joseph Nakhla to launch Bazinga!, a service that’s bringing social networking to apartment living, a little like the fledgling Facebook did when it first connected students on campus.

“Vancouver has often been called a cold city,” he said. “We love the concept of building communities.”

Nakhla, the founder and CEO, was inspired by his upbringing in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

“It’s a very dense city and I grew up in a lower-middle class concrete apartment building,” he said. “I was always intrigued at how busy our city was yet we still knew our neighbours.”

When Nakhla came to Vancouver, he found apartment living very different from home. And so he set out to combine traditional property management tasks, such as providing strata minutes, or links for residents to book party rooms, with a social side that allows neighbours to connect online — the first step in building a real-life community.

“We’re excited to make a dent on the social side,” said Nakhla. “Often neighbours are separated by just a thin concrete wall — not even a concrete wall, just a wall — yet you don’t know your neighbours.”

Some Bazinga! users have used the platform to turn their particular floor into a virtual neighbourhood, holding the highrise equivalent of a block party. Others use it to find neighbours to join in group buying deals: In one building, condo owners bought new glass doors for their units, bringing the price down from $880 to $680.

Ania Anvaryfar, who lives in a Toronto condo development, says the feature she likes best is the Bazinga! Loop.

A cross between a Facebook wall and Twitter stream, it’s a public bulletin board for everyone in a building or community, from property managers to strata councils, condo owners and renters.

“People go into their apartments and close their doors, they don’t know their neighbours, they don’t know anybody in their building,” said Anvaryfar, who this week suggested to her neighbours using the service that they get together for a potluck dinner.

“I find it a really useful tool in building a community.”

Bazinga! has more than 50 employees and recently doubled the size of its Yaletown headquarters to 7,000 square feet.

About 80,000 homes across Canada are using the service, mostly multi-family dwellings, with 15,000 to 20,000 of those in Vancouver. It also works with single-family homes and gated communities; the company has signed up homebuilders in Toronto and Calgary and has just started adding customers in the U.S.

Sign-up for developers varies with the project. For existing buildings, fees are paid by the property management company and cost up to a maximum of $2 per month per resident.

For developers, Bazinga! digitizes some traditional paper-based tasks, such as deficiency reports and condo manuals, plus it gives them a way to stay in touch with residents. Each owner (or renter) has his or her own profile that includes their apartment layout and details on all appliances and other maintenance information.

“We had been making homeowner guides manually for years so switching to an online platform with so many features and benefits seemed like a no brainer,” said Kassie Doucet, who works in project coordination for Boffo Developments, which started using Bazinga! with two of its newer developments. “It offered things we didn’t have before, like the ability to post surveys, to get homeowners’ feedback and to have the deficiency list and walk-through in an app.”

The web-based program was created with responsive design so no matter what device it’s viewed on, the site will adjust to fit the screen. There’s also an iOS app and the walk-through deficiency iPad app for developers so when the development company goes through units with its new homeowners, there’s a digital record of deficiencies that can be accompanied by photos.
Stratas can add information from financial updates to meeting minutes on Bazinga! and every resident can have a profile on the site, regardless of whether they rent or own. While a renter wouldn’t have access to owners’ information, he or she could access the other services of the site. Like Facebook, residents can direct message each other and can either post their names and photos on their profiles or hide their profiles completely.
gshaw@vancouversun.com

Source: The Vancouver Sun