New Calgary Start-Up Changing the Condo Buying Process
We sat down with Nyle MacLeod, co-founder of CondoScan, Calgary's newest company changing the process of condo ownership.
Tech Thursday is back with the 60 Second Founder series, a series that highlights founders and the companies they’re building. In Volume II, we sat down with Nyle MacLeod, co-founder of CondoScan, a service that changes the condo document review process.
Understanding the Problem: Outdated Document Reviews
For the majority of first-time condo buyers, the least understood and most tenuous process of the buying process comes right as a decision needs to be made: the condo document review.
The required review of condo documents that can cover anything from finances, condo bylaws, pet policies, and even the condo owner’s right to a parking spot can be a difficult task: hundreds of pages of dense material that isn’t always easy to interpret.
This issue became abundantly clear when Ewan May, co-founder of CondoScan had a friend go through the process, spending $500 and waiting 5 days to receive the review, which, in a marketplace where the condition period could be as short as 10 days, seemed both inefficient and troublesome.
The dated method of condo document reviews, both in cost and time, led Nyle MacLeod to team up with May, and build CondoScan: a platform that has streamlined the process and cost:
“We’re doing what used to take a week and $500... in under an hour.”
Introducing the Solution: CondoScan
The CondoScan platform serves to automate the condo document review process and provide condo buyers with easily-digestible information on the condo they are about to buy. Through the use of a trained AI workflow, CondoScan provides reports that don’t just summarize the vast amount of information, but explains, educates, and empowers buyers to really understand what these documents are saying.
A standard condo document review report will provide a summary of the hundreds of documents provided, though there is often no connection to the source material. Through the interactive report that CondoScan provides, buyers are able to fully understand what they are buying into, from a breakdown of condo fees, to the general health of the entire building, allowing buyers to dig into the information, especially with the additional time saved.
“There’s a financial aspect, which is what people care pretty heavily about, but there’s other aspects like the pet policy or parking, understanding what someone’s rights as a condo owner are”.
The Founder Journey: Learning Curves
While CondoScan is in its early days, the learning experiences for Nyle have been vast, though he speaks on his time at Quickly as helping him learn the ropes of what scaling a business is truly like, and mentioned while the learning curve has been steep, there has been no lack of excitement around making the leap with CondoScan.
When asked about what the biggest learning curve has been, MacLeod kept it brief, alluding to the fact that, with anything, there is no replacement for hands-on experience:
“You don’t know what you don’t know”.
Rooted in Alberta
CondoScan has been live for three months now, initially working with a core group of realtors, before moving into active deals across the province in Calgary, Edmonton, and Airdrie, though MacLeod has just recently gone full-time after his tenure at Quickly as their Director of Growth.
Given how different each province’s condo purchasing process is, and the model being trained specifically on the Condo Act of Alberta, the focus remains on Wild Rose Country for the foreseeable future, which MacLeod, a native of Ottawa, has no issue with:
“It helps that we get to build here and focus on this province”.
Make sure to RSVP to our “Interactive Vibe Coding Workshop” in Calgary on August 14th, facilitated by Nick Rogers, Co-Founder at Robin. We’ll see you there!
Thank you for reading Volume I of Tech Thursday’s ‘60 Second Founder’. If you know of a founder in Calgary that’s building in tech, make sure to reach out to Tech Thursday on our Instagram!