 Inside Hawaii Real Estate, a show dedicated to providing up-to-date information and used to Hawaii home buyers, sellers, and investors. I'm Will Tanaka with my co-host, business partner, and wife, Leone Lab, a realtor with over 20 years experience in various leadership roles in the Hawaii real estate industry. Thanks Will. Will is a full-time realtor with a real estate litigation attorney background and he also was the head of a Hawaii title NESTRO company. And now we're full-time in real estate working together as a team to bring you the latest in Hawaii real estate. And today we have a very special guest. We have Rick Osborne Jr, the general manager of Everon Security, formerly known as ADT Commercial. They specialize in security and fire monitoring for commercial properties. Rick has been in the commercial and home security industry for over 30 years. And before that, he was a lifeguard saving lives. We're lucky because Rick is a true expert in his field, having worked with companies like Alert, Alarm, Simplex, to ADT, which is now Everon Security. So welcome, Rick. How are you guys doing? How are you doing? We're here. Excellent. All right, Rick. Yeah, we really appreciate you. And today, of course, we're going to talk all about security systems. And growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, no one had home security cameras. Now when you scroll through social media, I see some very interesting behaviors caught in security cameras, whether it's at home, condo buildings, shopping centers, grocery stores, you name it. And when we go to Best Fire or Amazon, there seems to be an unlimited supplies of home security choices. So Rick, the fact that you've been in the security industry for over three decades, what do you feel is most important in the security industry? I mean, what's changed in your industry over the years? What fulfills you and what's kept you in it for most of your career? I would say probably change. Change is probably one of the most intriguing things that have been happening. Like you said, in the beginning, back when I started, cameras weren't a thing for residential at all. And even if they were in the commercial industry, they were only in banks. And they were in boxes like this big. And it was actual film inside the camera that actually clicked off pictures. And you'd have to go pull the cartridge and take it to like long drugs and have them develop the cartridge. There wasn't even video. And now, like you said, you go to Best Buy, you go to Amazon, there's stuff right on the shelf, you plug it in the wall, you hook it to your Google account, you go. So the innovation and the technology change, I think, has been the funnest. I've moved away from residential. I mostly do commercial, which even has more and more innovation. But then it's always changing. It keeps it interesting. We talk about these emergency of technology, smart home devices and all these options. And of course, you have employees, a good amount of market share. And what are some of the advantages like everyone for utilizing a professional service like your company? Well, like I said, I always go back to you get what you pay for. But there is a certain amount of expense and needs when you have overhead. For example, we have 35 employees, 25 trucks, offices, the whole line yards. I think the difference with us is when you pick up the phone, we actually show up, what a concept. Some of the smaller companies, if they take on too big a project, they could fold. I've been in the industry almost 30 years and kind of stayed with the same companies along whether it was through acquisition or other things. Again, having a company, everybody's got product, everybody's got a camera, everybody's got a recording device, a card reader, an alarm system. But I truly believe it's the company and the service that stands behind it that makes the difference. You talk about service. Can you talk about how everyone stands out from other companies? I think we have a very, very high expectation for our staff and our people, for our customers. For example, we've got some pretty steep metrics. For example, we have what's called an FDR, a first day resolution. So 85% of our tickets that are entered by our customers must have a first day resolution. Because nothing is worse than you call for service, we show up, oh, we're going to need a part for that. And then we leave and it doesn't get rescheduled or we come back for the part again and we bill you again for the second time we came for the part. When if we had just done our homework and realized what part we needed, we would have made one call and it would have been less expensive. And it's less costly to me if I don't roll a truck two times or something I can only charge months for. So first day resolution within 24 hours, 85% of our tickets must be responded to within 24 hours. And we're currently running about 92 and 94% on both metrics. So it's, you know, we're all about customer service and returning calls and making sure things get done right. That's impressive. That is, and I like that first day resolution. Is there any examples that you can share about security systems that you've seen over the years maybe that actually have saved someone's life? Well, you know, security systems like fire alarm are not code driven. So it's hard to say if we're going to save a life with a security system, I mean, obviously if somebody breaks in the alarm goes off, they run away. That means they didn't come in and bother you. So that's, that's a good thing. I would say the life saving is more along the lines of fire alarm systems and sprinkler systems. That's why it's generally called covered under the gambit of fire life safety. That's when you're really saving lives. You know, for example, Marco Polo had had sprinkler systems and a better fire alarm system. We might not have had the incidences that we did. So yeah, I would say the saving of lives is more on the fire life safety side. I remember this was years ago at another home, but you know, we had a break in and we didn't have security systems, you know, like 15 years ago. But when we got it, there were a couple of false alarms. So, you know, when I looked at the statistics, there are over 18,000 false alarms just on the island of Oahu, which takes up a lot of police and fire department resources. After a certain amount of time, then you get a fine by the police department. So in terms of trying to prevent false alarms and, you know, when an alarm goes off, can you just kind of walk me through the process? Right. So again, on the commercial side, I can speak to more definitely, but on the residential side, it kind of works the same way. We try, first of all, we're going to sit down with a customer and do a proper onboarding call. Who do you want us to call? When do you want us to call? You know, on the residential side, most people always go, well, just call the police. Hang on. We're going to try to manage the situation properly. So we call the police when we actually need them. So one of the things that we do is do what's called video verification. So we try to connect the alarm system and install a camera system at the same time. So when the alarm comes to our central station, we can look at the cameras and realize, oh, that's a floating mylar balloon through the room. I'm not calling the police. Things of that nature. Or there's construction outside rattling the windows. So there's not somebody trying to break in or somebody didn't break in. So we can actually verify before we call the police. But again, like you said, 18,000 alarms is going to move false alarms and move the priority of alarm response way down the list. Right? So based on that, you'll always want to try and make sure you're testing your system often, getting it serviced often, try to, you know, budget for the video verification piece of it. Monthly wise, it's not much, depends on what you want to do. Most of our banking customers, most of our retail locations, we are looking at doing video verification so that we can minimize the false alarms. And then your company, everyone has partnered with Google for home security systems. A former company ADT did. Yes. So when we were part of ADT, so ADT on the residential side, which again, we're not a part of, but I can speak to it a little bit. But on the residential side, everything is going to do it yourself, right? So that's a big market. And so for ADT to be viable in that market, they needed to do something. And at the same time, Google was getting steep competition from Ring at Amazon, right? So the problem with Ring or simply say for those eyes, you can buy it yourself, you can install it. But if at some point it's beyond your technical capability, there's nobody to call to come to your house and look at it. They may walk you through it over the phone. Even ADT does this, they have a FaceTime service. They'll actually FaceTime with you on your phone to walk you through the keypad issues where the technician gives quicker response. But we still have field personnel if something goes wrong. So Google actually partnered and bought into ADT so that what they're doing now is to merge all the Nest product that Google has, the cameras, the doorbells, the hubs, those type of things, merging those and making them compatible with the ADT alarm system. So that allows you to control things through your Google Home and things of that nature. It also allows Google to have a field presence because of the direct partnership with ADT. If something goes wrong, you can call ADT A for monitoring or B for service in the field. And Rick, in the commercial space, in terms of having access to your cameras on the phone, on your laptop, is it pretty similar? Oh, absolutely. The difference on the commercial side is there's a lot more IT involved. There's a lot more IT restrictions involved. Every time you go to somebody in your IT department, go, hey, I got this cool mobile app. I want to look at stuff. Can I put it on the network? And generally, they're going to shoot you down and scream at you and go, no. And we found that to be the case. And usually it's not because they're trying to be difficult. It's A for security reasons for IT cybersecurity. B, it's also for bandwidth. And I don't mean network bandwidth. I mean personnel bandwidth from your IT department. They've already got enough on their plate. They don't want to have to try and figure out and deal with the security of camera systems being put on the network, them having to manage it, having to put out the IP addresses, port forwarding, all these other fancy words. So we at Everon actually have what's called managed services. So we'll actually bring in the internet circuit, put in a Meraki switch and move all of the security equipment to a dedicated network so that their IT people don't even have to deal with it. So we're actually finding success with that with our banking partners because they just don't have to bandwidth personnel-wise to manage all that stuff. So are there recordings like somewhere in the cloud, I guess? So that's an interesting question because that is one of the, as you would call it, emerging technologies in the cloud. But when you talk about storing video on a massive level, for example, one of my clients who's one of the largest health systems or hospitals on the island or the state, at one location we're talking over 400 cameras. And then you're talking about terabytes, not gigabytes, but terabytes, which is 1,000 gigabytes. And I'm talking five to 600 terabytes of information. If you get up to 1,000 terabytes, we're talking about petabytes. So we're talking about rooms of servers and hard drives. So people are like, yeah, let's just send it to the cloud. Well, if you remember, cloud is all subscription-based. So the monthly cost versus buying a server. So you have to play, you have to look at each and every application differently. Cloud is becoming more and more popular. But again, when some cloud instances, you're then a prisoner of who that proprietary information might be. And if they say a way you just didn't pay your subscription, they lock you out of your own video. We try to do what's more of a hybrid or cloud managed. So we're still storing on premise, the video, but we're sending a link out to manage in the cloud. Again, less taxing on the IT departments. Yeah. All these technology, and I never heard the term going up above terabytes. So you said petabytes? Yeah, I never heard that either. Petabytes. Las Vegas is in the petabyte range. I could imagine that with all the gambling and privacy and cybersecurity issues. I understand one of your companies focus, of course, commercial and condo buildings. So you have cameras at the lobbies, elevators, pool areas, barbecues. And for those condo buildings, are there usually people just proactively doing those cameras live? Or is it more reactive when something happens that you would just go to the recordings? Is it your company doing it? Or is it their own security people? So there's a couple of different applications. But the first two, you use the proper words, actually. One is a proactive approach, which is they're sitting there watching the cameras. But you have to understand that there's been studies done and no human being can watch more than 16 to 20 cameras for more than 20 minutes before they start to glaze over. Right? And so unless you have alerts in what they call analytics, tripping certain things and moving screens and making beeping noises to bring their attention to it, you're generally going to start to kind of glaze over and not really catch stuff. You always want to be recording, and that's what we call a reactive. So again, it depends on the property, the budget of that property, the mindset of that property. We can make all the requests in the world to say, hey, you need to do this, this or this, especially in a condo. It's all going to come down to that year's board. So whoever thinks that they're the SME or subject matter expert that week. From our home security, if a homeowner sells their property, how easy would it be for them to transfer the system over to a new buyer or to the new homeowner? It's actually very simple because whether this law has changed or not, but way back when, when I was turning around chalkboards and programming with an abacus, yes, I even know what that is. When you attach something to a house in the state of Hawaii becomes property of the house. Right. So, you know, and again, if this came back from the old days when everything was hardwired and we were actually running a wire out to every window and every door, nowadays everything is wireless. So can you remove it and walk away? Yes, that's why they're, you know, that do it yourself for apartment owners and stuff. They're using Belcro and sticky back tape. Because that's an untapped market. But again, nine times out of 10, you're going to cancel your contract with your alarm company. And if you've signed anything more than a, you know, to the standard, they try to get you to sign as a five year contract. So if you say, Hey, I've sold my house, I'm moving, they're going to pull the, oh, well, you have a five year contract, but we can continue it. We'll just do a relocation chart. But what they're actually doing is going to sell you a new system, excuse me, add your new home, leave the old system in and then try to go back to whoever buys your house to sign them up for service as well. And that's how they expand the customer base. So that's a good tip then. So make sure that you read your contracts and be, be certain about how many years you're signing up for as a homeowner that's enlisting home security. Right. Cause again, the other structure is most salespeople's commissions are structured on how long the contract, you know, as we were preparing for this, for this think tech show. And I remember a movie called, what's it called panic button with, or there's a movie about, you know, panic buttons. And is that something that, that's still, you know, you still install for like retail stores or? Absolutely. We just finished a large clinic and there were 97 panic buttons installed throughout the property. But again, it all depends on who's monitoring it, where it's being monitored and what for, for a reason. But those buttons are still used in banking and retail as well. And maybe for security purposes, you can't really reveal too much about the process. But I was just, just more curious, is it just, you know, a single button that you press or are you able to? There are different devices and obviously we try to use a dual action type of device, something that you have to like pull and then push a button or squeeze or that kind of thing. Cause nothing's worse than your knee under your desk, setting up a panic button. You're just working away at a cop show up. That's right. That's right. There's different devices out there and there's different uses. Earlier, like I had, you had mentioned that, like in stores and things like that, cameras have picked up some interesting footage and, and so I was wondering if you could share some stories with us. Oh, well, so now you're putting me on the spot. I knew you were coming here. Yeah, no, I would tell you in my vault, I have some pretty interesting footage of some interesting things that have happened. I will not divulge any of the securities footage we pulled from elevators. This needs to stay G rated. But you know, simple things, honestly, the shift of our customer base is turning towards risk management versus security because it's a dual application. In other words, I've had clients that my contract was budgeted and driven by the risk management division, meaning they want to make sure the cameras are working. They're clear. They're running and properly installed because they got great footage of this lady with a broken foot that limped into the lobby of a hotel, squirted her suntan lotion on the ground, and then slipped on it on purpose so that she could sue the hotel for a loose tile in which she broke her foot. But by watching the video, you can see her foot's already broken when she walks up to do this. So they, she sued them for $750,000. They played the video. She immediately dropped the suit and they trespassed her from all properties. So that was where risk management saved. And we get this kind of video in a retail and grocery stores all the time. People take the cooking oil off the shelf. They dump it on the floor. They put the bottle back on the shelf and then they slip on it and then drive wolf, in other words, for trying to sue the store. Wow. The risk management definitely ties into this and I can totally get it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Even for the condos, a lot of your condo markets, they have the common area camera systems. The problem that's probably neglected the most is preventative maintenance. Coming in on a quarterly basis and cleaning the cameras, making sure they're working, make sure they're recording. There's so many times people go back to get the video of what happened and it's a beautiful shot of a dead gecko inside the camera. Or the camera hasn't been recording at all and they never even knew. So for an example of changing technologies, I can install software now that tells me and sends me an alert when the camera's been moved. The video's changed. It's not video. It's not recording or whatever. We can put analytics on the devices. And so that's like another benefit of going with a professional security service is preventative maintenance is someone's going to be paying attention to it because all of our lives are so busy. And so it's good to have someone that's kind of regular about it just like we have. They go back to bed, personnel bed. We think about a regular condo. They've got a maintenance guy. They've got an engineering. Or the hotels were the best. The hotels are funny because you're going to tell engineering, well, you guys are responsible for cleaning the cameras like cleaning. I'm not cleaning. I'm not housekeeping. And the housekeeping people are like, I'm not getting on a ladder and climbing up and opening up the camera to clean it. That's engineering. So we kind of resolve that form. But even on the smaller condos, you've got a resident manager. That's it. Maybe a maintenance guy for a time. Some of the bigger condos may have maintenance, but they've got enough on their plate with every condo owner calling them because their door squeaks or something, right? So that's a good point. Yeah. And yeah, I was just curious in terms of, you know, we hear about like 4k zoom or, you know, on our iPhones or TV, drones in terms of the quality of the cameras and the ability to zoom in. How has that changed in recent years? Well, it's interesting, you know, because I even sit here in the industry, I've been in the industry over 30 years. I know what the cameras are. I know what they cost. And then, you know, I look over and there's iPhone touting a 50 megapixel camera. I'm like, how the hell do they do that for that price? But again, they're buying, you know, a couple hundred thousand at a time. So, you know, yeah, we can do 4k, which is actually eight megapixel. There are some companies that have 30 megapixel and 50 megapixel cameras, but they're not priced properly to sell on a regular basis. So if you're not selling a lot of them, the price is higher because of demand, right? So, yeah, no, there's definitely, you know, 30 megapixel camera. I can zoom from miles and miles away, but the more I zoom, the more pixelated it gets. So you have to remember that your megapixel calculation is based on what we call a PPF or pixels per foot. How many pixels am I putting into that imager per foot? And that's where the megapixel comes from. So again, it's all about hiring the right professional to consult you on what you need for the right application. From what you're hearing in your industry, I know that it's kind of looking forward and it's newer technology, but you know, artificial intelligence, do you think that's going to become a component in terms of your overall security industry, whether it's commercial or residential? Oh, absolutely. It's either going to be in the setup, the programming. I also think, I mean, we're already starting to use, we call it analytics. So I can tell you, I can draw a line in the screen and I can tell you, if everybody's going right to left, I don't care. That's fine because it's a one way street. If anybody goes left to right, ping me and tell me and give me a note. So we're already trying to, we're already doing that in what we call analytics, objects left behind, loitering. We're using that a lot for the homeless population. You know, people, they're camping out in nice dry areas that happen to happen. It's an ATM best of people. And so the banks are losing money because people don't want to come up and use the ATM because there's a homeless guy sleeping there. So we're using that for loitering, objects left behind, things of that nature. I will only see that grow and get more powerful. Yeah, I can see that. So hopefully when that happens, I'll just retire and I won't have to worry about it. You're too young, sorry. Hey Rick, do you see kind of like drones as part of the commercial space in the future? So we have started pilot programs for that on the mainland. And we've actually also started robotics for replacing guards. So we're starting pilot programs in multiple locations to run robots and drones. The drones are more for industrial monitoring. So we're going to look for heat, water, things of that nature. We're going to be touring warehouses, data rooms, things of that nature. The robots will be able to set up on tours of the buildings. And then that robot actually will send a signal and in turn contact our central station. And our central station operators, amazingly enough, are sitting there wearing Oculus goggles and gloves. So that if it does connect to somebody or connect to something based on its interactions or something, it then connects to a live person. So we can literally open the door, pick up a bag. A lot of times we get door left open alarms from access because the cleaning crew have put a bucket to prop the door open. Because they don't want to use the car to go back and forth. It's too much on bug. And then they forget it. So now our robot will be able to pick up the bucket, move it and lock the door remotely. That is amazing. It's common. It's actually here. We're doing it in multiple locations like Boeing and Google and Amazon and things of that nature who are already there. That's both exciting and kind of scary at the same time. Yeah, that's for the next generation. Well, I mean, it's already here, but Rick, thank you so much for your time. I mean, wealth of knowledge. We've learned so much about security and commercial space. Yep. Well, thank you guys very much for your time. I appreciate it. And anytime, give me a call. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Rick Osborn Jr. General Manager of Ebron Security. Thank you so much and aloha.