GUELPH, ON – One of Canada’s fastest-growing residential Real Estate Investment Trusts, Skyline Apartment REIT, has chosen Atria Networks’ fibre Internet service to help power its expanding portfolio of rental properties.
Since its inception over a decade ago, Skyline Apartment REIT has assembled one of Canada’s largest and highest quality multi-unit residential and commercial real estate investment portfolios, with properties in Ontario and several other Canadian provinces.
With Skyline Apartment REIT’s properties valued at nearly $500 million, and given its remarkable current growth rate, Skyline Apartment REIT expects to soon rank among the top ten multi-residential real estate companies in terms of value and units held, as ranked by Canadian Apartment Magazine.
Skyline Apartment REIT currently consists of 86 properties, with 5,574 residential units and over 782,000 square feet of commercial space, in 33 communities across four provinces. There are investors from nine of the Canadian provinces that participate in the Skyline Apartment REIT portfolio.
Skyline Apartment REIT’s corporate vision is clear: “Driven by a desire to be the very best at pursuing steady, calculated Real Estate growth grounded in fundamentally sound properties, Skyline takes pride in its ability to continually identify accretive real estate investment opportunities to complement its growing REIT portfolio.”
A key element to delivering on Skyline Apartment REIT’s vision is a rock solid, sustainable IT system for managing its growing business, including its over 5,500 rent paying residential and commercial tenants.
According to IT Administrator, Peter Marshall, Skyline’s decision earlier this year to switch to Atria Networks’ fibre-based metro ethernet service from a previous telco service provider was driven by “our need for higher performance and reliability at our Guelph head office.”
Shortly after Marshall joined Skyline in 2008, he found that the company needed faster network service speed and reliability than its then-current network service provider could deliver.
Marshall already had a prior positive experience with Atria Networks, which made him receptive to considering a switch in network services. At his previous employer, an Internet publishing company, Marshall had used Atria’s fibre-based metro ethernet service and was impressed with its speed, reliability and cost effectiveness. Said Marshall, “At Skyline Apartment REIT, we were facing challenges with our (existing telco provided) network service. We needed speed to operate our online property management software and be able to bring on additional online investment and sales contact management software. ”
Skyline was certainly having problems with the telco’s service. In the afternoons, as all the telco’s customers tended to put the heaviest demands on its network, Marshall found that Skyline’s network speed slowed to a crawl. He metered the service speed coming into the company to verify it was not an internal problem. “At times we couldn’t even get 0.16 kb per second of inbound bandwidth. When we called the telco service desk, the technician said the problem was with our internal network, and not with their service. But I was pinging, and it was the telco’s bandwidth that was the issue. The next day, a different technician admitted it was their problem and temporarily fixed it. We had the same issue two days in a row.”
Excuses from the telco included ‘rainy weather’ interfering with the wiring and connections. “Staff who had to do Internet based data entry, analysis and reporting had to stay late to complete their work, due to the old network’s speed and reliability problems”, Marshall said.
“We switched because of Atria’s competitive pricing. With over twice the speed of the telco service, plus existing fibre network coverage in Guelph and no demarcation fee, the service and value was attractive.”
“And our support relationship is more personal. With their team, you don’t just go into a help desk queue waiting to talk to people who don’t know who you are. That’s an extra bonus,” he added.
Marshall said that Skyline ran the new service in parallel with the old telco’s networking service for two months. They tested the new service for about a month, ran benchmarks, and speed and load tests. Marshall had to make a case for the new service to Skyline management, to convincingly prove that Atria was working as promised. The next month, he did a ‘soft transition,’ with both the Atria and the telco services running at the same time, so that users could experience both services. The following week Skyline Apartment REIT switched entirely to Atria, and with the off-site users’ VPN configurations updated, Marshall made sure that all staff could connect onto the new service.
Adds Marshall, “The installation of the system took a couple of hours when the Atria technicians came by,” but easing the transition of the users was done systematically and diligently.
Skyline’s management has been impressed with the stability and speed of Atria’s fibre-based metro ethernet service. As Skyline Apartment REIT continues to grow, Marshall prefers to grow with Atria. “One thing I really like about metro ethernet networking over ADSL and cable, is that upload speeds are as fast as download speeds.” The other non-fibre optic services often only offer half the upload speed compared to download speed.
“With our new network, speed is burstable and we can increase speed at a moment’s notice; with other services, we would have to add another line,” he added.
Skyline Apartment REIT prides itself on building communities and providing high quality customer service to residents and commercial tenants alike. Part of the ability to provide consistent and timely customer service is high-speed, reliable and stable access to information. With several Internet based software solutions, Skyline relies on Atria’s fibre-based metro ethernet service to provide the support for that access to information. It is a partnership worth building on!