Tiffany MittalChief Executive Officer, Utility Ranger · CEO of Utility Ranger, in-house utility billing software

Interview Tiffany Mittal with TGO on Expert Talk Podcast. What is Utility Ranger?

31 Mar 2023 · 3 min

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2:32

In this interview, Tiffany Mittal explains Utility Ranger, a prop‑tech startup focused on small, mom‑and‑pop multifamily owners. She describes how traditional prop‑tech and utility‑billing services cater only to large owners with thousands of units, leaving smaller owners to shoulder rising water, sewer, and trash costs without a way to pass them to tenants. After experiencing these challenges personally, Mittal worked for a utility‑billing firm, learned the industry, and realized the barrier was the labor cost of servicing small portfolios. Utility Ranger therefore offers a self‑service tool that enables owners to implement Ratio Utility Billing System (RUBS), allowing them to bill tenants proportionally for utilities, recover costs, encourage conservation, and generate utility‑reimbursement revenue that can be leveraged to expand their property portfolios.

Chapters

All right, so see, I've got this thing because I saw your logo and everything, and I'm going, okay, she's like, you know, a superhero for utilities. That's what hit me. So, okay, what is your business?
So Utility Ranger is a prop tech company targeting the multifamily owner-operator. In multifamily, uh, prop tech companies traditionally go after very large apartment owners, people who own 1,000 units or more. But you know as well as I do, the majority of people actually who own multifamily are small mom-and-pop owners just like myself and my husband. Yeah. And we found many times over and over again when we would try to have technology implemented on our properties, nobody would help us. They wouldn't help us because we weren't big enough or we'd be like their tier 5 clients. And so we had a problem with our utilities, meaning Our utility rates were going up. We were covering the bill for the residents for water, sewer, trash, and the bills kept going up and we couldn't raise the rents fast enough to cover the increase in utilities. Wow. And so we wanted to bill back the utilities to the tenants to have them pay their fair share and help them conserve and have them have a little bit of stake in the game and making sure that they're paying their fair share. But the companies that are out there today wouldn't help us because we weren't big enough. Wow. And so I, uh, I went to go work for one of these companies, learned everything I could to learn about utility billing, and then said, you know what, the reason they're not helping small owners like me is because small owners just don't have enough buying power, and it's not worth the amount of labor it costs to do it from a service side. So I said, you know what, these owners, they don't need these service companies. They just need a tool to do it themselves. And so that's what I was committed to develop is a tool that basically allows an apartment owner to bill their own tenants for utilities using a system called RUBS, which is ratio utility billing. It's proportionately dividing up the bill, but it allows the owner to do it themselves, completely cut out the middlemen and start to receive utility reimbursement revenue rather than utilities on the expense side. And what that means though for owners, and a lot of people don't get this side of it, it's not just about billing your tenants, it's about creating a mechanism to grow your portfolio.