Kenny Funk, COO of The Scion Group, has a somewhat unorthodox nighttime routine for a real estate executive. For fifteen minutes each night, he winds down by scrolling TikTok – not for property listing videos or site tours though. He’s learning about advancements in technology and AI. One night while scrolling, he saw someone demonstrating the personal finance app they built using Lovable. The creator included the prompt they’d used, so Kenny plugged that in to try it out for himself. And at that moment, the proverbial lightbulb went on. “In 30 seconds, a working finance app came back and I said to myself ‘wow, this is legit.’ My next thought was, what could this do for our business?”
The Scion Group is a commercial real estate operator managing over 160 properties across the country for nearly 105,000 students at 80+ universities. With more than 2,000 employees, it’s the largest student housing operator in the world.
Before they started building their own tools in Lovable, the team at The Scion Group was forced to cobble together solutions from tools that didn’t quite fit their needs. Bespoke software for a real estate group of their scale simply didn't exist, and what did came with oversized price tags. Their capital projects lived on a project management platform and their analytics were spread across disjointed tables and spreadsheets.
Kenny brought Lovable to Brian Doyle, VP of IT, and the two immediately saw an opportunity to empower subject matter experts across every department to build tools personalized to their workflows.
It took off. In just four months, people across the organization were building more than six apps a week, creating more than 100 apps and shipping over 20 apps into production. HR built a tool to streamline their system for seasonal employees. Before this app, temporary employee contracts were all arranged through back-and-forth emails, with the process repeated across hundreds of workers. No major software company would have built a solution for this because of the highly specific nature of the need, but now the team has a ticketing system that helps HR manage contractors at scale.
Finance teams no longer have to make do with bloated tools that cover only half of what they actually need. They simply build the dashboard themselves.
When we put development in the hands of the people who will actually be the end users, we get exactly what we need for our business.
Building their own fit-for-purpose apps doesn’t just make teams more efficient. It also allows Scion to solve highly specific business challenges that traditional software cannot easily address. That impact started in week one.
The Scion Group had been paying for a tool to run property inspections across its 150 apartment communities. The team rebuilt it in Lovable in a matter of days. The new version does everything the old one did, and more. Property managers fill out the audit on-site, and instead of leadership wading through a 90-line report, the tool automatically surfaces the issues that need attention and sends a summary up the chain.
Our very first build with Lovable was a showstopper. It saved us $35,000. And that was just us getting started.
The team also developed a website audit tool to evaluate performance across all of Scion’s community websites using five consistent, measurable criteria. Rather than relying on subjective reviews or manually assessing each site individually, the tool creates a standardized score for every website across the portfolio.
The audit goes a step further by evaluating competitor websites using the same criteria. This allows Scion to see not only how each of its websites is performing internally, but also how it compares with the competitive landscape in each market.
“We can now assess every one of our websites on a consistent basis and compare them directly with our competitors,” said Kenny. “That gives us a clear view of where we are performing well, where we have gaps, and where we need to take action.”
Real estate is an industry full of data that’s usually sprawled across dozens of spreadsheets and updated and analyzed manually. It previously took special attention from trained analysts to derive insights from those rows and rows of cells. But Kenny and Brian have built apps that synthesize the data for them and deliver actionable insights, including maps that color code each of their properties from green to yellow to red based on the level of attention needed from the team.
Kenny explained the impact Lovable has had on his process. “What Lovable has done for us more than anything is get us from information to insight instantaneously, so we can have people act more quickly on opportunities for our business.”
What before had been “flat data” can now be connected to Lovable to build dashboards, sites, and apps that update automatically and deliver insights instantaneously. “All these tools have taken what was previously just flat data, and now we’ve been able to plug that data into any given app we build and get context around it, which helps us make the best decisions for our business.”
A concrete example of this comes from Kenny’s social media analytics tool that evaluates the performance of posts from each of The Scion Group’s properties. The team can compare their performance to other posts both from within the company and from competitors. “Before Lovable, our social media team had to go out and manually complete assessments,” Kenny said. “But now, our audit tool can look at all the metrics and assign a score. We no longer have 187 people doing 187 different things. We can identify the most impactful tactics and replicate those strategies across the rest of our properties.”
Brian, Kenny, and the rest of The Scion Group are all-in on Lovable. They’re building at a breakneck pace and on track to ship more than 100 projects in their first year. “We’ve never been disappointed,” said Kenny. “Everything we’ve put into Lovable so far has come back with us saying, ‘Wow.’”
With 24 apps in production and 77 projects in progress and a voracious appetite for more, the sky is the limit for Kenny, Brian, and team. They’re on track to replace more than $1M in SaaS contracts with custom-built tools. Building tools for themselves isn’t just saving them money. It is helping them solve problems they couldn't have imagined addressing three months earlier.
We solved more problems in the last two months with Lovable than we did in the three and a half years. It’s exhilarating.
Kenny went on to add, “In the last several months since we’ve been doing this, our mental process has changed. Historically, we always had the constraint of thinking, ‘Well, that would be really cool, but it’s never going to get built.’ Now, the first question we always ask is, ‘Can we do that ourselves with Lovable?’”
