Acadia Realty Trust
How a Team Managing Hundreds of Properties Doubled Its Efficiency and Saved Over $1 Million in Insurance
INSIGHT OVERVIEW
The Problem
Acadia manages over 200 open air shopping centers and street retail across the US. As a publicly traded real estate investment trust, Acadia's operational decisions are subject to shareholder scrutiny, financial audits, and insurance underwriting at scale. Their operational model relies almost entirely on third-party vendors to execute maintenance, inspections, and property management tasks on the ground. The outside vendors report to regional property managers that are often 100’s of miles away.
Before StringBean the regional managers were flying blind. Managing properties with vendors constantly coming and going meant there was no single source of truth for what was happening on the ground. Property managers had no way to verify vendor presence, time on site, or quality of work. Documentation was scattered, inconsistent, and impossible to pull together quickly. There was no shared playbook — onboarding new staff or transitioning assets between managers was painful and slow. And with no documented proof of compliance, insurance renewals became an expensive guessing game. It took a team of 12 to keep up with the operational demands of the portfolio.
The Solution
Acadia implemented StringBean across 110 properties, starting with VendorSense for contractor oversight and expanding to full workflow management and quarterly inspections.
Every vendor now checks in and out digitally, with geo-stamped photos, timestamps, and task documentation captured automatically. Regional property managers get a clean, traceable record for every vendor visit without having to chase anyone for updates. Quarterly inspections flag exceptions automatically, giving managers a prioritized list of follow-ups rather than a stack of undifferentiated reports. Asset management consistency across properties means new staff can get up to speed quickly and portfolio transitions happen without knowledge loss.
As Jeremy Hill, VP of Property Management at Acadia, put it:
"StringBean is the perfect fit for Acadia's property managers to verify work, document it, and keep everyone aligned — without slowing anyone down. There is no more guessing if vendors came and for how long. StringBean meets us where we actually operate."
The Results
A team of 9 now manages what previously required 12. While simultaneously growing the portfolio from 70 to 110 properties, doubling the sites-per-manager ratio. The documented proof of compliance across those properties contributed directly to outsized insurance savings: when the market saw premiums rise 25–40%, Acadia was capped at 7%. The following year, when underwriting softened by an industry average of 16%, Acadia achieved 23%.
Vendor accountability went from a persistent problem to a solved one. Every contractor interaction is logged, timestamped, and retrievable on demand, giving finance the confidence to pay fast for compliant vendors and hold back payment when they're not. The CFO can sign off on SOX compliance with data available on the fly. What used to be an overhead burden is now a competitive advantage.
The Bottom Line
For a lean operation managing a large distributed portfolio, StringBean didn't just improve efficiency it fundamentally changed what was possible with the team they already had.
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