Facilitron, a fast-growing school facility rental platform that has likened itself to Airbnb, now provides its services to nearly 50% of Florida schools, the company said in a May 15 news release.
The platform helps some of the biggest U.S. school districts manage and rent out gyms, theaters, music rooms, playing fields and other facilities. Users include Hillsborough County Public Schools, which covers Tampa, Florida, and surrounding communities; Austin Independent School District in Texas; San Diego Unified School District in California; and Clark County School District, which encompasses Las Vegas, Nevada, Facilitron CEO Jeff Benjamin told Facilities Dive.
Its newest partner in Florida is Broward County Public Schools, the state’s second-largest school district. In its press release announcing the partnership, Facilitron cited “growing community demands for space rental and school safety” as factors that drove the need for a “more comprehensive facility management system.” A representative for Broward County Public Schools declined to comment.
From frustration to innovation
Broward County Public Schools joins more than 10,000 U.S. K-12 schools and colleges that use Facilitron today, the company says.
“The whole process was just broken.”
Jeff Benjamin
CEO of Facilitron
The idea for the platform arose in 2015, Benjamin said, from his frustration with the way public schools managed facility rentals in his northern California community. He had three kids participating in Little League, dance teams and other extracurricular group activities, and he recalled a litany of problems, such as double bookings, inaccessible fields, and locked gyms.
These issues stemmed from inefficient or inadequate booking systems, often using literal pen and paper or clunky, user-unfriendly software, Benjamin said. “The whole process was just broken,” he said.
Schools’ existing booking systems had other inefficiencies, such as uncertainty over how to prioritize facility rental requests and how much to charge different groups, Benjamin said. So, with feedback from early adopters, his then-small team developed standardized prioritization and pricing hierarchies that favored “nonprofit youth organizations with a certain amount of [member] enrollment at the school” over commercial users like film crews. Further, some Facilitron users hadn’t updated their rental fees in years, Benjamin said.
Like Airbnb did for short-term housing rentals, Facilitron layered on liability insurance and a service fee to cover facility staff wages, utilities and other rental-related expenses districts were paying, Benjamin said. When onboarding new districts, Facilitron creates a “digital catalog” with the square footage and capacity of each rentable facility, which also aids emergency management planning and space optimization, he added.
The platform also has a built-in building automation solution that can manage lighting, HVAC and other connected systems, allowing district staff to set energy-consuming building systems to run on weekends and evenings only when they expect the facilities to be occupied, rather than overnight or all weekend, Benjamin said. A 3% reduction in energy usage could save “a typical 40-school district” more than $100,000 annually, Facilitron says on its website.
“Our mission is to help schools recover their costs [and] make more money” from facility rentals, Benjamin said.
Scheduling app benefits
Facilitron offers internal scheduling and attendee management tools to give larger districts more visibility into who would be using which facilities — and when they’d be using them, down to the minute. The internal scheduling tool creates a “single calendar of record” that often replaces a “hodgepodge” of personal staff calendars and notes, Benjamin said. Attendee management was vital for districts when complying with contact tracing and social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
“Facilitron is more efficient and uses less staff time” than the previous facility rental management system used by Orange County Public Schools, OCPS Facilities Director Harold Jenkins told Facilities Dive.
The OCPS district, which has more than 200,000 students at approximately 210 schools, has improved its attendee reporting, fee collection and event cancellation processes since switching to Facilitron in January 2020, Jenkins said.
OCPS “investigated multiple vendors before choosing Facilitron” to replace a competing system, SchoolDude, now known as Brightly, Jenkins added.
Brightly, a subsidiary of Siemens, says it has more than 7,000 educational institution customers, including Miami-Dade County Public Schools, and that it has positively impacted 50% of U.S. students. Other school-focused facility rental platforms include Amilia and FMX, which, like Brightly, offer a broader set of facility management tools, such as rental listing, booking, payment and reporting tools.
Benjamin touts features that set Facilitron apart from its competitors, such as an AI insurance “reader” that analyzes districts’ uploaded insurance certificates and informs them if any corrections are required.
Matching rental fees with facility management costs
The platform has its detractors, however. Some longtime users complain that Facilitron has negatively impacted organized youth activities and the facilities they rely on.
Nate Anderson, a physical education teacher and sports coach at Oak Grove High School in San Jose, California, wrote on LinkedIn earlier this year that “Facilitron may have become the monster that has helped to cripple youth sports, not grow or sustain them.” Sharing photos of waterlogged, torn-up baseball facilities, Anderson complained that sports programs that had donated “thousands and thousands of dollars” for facility upgrades over the years “were treated just like any other ‘outside organization’ once the district started using Facilitron.”
In a response posted on LinkedIn, Facilitron noted that it “does not directly control, manage or maintain any district’s facilities” and suggested that the problems Anderson raised stem from issues beyond Facilitron’s control, such as sharp increases in user demand and facility maintenance costs.
“Demand [for facilities] now is higher than ever, and dramatic increases in costs along with liabilities revolving around equal access and equal treatment of community requesters has led to a push by districts for more uniform application of policies,” the company wrote.
By gathering data about facility usage and combining it with publicly available replacement cost data, Facilitron helps school districts — and, ideally, groups using district facilities — to understand how much it really costs to maintain playing fields and other heavily used assets, and how soon they’ll need significant repairs or replacement, Benjamin said.
Armed with more data, school districts realize they can charge more for rentals, especially to “elite users” like club sports teams with full-time coaches, Benjamin said.
He pointed to Manhattan Beach Unified School District, a small Southern California district that “generated more than $500,000” for its high school athletic complex after switching to Facilitron.
“The idea is that money generated from rentals should go back into a fund for those particular facilities,” he said.
