What’s the world look like before Camino?
It’s 2021 and the garage office has grown tired. The family is growing, but the house feels like it’s shrinking. The family finally decides to build an addition onto their home that can accommodate not only a new home office, but also a new gym. Would you know where to start to make sure you can legally build this on your property? Most homeowners do not and take to Google for answers. You find that the local city building office website doesn’t clearly lay out the process to turn your dream into a reality. You call the local building official, but find that it’s a sea of automated menus. You get frustrated and decide to go down to the local office and try to figure it out in-person, but you’re forced to wait outside, social distanced until you can speak with someone live. This is a painful process for a simple job.
What’s the world look like with Camino?
Take the scenario above, but when you arrive at the local city official’s website you’re met with an incredibly helpful, intuitive and easy-to-use platform that walks you through all the steps needed in order to get your project started. Enter, Camino! With Camino’s virtual permitting software, you can easily determine what you need to do in order to build your next project. The process is simple as their software will walk you through the necessary steps from proposal to payment. So why isn’t this ubiquitous service in the public sector yet?
How can the public sector adopt more technology to effectuate change?
Historically, local city officials skated by with clunky permitting processes tooled by PDFs, paper docs and first generation software. When COVID-19 hit, the system broke. Every city was scrambling to figure out how to instill streamlined processes without putting people at risk and handle an onslaught of demand. The City of Santa Clarita team (case study), for example, was able to reduce calls by 20% and issue permits 35% faster, which in turn allowed their city to collect more in permitting fees and made their constituents much happier with the improved process. And the Camino team is just getting started! Their government tech stack is going to revolutionize the way you interact with your local municipality from everything to permits to home inspections. Camino’s virtual inspection software will give the local city inspector a power tool to cut down on time spent out on the road, leading to more inspections and staying safe from close contact with others during a pandemic. The local governments are clamoring for this! Camino has seen a tremendous spike in interest throughout the pandemic and we believe 2021 is the year of deep fortification of all systems.
Why a GovTech bet?
With Lincoln Property Company’s national reach and close relationships with the local city officials in the municipalities in which we work, we believe that an LPC Ventures investment into Camino will help accelerate the adoption efforts for both the private and public sector use cases. A vote of confidence from a developer could be a signal to our cities that modernizing the approach to get jobs approved in a more efficient, easy-to-use manner is a win for all sides. We believe our cities want to adopt modern technology solutions and we’re here as stewards of that future.