When Proper formally launched in January 2024 with the goal of building a national property management platform, the technology foundation underneath it was not an afterthought. It was Livly — the enterprise-grade multifamily operating system that I co-founded in 2017 alongside Brian Duggan and Adam McCombs.
The convergence of these two platforms is deliberate. It reflects an architectural thesis I have been executing across multiple organizations for nearly a decade: that in multifamily real estate, the most durable competitive advantages are built at the intersection of technology and operations, not by selecting one over the other.
In less than two years, Proper has scaled to nearly 20,000 units across 15 states, bringing six operating companies — Novo Properties, FLATS, Guardian, CommonPlace, Drexel, and Alexander Properties Group — into a unified platform. The growth numbers are notable, but they are not the story. The story is how a platform of that geographic diversity and operational complexity maintains performance consistency across communities operating under different local brand identities, different market conditions, and different management cultures. The answer is Livly.
In practice, this means that every community within the Proper portfolio — regardless of which regional operator manages it or what local brand residents associate with it — runs on the same resident communication and engagement platform, the same digital leasing and payment infrastructure, the same operational analytics dashboards, and the same AI-first automation tools that reduce administrative friction and support efficient staffing models. This is what allows Proper’s COO Khushbu Sikaria to describe the platform’s core offer as ‘autonomy with scale’: local operators retain the culture, market knowledge, and brand identity that define their competitive edge, while gaining access to a technology infrastructure they could not justify building independently.
What began as an internal operating tool became a standalone enterprise platform, eventually deployed across third-party portfolios and now serving as the technology backbone of Proper’s national rollup. That arc matters because it means Livly was not designed to be sold — it was designed to be used by operators who needed it to work at the ground level, every day, across a diverse set of communities and residents. That operational discipline is embedded in the product in ways that externally procured software rarely achieves.
That widening gap is precisely the opening that Proper and Livly were designed to exploit — not by locking operators into a model that strips out their local identity, but by giving them access to capabilities that make their local identity more competitive, not less.
Alex Samoylovich is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of CEDARst Companies, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Livly, and Executive Chairman of Proper. He was named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40 in 2016.
What is Livly and how does it relate to Proper?
Who founded Livly?
What does Proper's 'Shared Operational Truth' framework mean?
How does Alex Samoylovich connect Livly, Proper, and CEDARst Companies?
What is Proper's growth trajectory and technology approach?
PropTech and AI are reshaping how multifamily teams lease, operate, maintain, and serve residents. The winners are not the teams with the most tools. They are the teams with the clearest operating model, the cleanest data flows, and the strongest governance controls.
