When I first encountered the reserve planning industry, I did not expect it to become my next chapter. But the more I learned, the more I recognized something I had seen before: an industry carrying enormous responsibility, serving millions of people, and running on tools that were never built for the scale or complexity of the work.
That recognition changed everything.
What the Reserve Planning Industry Revealed
Reserve planning is not a niche back-office function. It is the financial backbone of how communities survive. When a reserve plan is wrong — when the numbers are stale, the assumptions outdated, or the methodology inconsistent — the consequences land on real people. Special assessments that blindside homeowners. Buildings that deteriorate faster than anyone planned for. In the worst cases, tragedies that could have been prevented.
The professionals doing this work know this better than anyone. They carry that weight every day. And they have been doing it, largely, with spreadsheets and desktop software that has not meaningfully changed in decades.
After years of deep collaboration with the team behind PRA — a platform with 36 years of industry trust and methodology built by people who understood this work from the inside — I set out to build what the industry always needed but technology was not yet ready to deliver.
Why the Industry Has Good Reason to Be Skeptical
Here is what my background taught me: technology that does not fit the way people actually work does not get used. It creates new problems while claiming to solve old ones. It adds training overhead, introduces unfamiliar risk, and ultimately gets abandoned — leaving the professionals who tried it more skeptical than before.
The reserve planning industry has seen this play out. Technology companies have walked in before, promising transformation. Most did not last. The tools were too generic, too complex, and built by people who had never sat across from a board trying to explain why a $2 million roof replacement was not in last year’s budget.
That skepticism is earned. And I am not here to dismiss it.
What I brought to this problem was a different belief: that the right answer is not to replace the professionals doing this work — it is to give them tools worthy of the work they are already doing. That means pairing 36 years of reserve planning knowledge with the kind of engineering talent that has built enterprise-grade platforms at global scale. It means building reserve planning software that fits real workflows, not software that asks professionals to change how they work to fit the tool.
What AI-Augmented Reserve Planning Software Can Do
At EZRS, we have brought together deep reserve planning methodology and a team of best-in-class engineers who have built and scaled technology at some of the most demanding companies in the world. That combination — industry knowledge and modern technical depth — does not exist anywhere else in this market.
What we are building toward is a reserve planning platform that understands the work from the inside. One where reserve plans stay current rather than going stale the moment they are printed. Where scenarios can be updated when costs change. Where a professional can manage a growing portfolio without rebuilding the same analysis from scratch every cycle.
Where AI handles the repetitive work — data entry, formula rebuilding, version management — so the people behind the plan can focus on the judgment calls that no software will ever make for them. The site assessment. The funding recommendation. The defensible conversation with a board under pressure.
This is not automation. This is augmentation. The reserve specialist stays accountable. The platform makes the work faster, more accurate, and more defensible.
We are not there in every respect yet. That is exactly why we are having these conversations now — with the professionals who will hold us accountable to it.
Why Reserve Planning Compliance Is Changing Fast
The stakes around reserve planning have never been higher. Florida’s Structural Integrity Reserve Study legislation — passed in the aftermath of the Champlain Towers collapse — mandated reserve studies and non-waivable reserve funding for condominiums three stories and taller. Boards now carry personal liability for non-compliance. Lenders are tightening requirements. Insurance carriers are scrutinizing reserve adequacy in ways they never have before.
More than 30 states now have reserve study or reserve fund laws on the books. The professionals navigating this environment need tools that can keep up. Static documents and manual spreadsheet models were not designed for a world where the defensibility of every plan is a legal question, not just a professional standard.
Reserve management companies need consistency enforced across every specialist in their portfolio. Timeshare and vacation club operators need capital planning infrastructure that scales across complex, high-value assets. Independent reserve specialists need to grow their practices without proportionally growing their administrative workload.
The tools available today do not serve any of those needs well. That is the gap we are working to close.
Built for Reserve Planning Professionals Who Work at Scale
I did not start building EZRS for boards or homeowners, though they will benefit from what we are building. I started building it for the reserve specialists, the RMC directors, the asset managers, and the field assessors who show up every day and do work that matters — and who have deserved better infrastructure for a long time.
We are early. We are building in partnership with the industry, not at it. That means having real conversations with reserve planning professionals before we scale, listening more than we talk, and holding ourselves accountable to the people whose work depends on getting this right.
If you are a reserve planning professional curious about what we are working on, I would welcome the conversation.
Book a 30-minute discovery call at ezrs.com/contact
