5,000 Doors, One Platform: Simplifying PM Tech with Steven Rea | Peter Lohmann's Podcast

coming from multifamily, we made no money on maintenance, right? Like payroll flows through, you have a maintenance person who works at the property, the property pays for that. Like in multifamily, the way my mentor friend did was we rent people and processes, right? Our product is that we rent people to management companies who are trained and know how to execute and they run the properties. So I'm having to adapt my thinking around some of these things. It's been kind of hard, but I think because of that experience, I'm coming at it from the lens of like, this shouldn't be the end-all be-all of where a lot of money's made. And maintenance, I know smaller companies struggle with it. I think larger companies make a lot of money on maintenance. And if we can pass some of that savings through to owners or find ways via incentives, like if we're getting paid on NOI, my, the whole team is in terms of leadership and focus and what we talk about, which matters because people do what their boss talks about all the time. Even if what's on paper might be different, like if you're always asking about certain things, that's where people optimize for. And if what we're talking about is minimizing days vacant, driving retention, because all those things ultimately flow through to NOI, which get us paid more, then that also is going to naturally result in better outcomes for those owners.

Friends, welcome back to the Peter Lohmann Podcast. I am here today with a special guest, Stephen Ray, who is Chief Innovation Officer at Northpointe. And just a little context, if you haven't heard of Northpointe, they're huge. They manage over 5,000 doors across dozens of markets in the United States. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you, Peter. I'm excited to be here. Been a fan for a while and yeah, always been looking forward to kind of sharing perspectives because I think we, we see things very similarly and also a little bit differently on the business and Hopefully that'll be fun for everyone listening and watching.

Yeah, totally. So, you know, you and I bumped into each other at Broker Owner here recently in New Orleans and had a great conversation at a Profit Coach happy hour. And we got into conversation around maintenance and compensation for property managers, increasing efficiency and throughput of technicians and trade-offs. And I've been kind of— we've been sort of in each other's LinkedIn for a while. Two, you're a guy who has a lot of like real-world experience with operating a management company, but also thinks deeply about how things tie together, how incentives work. And that's like squarely in my wheelhouse of people I like to be around and get into discussion and debate with. So I think today's episode is going to be a lot of back and forth, which I love. And I want to start by jumping into this. Maybe it would be helpful just for folks who aren't familiar for like a little bit of background on yourself and then we'll jump into the first topic.

Yeah, so I've been in property management for about 20 years. I started working for a private investor to kind of learn the business, but I would say I spent my formative years at RPM Living before it was RPM Living. I was there for about 12 employees and 400 units. Up through several hundred employees at about 15,000, 20,000 units. Worked directly for the owner, Jason, at the time. Built the training, built the tech stack, and then my last 3 years I spent getting the first institutional clients and helping grow the platform beyond value-add mom-and-pop into an institutional customer base. Learned a lot about the business. That's where a lot of my opinions come from. It's where I met my mentor, who I don't really have any original thoughts. Everything I say about this business is her being channeled through me. And then had a short-term rental business for a while, worked at ResProp, helped build the ResProp third-party platform in Texas, added about 6,000 units there in a couple years. Wow. And then left. And then my good friend Dan French, who's the CEO at Northpointe, spent about a month and a half recruiting me to come work with him at Northpointe to rebuild the platform. I was having way too much fun just playing around with AI, but playing around with AI doesn't get you paid. So I was getting really smart. And slowly seeping through all of the money I had saved up. And I've always been really passionate about property management. I think we have a, we sell something really unique in terms of the homes that we rent. We provide the backdrop to people's lives. It's the, probably the most intimate thing that you can sell somebody and provide to somebody. And that obligation has always been, it is an obligation to do that well and do that at the high, absolute highest level has always been really kind of near and dear to me. And, and Dan kind of introduced me to SFR. I spent the last 9 months really kind of immersing myself in it and understanding the ScatterSite operations a lot better. And it's been a lot of fun. I, I like learning new things and it's also been hard and it's kind of fun taking the best of both worlds and trying to bring them together in terms of how we operate and how we execute. And so yeah, that's, that's the, about as fast as I can do it in terms of background.

No, that's perfect. And you know, I had Dan on the show recently. We, we had a great conversation about sort of comparing and contrasting SFR and multifamily, which you guys both come from that multifamily background. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us in SFR to learn from some of the things that the multifamily folks are doing and vice versa, to be honest. I think there's a lot of things that we do better because we actually operate in a harsher environment. It's more difficult logistically. So let's start by talking about the concept of a single platform that does everything. Versus best-in-class point solutions and vendors. So, you know, just to set the stage a little, like, for example, we use Buildium and we end up bringing on all these other softwares around Buildium to be able to function effectively at our size, which is about 750 doors. So we use LeadSimple, we use PropertyMeld, we use RentEngine, we use like all these different— and there's more. More software than I would prefer. I, you know, it would be great if we could just do everything in Billium and not have to have all these, you know, additional apps, cost, logins, training, integration. There's a heavy cost to these point solutions. And I stumbled on a video online recently where you were talking through a transition that you led Northpointe through, where you migrated off of a very popular maintenance platform that a lot of people use that's dedicated specifically for maintenance coordination. And you brought that fully back into AppFolio, which is like your main core software. And I listened through to what you had to say, and I don't know if I agree with all of it, but let me just start by having you sort of explain, you know, briefly what was the reason for that decision and how has it gone? Um, there's a lot of times we see people going the other way. They're like, oh yeah, I onboarded this, I onboarded that, I onboarded that. So it's, it's a, it's novel to see someone sort of moving against the current.

So, so you listed a lot of the reasons already, right? Cost, training, complexity, different logins. And this was born out of my kind of lived experience. So when I was at Roscoe, which is what became RPM, we only used Yardi. We had no point solutions. I customized that Yardi a fair bit, but we had, so we had a single pane of glass that people interface through. And at the time I was also running training. So every employee who came to work for the company, I was training and/or my other trainers eventually who I hired were teaching them. And there was a simplicity to that. There was one way to do things. There was one login. It made training and scaling that company as we grew a lot easier.

Yeah, but doesn't Yardi kind of suck?

Well, I mean, it's one of the biggest property management softwares in the con— in the, in the world for a reason, right? It's more of accounting software that they've layered an operations layer over. And I think that's kind of the point, right? In, in that it, it's not the best UX and UI, right? It's not the best. They've tried since then, 'cause this was 2008 to, you know, like this 20, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. But it also didn't need to be like the world's best experience. There's certain things that we have to do to operate a property that as long as people have a clear path on how to do it, plenty of people work with like softwares that don't have great UXs. Like it's, it's more about familiarity, training, building the muscle. And then I lived the opposite of that at ResProp. ResProp had a sister company called Rex that launched 10 prop tech startups through a prop tech studio or a startup studio simultaneously. We used a point solution for everything and training was a nightmare, right? So as we scaled and as we're bringing on teammates and trying to familiarize them with how to do their jobs and how to use the software, we have a CRM for this and we have, you know, maintenance software for this and websites are handled through that and it, it just became really cumbersome and it meant that we spent most of our training time teaching people how to use software and not how to be great property managers.

Okay. Let me go back to Yardi for a second, because like I'm trying to envision what it would actually be like to use everything for one software. So let's just take rental listings. So did you like, did Yardi have some kind of an iframe embed that went on your website that showed your available listings?

So we used Wrik Cafe, which was their website product. That, that was a, that was a website builder, similar to what a lot of the like RealPage or AppFolio, all the companies have where it pulled real-time availability out of our PMS and published it to the website. We had like 8 templates to choose from at the time, pick the pictures, and then we were live.

Okay.

And that syndicated to all the third-party listing sites and all that.

So I, this was kind of pre-ILS boom. But now yes, they can.

Okay.

The apartment business is a little bit different in that there aren't really a lot of free sites to syndicate to. Right. Like there's your website and then there's paying CoStar thousands and thousands of dollars a month without, with risking it a little bit. I am not a fan of ILSs. I don't think they work the way they propose that they work. I think most of them just buy a bunch of search terms that are driving direct traffic to the properties and sites. Yeah.

I heard someone else tell me that recently.

Yeah.

There is, yeah. Like as a property manager, we, we get this idea that everyone just goes to Zillow to find rental homes and apartments, but it turns out that a like huge percentage of people literally just still going to Google and type like 2-bedroom for rent, which then the top results are Google or are Zillow cuz they're paying for those. And then, then so like to us it looks like they came from Zillow, but they actually originated at Google.

Yeah. And I would say in the apartment side of things, it's also drive-by traffic used to be the number one lead source that was in people's reports and now it's disappeared because it's not there anymore. Like I would say an SFR, like a really good for lease sign out in the yard, which I know some people are worried about because of squatters and that sort of thing. But like there's something to be said for, you know, real estate's a location business. People are driving by these things all the time and our job's to drive awareness. That's how you get leasing. Or get leases is making people aware it exists. And you can drop it into Zillow where there's thousands of homes that you may or may not get seen, where you're really playing a price game. Or, you know, you can find other ways to drive traffic, which we haven't cracked that yet for SFR. I'm really solid on how to do that with multifamily SFR because every home's a bit unique, has kind of its own challenges, but there's definitely an opportunity there. And I think ILS is, I said, the Shopping behavior isn't what people think it is. I think most of the time some people go there and shop, but most of the time it's destination traffic.

Okay. So sorry, I took us on a tangent there. Yeah. So back to, you know, the Point solution versus all in one.

Yeah. I mean, so we used their utility billing software, we used their websites, we used their internal CRM, we used, we actually used their pre-revenue management. We used their comp tracker that was built in, in terms of tracking rents for the comps. And Was it the best user experience compared to stuff that's available now? Absolutely not. Did it work and did it, and was it straightforward enough that people are training on software was not complicated and we could have checklists and like, you know, step-by-step guides with screenshots of what they need to do so they felt supported. And then we got to spend hours teaching people about how to set rents and how to manage maintenance and, you know, how to execute as a property manager instead of being like, here's how you navigate RealPage, and then, and then here's how you navigate the CRM and here's how you, here's your, how your procurement works and here's how, like, you know, and you spend all your time teaching people to use software. The challenge I've seen in that is then when, when something happens that exists outside the sphere of that software, they don't know what to do. Like they haven't, so, so then they panic. And I think, I think that largely contributes to churn in terms on the employee side of the business is people don't feel like they can win because They don't know what to do if it's not a checkbox that's been put in front of them in terms of the workflows.

Sure. Okay.

So, so basically you had experience operating this way with Yardi and then you come to Northpointe and the situation is that Northpointe has AppFolio as the core, but then a whole bunch of point solutions around it.

Yeah, I would say we, we had AppFolio in name only when I started. So it was a PropertyWare migration to AppFolio. We basically ported PropertyWare onto AppFolio in terms of all the setup and everything with kind of some of the people were here prior to me. And then we had integra— we really operated out of Power BI and, and then we had built integrations with a lot of these point solutions from an API standpoint. So no one really knew how to use AppFolio. They didn't trust the data there 'cause they weren't spending time there. And it just created a lot of complexity and confusion for people on how to do their jobs. And one thing, SFR I think is a lot harder. We kind of alluded to this earlier than multifamily. I think a big part of that is everyone's kind of on an island, especially at a national scale company. Like you're not in an office with a bunch of people. You're not like, even in multifamily, like at your property, there's maybe a maintenance guy or several people who you're around all the time or people you can lean on. A lot of property managers in SFR, it's like just them in the market. They work from home, they work from their car, like they, you know, they're, they're kind of isolated in a way. So leaving, giving them this big stack of tools they have to learn on their own, even if you like do webinars and that sort of, it's just people learn by doing. And if you can get immersed someone in the system and have them using it a lot, there's a familiarity that builds. I think people learn how to navigate things and use things a lot faster. So we had about 27 different tools that we were using when I started. We're, we're down to like 6, including Google Workspace. I, I think my goal's simplicity. And that's not to say I'm, we may not add stuff back, like the, the maintenance software that we ripped out is actually very good. Like I'm a fan of it, but it just introduced like what we do is already really complex and it introduced a layer of complication on top of that, that our team just wasn't equipped to handle at the time. So the goal was simplicity. Like, how can I strip out the extra? Because we don't actually need— I think a lot of times we convince ourselves that we need these point solution products that are amazing. But if you look at it from first principles of like what actually has to get done to be a good property manager, like I don't need a lot of that other stuff. Like I told the CEO of that company, you're Maintenance 301 and we're still at like maintenance for dummies, like Maintenance 101. Like the, The tools and the insights that you provide, no one in our company understands except for like a small handful of people. I just need to be able to get work done. And I think specifically on maintenance, because there's, you probably have seen like broker-owner, there were a lot, I was just at NAA, there were every, there's so many prop tech startups that are focused on maintenance, but maintenance is inherently a physical thing. Like people go to homes to fix things. Like until we have Optimus robots getting dropped off by cyber cabs to do maintenance work, it's still very much a human thing that has to happen. And I don't think software necessarily solves that problem. It could help, but like, it's, it's more, there's more to it than that. And these tools are really expensive. Like, you know, $2 to $5 a door is a lot every month for a tool that does one thing.

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Okay, let me respond some of that. So just to make it a little more, you know, we'll kind of make it a little spicy here. So first of all, I don't think these tools are expensive. So $2 a unit, $3 a unit, you know, our revenue per unit at my company, and we're not even really that optimized, is probably around $250 to $300 a unit. You know, I know a lot of property managers who are in the $400s. There's a few who are in the $500s.

So like, that's annual, right?

No, per month.

Per month. Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

So, you know, for a tool, and I think, you know, you said earlier like we don't need it. Well, of course we don't need it. I mean, properties got managed on pen and paper and Excel. Like it's certainly, it's obviously it's possible. We did it for, you know, 100 years or whatever. But, you know, in evaluating these tools, what we're trying to find is, is, is there like an ROI on the tool? Like, If I can implement a tool that lets me manage 300 doors with one maintenance coordinator instead of 100 doors at $3 a unit, I make that trade all day right now. I think there's an argument to be made, you know, are the benefits as good as promised and what are the trade-offs? What are the kind of hidden trade-offs? And I know you talked in the video a lot about like visibility of data. Right? So if you're trying to get a picture of the business, how many open work orders do we have? What's the utilization rate of our techs? You know, a lot of data that you really want now is spread across multiple systems. I think that is a valid concern and there is a cost that doesn't show up on your P&L to that data being spread out like that. So I think those— to me, those are where like the really interesting conversations are, is like what are the no-brainer tools that are worth the cost? Like, you clearly are making this calculation as well because you still have 6 tools, you don't have 1. So some of these you're like, yeah, we could stand up our own email servers, but, you know, let's just use Google. Like, even though it's, you know, I thought about it, user, I'm sure you have. So, you know, the other thing I think about here is like the, the argument for some of these point solutions is like where there are clean breaks. I like to think about clean breaks as like a systems engineer where you can cleanly separate systems. And like one example of this is leasing, right? Especially in SFR, the whole like posting a rental listing, dealing with the prospective tenants, screening them, coordinating the showings, rental applications, all of that is like disconnected from everything else that we're doing and is fine to be that way. So like we use, you know, like we use a tool for that that we don't use. Buildium's built-in stuff. And then once they become a tenant, we move them into Buildium and we operate from there. So like that's an example of what I think of as like a clean break. Maintenance too. It's like it is all being done by humans, but that whole coordination part is like where we see the most time savings. There's just so much back and forth time soaked up. Because you've got 4 participants in this, right? You've got tenant, owner, property management, vendor. So you've got 4 parties that are all trying to like coordinate and approve something. And I, you know, we have found software to be helpful there in time saving. So obviously you've done this math, you've been on the other side of it too. I'm curious to hear some of your reflections on that.

Yeah.

So we're, I mean, it's not like we're doing maintenance in pen and paper, right? Like Appfolio has a pretty robust maintenance platform. We, we, we are in mid-rollout in their Performer in terms of their AI tool, which is, is helping a lot with triage. I think especially at SFR, front-end triage is paramount to being able to effectively execute maintenance because you don't have a, a part, like you don't have a shop with parts in it like you do in multifamily. You can just go walk to, you, if you can solve something before you roll a truck, that's super beneficial. I, we have, with our portfolio size, we have 6 coordinators. So I mean, we're, we're not at 100 per, like, we're pretty scaled on that in terms of efficiencies.

A lot of that's training coordinators for 5,000 doors, 6 or 7.

I'd have to pull up the list. So, uh, now AI helps that with the intake and triage. Vendor routing helps that. Having a good vendor network helps that. In certain markets, we use things like Lula, which, which help that. Because it simplifies things. But in a lot of markets, we have our own maintenance guys and the coordinators are doing the dispatch. Now we have coordinators and supervisors, there's, it's split, plus the techs and the vendors. But yeah, when you said like 1 to 100, 1 to 300, we're well over that right now without Folio. So I, I, I don't think, you know, what did we give up? We gave up some analytics, we gave up some dashboards. You were talking about Yardi's UI/UX. Being kind of awful. Like the one that we came off of did, now apparently they're relaunching it, but did not have a great user experience. It's hard to run reports. It's hard to pull out some of the things we were looking for. Or I would say it wasn't, it wasn't simple. If you like, I'm, I'm big on like there's to be easy and simple. So easy requires preexisting knowledge. Simple, it's just really intuitive. People have used that software, it's, it's easy. If you haven't used it as like I hadn't and I was trying to learn it, there was this pretty steep curve. And if I, and I'm pretty technology literate and pretty good at figuring these things out. So if I was struggling, I knew others would definitely struggle. And I would push back a little bit on the clean breaks. This is probably born out of my time in multifamily, but I've never thought anything that we do really kind of has those clean breaks, lives in a vacuum. Everything ripples into everything else. Like make ready is drifting to turn. What if that both, or make ready is drifting to leasing and marketing? What if that property sits vacant for, you know, 15, 21 days and someone's gotta go, like we call a sparkle bucket, like go, you know, freshen it up. Or maybe there's a roof leak while it's leasing and you gotta get maintenance back involved and you have to have that constant conversation with owners about pricing in the market. Like there's, everything touches everything. And I think part of my other drive for continuity on the data side is just my intuition around where things are going with AI. Having spent a lot of time and done a lot of things with AI, the latency and cost of having to normalize data from a bunch of different systems into one place, I think is, is creates a lot of challenges. Whereas if you have everything in one place, you have the relationships between all of that data mapped, you can actually do really interesting things with agents. And so I'm, a lot of what I'm doing is also positioning us for, in my mind, like '27, '28 when these tools and harnesses start to mature a little bit more and they can drive more outcomes. And hopefully we build the power infrastructure to support it as a country.

But now what about the concept of like, I would call it maybe like vendor lock-in or wholesale transfer pricing power, where if you are fully all in on a tool, they have a lot of leverage over you. Like when, if you back up a second, like you talked about how you moved from when you came in, they had just completed a migration from PropertyWare.Folio. You know, like if, if, if we were to ever switch out from Buildium, all these tools would mostly stay the same, these third-party point solutions, which would actually be an advantage for my team. And you know, we, we actually, like I, I had a saying for probably 10 years, which was I want everything without a dollar sign out of Buildium. And that's basically how we operated, basically the total opposite of what you just articulated. I want everything with a dollar, without a dollar sign out of Buildium.

And then accounting platform and then everything else is, yep.

And then if we need to, we can swap out Buildium with a different accounting solution or Vibe Code or whatever. Now that's easier said than done, but I feel good about my relationship with Buildium because they, they, they have limited power over me. But in your situation, AppFolio could double their prices overnight. And now I feel like you're in a worse position than you were when you had, you know, a little bit more spread out. Across different, you know, solutions.

That's, that's fair feedback. And I might come to regret this at some point, but we actually, I'm trying to think how much this, the best way to frame this, how much I can share. I just renegotiated our AppFolio contract and made it a, and extended it. And we're very happy with, with where we are from a fee standpoint for the next like 5 years and hopefully beyond. I'm lucky I inherited a customer advisory board seat when I started with AppFolio that our former CEO had. Adam. So I've gotten to spend time with their team. I spent time with their team at, at the Future conference last year. We did a cab retreat. I've gotten to know their chief product officer, their head of AI, their CTO pretty well. I have a lot of confidence in where they're headed. You know, in the 2 years I spent playing around with AI, I mentioned in kind of my intro, I was actually trying to figure out how to build an AI-native PMS. It turns out that's hard because you're actually building like 30 softwares and I'm not a software developer by trade. So I don't know what that says about me that I thought I could do that and I quit my job to do that. And then like 6 months later I was like, what would I do? Why did I do this? But a lot of kind of my intuition around what I wanted to build, it has a lot of echoes in what AppFolio's done, right? Like a single database source where they have a graph layer that's mapping the relationships, they have a vector store that's, that's helping with semantic search eventually, as opposed to a Yardi or a Realpage who's done so much M&A that they're spread out across hundreds of databases.

Totally.

And I'm, I'm, I mean, part, a lot of this is probably happening at all companies. I don't have a lens into some of the other PMS providers right now, but with AI, they're shipping features and improving the product all the time. I've worked with basically, you know, I mentioned Yardi earlier. I've worked with Resman. I've worked with Entrada. I've worked with RealPage, Entrada and RealPage through consulting assignments. AppFolio is the most engaged in our success of any of those who I've worked with. You know, they sent 2 people in our office to do like a reimplementation where we spent 2 days. Just breaking down how we do things, giving advice. They're super available and accessible. And I, I, you know, we beta tested a lot of stuff at, for Yardi when I was at Roscoe, like brand new products, had it 6 months, a year before anyone else. We never had this sort of relationship. They never felt so invested as the AppFolio team feels in our success. And that's been unique. And so that gets like good faith from me. But in 5 years, you're right. They could like triple the price because, and I might have to say thank you. But I also think switching costs on PMS software is going down as AI gets better and as you can do some things that can help with that. And I've done these, I've done a bunch of software implementations that doesn't necessarily scare me. I don't want to do it, but I ultimately, if it was better for the business and better for the team to make a change, we'd make a change and we'd figure out how to execute it. Sure. I don't want to operate from the worry about what might happen. I try to be more focused on like what's best today., and then we'll deal with the problems that arise.

Yeah. And I, I think a 5-year, you know, engagement is, is solid, right? That's plenty of time to, you know, operate profitably and, and kind of reevaluate when you're, you know, 180 days out or whatever. So, okay. I wanna jump into some more of the maintenance stuff. So you and I had an interesting discussion at Broker Owner about this concept of, you know, maintenance technician efficiency. And like, I think maybe I remember you describing that you were going to sort of what I would call extraordinary lengths to increase the efficiency of a maintenance technician when he's at the property. Am I remembering that right? Like, do you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to like minimize drive time and some of this other stuff? Like, talk a little bit about what you guys are doing there.

I would say we're in the early stages of that. You know, we actually just for, like we, we basically were pure vendor last November and have rebuilt our in-house maintenance team. And as part of that rebuild, we have a brilliant guy, Brett Kirsch, and then Paul who were leading that effort. As part of that, again, our company's owner obsessed. We're focused on how do we optimize for owners because we think that's ultimately how we're gonna grow as a company because we're trying to build a scale business. And a lot, there's a lot of leakage in maintenance. If you pull reviews of of any management, any SFR management company from owners, a lot of them are complaining about maintenance costs. A lot of them are playing.

Yeah, but that's because they don't know what stuff costs today. That's not necessarily, you know, an indictment on the property management company.

I don't know. I mean, they're the customer and perception is reality. So I would challenge that and say then the management company is not doing a good job of communicating the costs and explaining those costs and giving a representative sampling of the potential costs so they understand that this is market like that's burden's on us. The burden of proof is on us, not on them to be experts. That's why they hire a property manager. They hire us to drive the bus and to be the expert. So we need to share that expertise with them. And like, we get this all the time and owners push back on our coordination fees for vendors. And we have to say, well, let me explain to you why we charge this fee. And then, and we have a discussion and some don't like it and that's okay, but most of them understand it. So we're, For me, routing and drive time, windshield time is, it either costs the owners a lot of money or it costs us a lot of money, right? We're either passing it through or we're not. Either way, it's sunk cost. So we're trying, because we have density and we're a decent-sized management company, you might actually be able to do this with your density, even at 700 doors possibly, is we're in a couple markets where we have the density to do it. We're grouping zip codes and working on doing maintenance on specific days of the week. In those zip codes so that way you can get maybe a little bit of a buildup. You're not having drive time across the city. You have that group where you're doing. Residents haven't really pushed back on that a lot. There's AvalonBay, that's a big REIT, proved this out a few years ago on a property they had in the DC area that had no staff. Maintenance was done on Mondays and Thursdays unless it was an emergency. And because there was an assurance of outcome, the residents didn't mind. It's the same thing, like Uber figured this out when they put the car on the map. And you could see the car coming. People were willing to wait longer when they knew it was going to show up. When residents know the problem's going to get fixed, they tend to be a little bit more, give more grace on that side of things. So that's one piece. We're working, we're building out our integration with Home Depot and Lowe's to where we can order things before we get to the store. So things are ready at the contractor desk. So we're not waiting in line or having to shop. It's really, I think like it's a few minutes here, a few minutes here, a few minutes here. And over time that aggregates, maybe I get one extra work order done a day, or even like quality of life for my maintenance guys is better because they're not driving all over the place all day. Like they're actually, you know, doing work and getting stuff done. It's been a challenge. The routing and dispatch pieces are things that not a lot of tools and softwares out there do well enough yet. Google Maps has a routing API, or Google has a routing API. That, that's like in the backend of Maps that you can use that helps somewhat. You can give it like timeframes and it can help with some of that stuff in terms of traffic flow, but it's not a solved problem. When we inherited Northpointe, there was so much like bleeding on owners on, on maintenance when we were audited, like time spent on work orders and what work was being done. And, and so we're really starting from first principles and trying to rebuild that up. Because ultimately, like, that's, that's the, that's the big— that and when holes are vacant leasing, those are the two big friction points for our customers. If we can solve maintenance and make them feel good about it and be profitable, we're going to win. And it's hard and it's taking a lot of time, but that's why we do it.

This episode is sponsored by Haven AI. I've been hearing a lot of great things about Haven AI recently. A couple weeks ago, I was on a webinar panel about AI and property management, And Evernest talked about how Haven's AI agent transformed their leasing operation, handling most of their top-of-funnel leasing interactions across text and email. And you might have heard Haven mentioned on a recent episode of my podcast where one of their customers, Matt Luke, told me about how he's managing 350 doors with no W-2 employees. That's not a typo or a misspeak.

Zero W-2s.

He's using Haven's AI agents for maintenance and leasing to make that work. There's no shortage of AI hype in property management right now. Everybody's got an AI something, but what caught my attention with Haven is that it's not just a chatbot bolted onto your website. It's a platform of configurable AI agents that plugs into your existing software and actually takes action. We're talking creating work orders, dispatching vendors from your preferred vendor list, triaging emergencies, qualifying leads, scheduling tours., and following up with prospects across phone, text, and email around the clock. They're Y Combinator-backed and were just named one of the top 50 AI startups in real estate. The operators I've talked to who are using it seem genuinely impressed, which in our industry is not easy to earn. If you wanna see what the buzz is about, book a demo at usehaven.ai. And thanks again to Haven AI for sponsoring this episode.

Do you guys bill your maintenance like time and material? So like all these incremental minutes saved goes right to the owners? Yes.

Okay.

So my position is that this is a complete and total waste of time and that all of the hour— and I'll tell you why— but all of the hours that you're spending on this, like route optimizing, Google Maps API, pre-ordering the desk for Lowe's, like all of that is— it's like over-solving by an order of magnitude. And here's why. Like, I don't believe that owners, rental owners are entitled to below-market pricing just because they're working with a property manager. Like, it is not in my scope of services. It's not in my PMA that like, because you, Mr. Owner with a duplex on Main Street, are— have hired me for $129 a month, that does not entitle you to like industrial-grade pricing on, you know, it does not entitle you to the same pricing that a REIT would get. Like, you're like, you know, we're going to try to do better than retail. And I had a whole discussion with— on a different show about this, of like the 3 different levels of pricing. There's like rip-off pricing, which is like the private equity-backed HVAC roll-up companies. There's normal pricing, which is just like some guy in your town who's been doing it for 20 years that charges fair prices. And then there's like Home Depot guy in the parking lot pricing was like $25 an hour. Totally unrealistic, right? Some owners are expecting that. Unrealistic. I'm shooting for the middle, right? That's what I want to deliver for my owners. And I like all this time and energy and money that you're spending to try to get owners to save a few dollars here on their own work orders. I just don't believe they're entitled to that. I'm not going to spend my time and money on it. They're not paying for it. It's not in our contract. And like, I'm not— I am not my client's, like, best friend. I am not their financial advisor. I'm a property manager. I am a property manager. They're paying $129 a month or whatever it is, and I am just not going to do all that for them. I'm just not. And I don't think they deserve it. I don't think they are paying for it. I don't even think they're really expecting it. Some of them might be, but I don't think it's fair. I don't think it's fair to put that on property managers. It's like, you know, an owner complains about some plumbing bill. I'm like, this is less than you would've paid as a homeowner. Like if you had called a plumber to your house today, this is less than you would've paid for that same repair and you're whining. Like, that's my perspective on this.

So I, I, I agree. I mean, if I have an owner push back and say this is too high and it's market, or it's just below market because of our relationship with vendors and the things that we've done, or 'cause it's our tech and our tech operates at a lower cost than what would be used to vendor. Then I agree with you. Now, in the same breath, I would say we're trying to build a scale business. We're trying to really like do something different in terms of how we think about owners, how we execute as a company. I hope every other management company has your same perspective because I'm going to take doors from them day over day over day because my cost to maintain is going to be less.

But we're talking about like a 5 or 10% decrease in maintenance costs. Owners don't even notice that.

But if it's on, what if that's on a turn, right? That's like a $3,000 turn and I can do it for $300, $400 less, $500 less. I still don't think it's enough for them to, um, I think my—

because it's never apples to apples, right? It's like by the time they switch property managers and get some, like the whole situation's different, the market's different, pricing is different, the unit condition is different.

Like, yeah, that's, that's fair. I wouldn't, Going back to like the perception piece, I think if we can demonstrate those small things, the small savings, like, yeah, is it like, is it a significant amount of money to them? No. But is there, does it build more trust? Does it build more, like, net promoter, like, are they referring us in, in terms of those things? Like, it's not all, it's taking a little bit more of a long-term perspective on how we're creating value that I'll give up a little bit today as opposed to trying to maximize every dollar because I'm not trying to build a lifestyle business. If I was building a lifestyle business, it might be different, right? Like, but you know, we're trying to build the preeminent company in residential property management and doing it in a way, and that requires our customer who are owners to trust us, have confidence in us that we're acting as a fiduciary, that we're putting their financial like benefit and outcomes when we have the ability to improve it, that we are doing it versus having our outcomes in P&L be primary and that that's going to pay dividends long-term. We also, I, I would say this, some of this was born out of the fact we have a couple big institutional clients with who operate at a portfolio level and think about things a lot different than what we'd call a retail owner. And their focus is entirely on cost to maintain and, and maintenance optimization. So, and we're competing with all the other big, like, scaled players in the business for those doors. And if we can get more efficient and drive that cost down, it's going to win me a lot more doors. And that's ultimately the business that we're in is we manage properties. So I want to manage as many as I can. And it's hard to do. It's, it, this is, I would say this is where it's a lot harder than multifamily because I have one client who owns 3 properties. That's 1,000 doors. It's just, it's very different than here. 1,000 doors might be, you know, 800 clients.

Right?

So, and that's where technology comes in to help scale things. That's where we're trying to do some interesting things with AI to give a more white glove experience to a retail owner where we, it's just not possible to do that with humans doing all of it. And a part of that's going to be optimizing maintenance and, you know, they don't have to always feel it because I can sell it, right? Like I can go to the market and say, do you have this experience with your property manager where you don't feel confident in maintenance costs and like all the perception and things, whether they're real or not. And I can lean into that and show them how we're transparent and how we do these things that maybe saves them 5%, that, but that might be enough to make them make the change beyond the dollars. Because we're, a lot of our clients on the non-institutional side are like mom and pops who are just trying to like make some extra money to put their kid through college or that sort of thing. Every dollar matters, right?

Like they're not necessarily independently wealthy and, you know, well, yeah, every dollar, every dollar matters to me too. Like, you know, I got a family to put through college. I mean, like, there's, there's not some moral high ground here where like, just 'cause they're, you know, you know, I, you know, in the same way that you said, like, you hope a lot of property managers think like I do, like, I, I kind of hope that you guys continue to pursue this 'cause you're, you're in my market and it's like, yes, continue to like, you know, sacrifice your own margin for these institutional owners. Have fun with that. Like, I, I have so little interest in that, I can't even articulate it. I just—

that's why this business is fun too, right? There's a bunch of different ways to legitimately— like, that's why, that's why I fell in love with property management is there's almost an infinite number of ways to do it. I mean, ultimately, you know, you've built a very good business for yourself in Ohio. Like your owners, your owners trust you, right? Otherwise they wouldn't still be working with you. You've done a good job for them. You're at the size that you're at. We have some, some more institutional groups that require a lot of work and a lot of effort. And I think that's where Dan and I coming from multifamily really works in our benefit. So like, I'm used to this, right? Like I'm used to asset managers who are in our business all the time and owners who have extremely high expectations because in those cases we're dealing with like $70 million, $100 million, $150 billion properties and investments that like we're the steward of and are responsible for making sure that they maintain and hopefully increase their value. So for me, it's just kind of like, yeah, it's just what we do. Yeah.

And you know what, as soon as that, as soon as that asset manager Soon as that REIT, whatever, finds a good opportunity, they're going to sell the property right out from under you. And they don't give two Fs how much money you made on it in the time you were managing it. You get nothing on the increased value of that property. In fact, they'll probably give you a hard time because the leases weren't the way they wanted them on the way out the door. Like, I've had my fill of dealing with those folks and they don't appreciate property managers. They don't care about my profit margin. They all they care about is their next role at their next job or making a buck on the property that I, you know, blood, sweat and tears over for, for could have been 6 months, you know, some big turnaround that we executed. And they painted this vision of a 5-year plan. We're going to be working together, blah, blah, blah. 6 months later, oh, you know, we had a great offer. Sorry about that. We just need to get all the keys together for us.

Yep.

I don't know how you guys do it, to be honest.

I've had all that happen.

I don't know how you do it.

My mentor taught me once you reach a certain size, you have to grow really fast just to stay still because deals are going full cycle all the time and you're going to lose some of those to other operators or someone's biggest owner-operator and you have zero chance at management. I guess I'm just 20 years in kind of conditioned to it and I see it as a challenge. Maybe they sell it, but then they're going to go buy more. This is what they do. So who are they going to use? Hopefully they use me because I did a really great job and I made them a lot of money. As many—

they're going to use their brother-in-law who just started a property management company. They're going to use the next guy who said they're going to do it cheaper. But like, you know, there's no loyalty out there, man.

I've had clients, I've had clients who were like, I'm going to start a management company. And, you know, I told myself, I will help you. Like, I will give you advice. I will tell you like what roles to hire because you're not going to want to do property management. Like, I know you, like you're a deal guy. Like you buy it, you like buying properties, like investing in things. You're You like acquisitions and you like making the money on the dispos. You don't like fixing broken toilets. You don't like all the things that come with being a property manager, with providing someone their home day to day. And all 3 times I've done that, they've come back and hired us like 6 months to a year later and been like, you're right. But because I stayed close, because I kept the relationship, right? It was still there. I've had dozens and dozens of properties go full cycle and sell, Those clients come back to me when they want to use management again because we're focused on optimizing the value. And then at ResProp, as we were leaving, we were starting to put into place more incentive-driven PMAs and management agreements, whether that's a variable fee tied to budget performance, or we were negotiating right when I left our first lease-up that if we exceeded pro forma revenue to where when they put long-term debt on the property, the value was going to be meaningfully higher than what they had underwritten, we were going to get to participate in some of that upside. And we were negotiating around some of those things because most multifamily operators think lease-ups are about speed. They're not. They're about value creation and maximizing what they either refinance or sell that property for at stabilization. And I pushed for us to get to participate in some of that upside. No one's going to be like millions of dollars, but it was going to be probably 5 figures to low 6 figures. Based on performance. And that was going to be really meaningful for us. That was like 6 months fees on those properties. Like I said, there's a lot of ways to do it. I'm really focused on serving the customer. If you serve the customer well, the business tends to do well. As long as you're not being dumb about it, right? You can also put yourself out of business that way if you're not being intentional. But incentives and property management and all sides of the business are pretty misaligned.

Yeah, let's get into that. I, you know, I, I, I agree with you on there for 100%. And in fact, what, like a, basically a founding cornerstone of RL Property Management is that we don't charge leasing fees for that reason. I think it's a horrible, horrible incentive. Yeah. I mean, you just touched on it. Leasing's not about speed. And the, the way that most property managers charge, which is a big leasing fee, that's like a significant chunk of their revenue is that leasing fee.. And so their incentive is to just find somebody, move them in, collect that leasing fee, right? And so I said from the beginning, before I even really knew anything about property management, we're not going to do that. We're not going to charge a leasing fee. Our incentive is to find the best possible tenant for your property and keep them in the property as long as possible, because if they move out, it's on us to find you a new tenant. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about incentives in this industry, and I think there are issues. It's classic principal-agent problem stuff. I'm sure you've read up on that as I have. And when you start trying to solve this, and I know a lot of people, I'm sure you've walked down this path as well, you're like, all right, well, we're going to start with like a flat monthly fee, but then, you know, we take the NOI and like a certain percentage of that goes to property manager above this floor. And like, then we can work in some like occupancy targets that sort of sweetener and you get like this big complicated formula of like trying to like perfectly align the incentives between the property manager and the owner, then you have like, you have the pro— same problem in your own company, right? Where you have salespeople who are paid on commission to bring in these owners, but they might not be a great fit. And you have leasing people who may be paid on commission and that's working against you. So, you know, inevitably you, you end up with these complex solutions and you're like, wait, this is too complicated. No one even understands it. You have to like walk it back. So share, maybe you've, figured some stuff out that I haven't here. I'd love to hear your perspective on some of these things.

I won't say I figured it out. I'd say we're actively trying to improve and make things better kind of progressively. It's funny how you kind of laid out the bowl of spaghetti that was like how people can get there. I tend to over-engineer things. And so that very much like feels familiar. What I've learned in my career is that simple usually wins. Same thing with the software, which is why We are, we're in negotiations with some institutional groups, which is the only place where I think this would work in terms of SFR, because I wouldn't do this with a retail owner, but, but looking at NOI as the driver for the fee, but you would have to have exclusions, taxes, insurance excluded, major like CapEx, things that are major events that can't be planned for excluded. So it's really tying into like efficiency and maintenance. It really actually becomes more of a retention bonus and retention incentive than anything, which is what I actually like. Because to your point, I think there's a lot of work that goes into leasing. I can justify a leasing fee. What I would like to do that I don't think any client's ever going to let me do is invert the fees and charge a lot less for leasing and charge more for retention.

Because that's what we did. We have a huge lease renewal fee, but no leasing fee.

Yeah, because that ultimately is what benefits the property, especially in SFR. And occupancy, I'll try not to get too much of my occupancy rant. I think occupancy is a vanity metric. It's a, it's pretend. An SFR occupancy's binary is 0 or 100. Rent collection is binary. It's collected or it's not. Like for those individual owners, they don't care what your portfolio collections are. In their lived experience, it's one or the other. So we're, we are trying to optimize and talk around not occupancy, not necessarily collections, but days vacant because that's where we can actually make a real impact. You know, if I have a, as a portfolio, if you have a bunch of people move out, in June because it's June and people move in the summer, my occupancy drops. I'm not really worried about that in that like 0 to 21 days vacant, right? We're doing turn, we're getting it ready to lease. We get over 35 days and now it's a problem. Like now we gotta go solve that problem because now that owner's starting to have to come outta pocket, pay maybe to pay their mortgage or like things that they weren't planning on or anticipating. But back to the incentive piece, I agree leasing fees feel somewhat misaligned. I think retention is where we could be a lot better aligned. I think maintenance is where it's really misaligned. And some, and the execution by some companies, not everyone, but because, and this is, was something I'm having to learn coming from multifamily, we made no money on maintenance, right? Payroll flows through, you have a maintenance person who works at the property, the property pays for that. Like in multifamily, the way my mentor friend did was we rent people and processes, right? Our product is that we rent people to management companies who are trained and know how to execute and they run the properties. So that was the one place we made money was management fees and maybe like a marketing fee here or there. We made $0 on maintenance. So I'm having to adapt my thinking around some of these things. It's been kind of hard, but I think because of that experience, I'm coming at it from the lens of like, if I, this shouldn't be the end-all be-all of where a lot of money's made in maintenance. I know smaller companies struggle with it. I think larger companies make a lot of money on maintenance. And if we can pass some of that savings through to owners or find ways via incentives, like if we're getting paid on NOI, my, the whole team is in terms of leadership and focus and what we talk about, which matters because people do what their boss talks about all the time. Even if what's on paper might be different, like if you're always asking about certain things, that's where people optimize for. And if what we're talking about is minimizing days vacant, driving retention, because all those things ultimately flow through to NOI, which get us paid more., then that also is going to naturally result in better outcomes for those owners, which then adds to more property growth and more opportunities for people on our team to get promoted, make more money, et cetera.

Yeah. I mean, on the maintenance part, most property managers who run in-house maintenance do not make money on it. They don't charge enough, they don't keep their utilization rate high enough. Most of them are breaking even or losing money. And if you are losing money on maintenance, you're basically paying your owners to maintain their properties. You're subsidizing their rental properties, which is insane. So no one should operate, you know, maintenance, a maintenance, an in-house maintenance division at a loss. That is, I don't get that at all.

And I'll just add for real quick context, we only have in-house maintenance in markets where we have 500 homes or more, right? So if I have a home with 70, 70 prop, a market with 70 doors, we're using vendors. And we're coordinating those vendors and doing that because to your point, it does not make sense for us. We can't utilize a tech enough. And if you're someone's second or third job, they're not reliable.

So, well, you should be able to keep a tech busy with about 100 doors full-time-ish.

Interesting. I'll take that back and we'll look at it because I would love that because we do better on in-house maintenance in markets where we can do it than we do on vendors.

Yeah. Look at your spend. Take one of your markets where you have like 200 doors and look at your total like spend maintenance spend across all your properties, you can usually absorb about half of that with an in-house. You can move, you can usually move about half of it in-house.

It's just interesting that perspective because my intuition goes to like ticket volume, right? Like, and like, and work volume being some of the driver, both in terms of like make readies and volume of tickets. And you have to get like a 300, 400 number in terms of units before it feels like you have enough. To keep someone busy 40 hours a week. But you might be right, just from a cost and revenue standpoint, it might be moot. I might—

Yeah, because like the punch-outs on the turns and stuff, there's some, there's some stuff that aren't like maintenance work or like resident-submitted tickets, but are, you know, lots of work.

Yeah.

And then on the, on the NOI side, like these sort of innovative pricing models, I thought about this too. It's like, all right, You know, what if we charge no management fee, but we get to keep 10% of the NOI or something? Like make it so the incentives are aligned so that, you know, my incentive is to make the property profitable. You as the owner want the property profitable too. Let's work together. Like give me a cut and we'll be fully aligned. Because, you know, you hear from owners all the time, you know, you guys are making more money on this property than I am, right? You ever hear that from an owner?

Yeah. So, so my, so my boss, my mentor told me not to drive a nice car. Because I used to pick up clients and drive 'em around. So like, you need a Mazda, not a Lexus. So this is, this is fun. It's not real, but it's funny. Just the perception thing.

I know, but I think it is real. Like, and that's, that's why maybe I'm just burned out, but like, I don't wanna serve people who don't wanna see me be successful. Like, I don't wanna be in business with somebody who would be mad if I showed up in a Lexus to a property or to a sales appointment. And then would be making jokes about me making more, more money on their property than I am. Like, I want to work for people who are thrilled to see me succeed and thrive. And so maybe that's kind of why I moved in, in, you know, other directions in the industry. But like, to me, that, that is soul-crushing, this idea that my customers are watching my personal lifestyle and gauging that against like, well, that's money that actually should have been mine because you're managing my properties.

Like, so I can joke about that because it's my relationship with my boss and she didn't like fully mean it. Like it was because I was joking.

I know, but I think there's an element of truth to it.

Well, she was— I was doing that. Her head of acquisitions just bought this like $150,000 Porsche and she was like, he's supposed to drive that car because people are investing with him. Like we're— it was tongue in cheek. But I would just say like in that situation you outlined, I have no problem firing an owner, right? Like I need to work with clients who understand the value that we bring and we create and who aren't going to make it laborious to work with them on a regular basis because they're just whining about everything and it's not worth it. So like I've turned in keys on lots of multifamily properties and said like, you guys aren't paying bills. You guys aren't like, you're here all the time, like distracting yelling at my staff, like, I have zero interest. Here's the keys. Like, we're out. We're, we'll, you know, for the next, we got 30 days to wind this down and then we're done. We did that with a bunch of SFR owners when, when we took, when Dan and I stepped in and took over leadership at Northpointe. Like, they weren't paying their bills. They were tough to work with. They, they were demanding too much time for what, for, for their segment of, of things. And we said, no, thank you. Now we're trying to use technology to be able to serve some of those people better. But I agree, like when people, when there's an entitlement, I don't have a lot of patience for it. Like what we do is really hard and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of intention. And I think most of our clients appreciate that. I will say my first intuition when an owner's upset is not to blame the owner. I always look at us first. Like, have we failed to communicate? Is there truth and their perception? You know, is our side of the street clean? Like, are we justified in our opinion? A lot of times we're not, right? Like you can find flaws and like, hey, if we communicated better, if we'd been more proactive, hey, we really dropped the ball here. This was our fault. Then, then I'd get it, right? Because I'd be the same if I was a, if I was a customer of a business and that business was failing me or not communicating with me in a forthright way, I, I would be upset too, especially if it was like what was going to pay for my kid's college or something like that. Like it's a much more intimate thing. But for some people, just, you know, part of my life, some people are just assholes and I have no patience for it.

Totally.

You know, at Roscoe, we literally have— it was a no asshole policy. Like, we weren't going to work with clients who weren't— who we didn't want to work with. And we fired some clients because of that. And we do the same at North Pointe. I don't need to be everybody's property manager. I want to be a lot of people's property manager. But we say no to businesses as much as we say yes to it.

Just to close the loop on the NOI discussion, like, back to that example where, like, you know, let's say we'll take 10% of the you know, profits or whatever. The problem that I always ran into with that is you would run into property owners who would underinvest in the property on the CapEx items, which would, which would destroy the profitability of the asset because the rents wouldn't keep up with market. Property's looking terrible. You know, they're trying to cheap out everywhere to save money. And now that's like stuff I can't control. But my performance is taking a hit because of decisions that they're making. Or it could even go the other way where they're like, you know, I want new sidewalks here, I want this, I want that. And they're spending all this money to over-improve the property relative to what it should be. And they're eating into my profits, you know, because we share the profits. So I always found that like where, where I would inevitably go, like the more I thought about like, you know, let's perfectly align these and stuff, it's like, you know what, I'll just buy my own property. Like if I'm going to go to this extent to try and like contort myself into like this perfect property manager and we're going to have all these aligning incentives, like, you know what perfectly aligns the incentives? When I own my own properties, I'll just go buy my own properties and stop managing them for other people. Like I always end up on that road and then I don't really know where to go from there.

I, you know, I think some of it, it comes back to client selection and then, you know, we've, we have proposed this to a large institutional group and I mentioned I did variable management fees. That change based on budget performance and multifamily. We've proposed this to an institutional group. They have not said yes yet. We could look up in 6 months and revisit this conversation. I could be like, Peter, I was so wrong. But we have some exclusions built in, right? If it's what would be considered a capital item, at least in terms of my multifamily brain, like sidewalks or driveways or roofs or HVAC or those sorts of things, it's excluded, right? That's not an operating expense.

Well, it's excluded, but what if they just don't do it?

Well, Then that's a client I don't want to work with because if they're not maintaining the habitability and the quality of the house, then I have no interest for you. Like we run into a micro example of this. I don't know if y'all have this where we have owners who don't want to pay for new photos. And it's like, we, you're asking us to market and lease our property and you're asking my property manager who's not a photographer to go take their iPhone and take pictures of the house. Like that is the most absurd thing. Like I remember like it's $125 to go like, or whatever it is to go have like Plan-O-Matic or someone go and take good photos that are beautiful and that actually help lease the property. And an owner that rents $2,000 and is losing, you know, what, like over $100 a day in vacancy loss, like won't pay $120 for a photo. And with those owners, we just have to have that conversation and do the math for them because they're thinking in a vacuum. They're not thinking about the big picture. And then if they still push back, then it's just not the right client for us. Like we, we have a standard as an operator that we want to meet in terms of like quality listing, quality of photos, those sorts of things that if clients aren't willing to Same thing with habitability of the quality of the home. Like again, we, that it means a lot to me to provide someone a good quality home. Doesn't have to be luxury or anything, but it should be clean, maintained, you know, the nicest it could be for its age and location. Then we, I just, I don't have time for those customers. Like you can go be a slumlord somewhere else. You're not going to do it under our umbrella. And maybe that's also the benefit of being a little bit bigger in scale is we can, we can have those conversations is where we can be a little bit more, dig our heels in. And say, no thank you. Like, good luck. You can go find someone else. We're, our, our time is valuable. We're gonna spend it on the people who, who this matters to.

Totally. Well, Stephen, we are over an hour. This has been a fast and fun conversation with you. It, it went in the directions I, that I knew and hoped that it would. So thank you for coming on the show today. And for folks who wanna follow along with you, I'm going to recommend you follow Stephen on LinkedIn. He's a great follow. Posts frequently, lots of fun conversations in the comments and stuff. So anywhere else that you would encourage folks to check out?

Most of it syndicates through my LinkedIn. I have my podcast called Year One where I'm documenting rebuilding Northpointe from first principles, from like a technology standpoint. So I get into what we removed, why we removed it. I think the big thing is like all the mistakes I've made along the way, which has been kind of humbling and fun for me to like have this obligation to go sit on camera and be like, I effed a bunch of stuff up the past month. Like, here's, here's all, here's all the things I thought were going to happen, and then here's what really happened, and here's what I learned from it. So podcast is called Year One. We have a YouTube channel for the company called The Residential Operators that will have more podcasts coming out later.

Okay.

But I, I post them on LinkedIn. You can find it, find them on my LinkedIn as well. Awesome.

Well, we'll link to that, and, uh, thanks again, Stephen, for coming on the show.

Yeah, thank you, Peter. Enjoyed it.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.