A Family-Run Property Management Powerhouse with Taylor Haas

We have a list, it's called at risk. And so anytime one of our team members feels like they have a bad interaction that an owner expresses concern, we put them on that list and that way we give them extra emphasis to making sure that we're trying to give them a good experience. And so everybody's aware that, you know, Jane Smith is unhappy right now. We need to like really step it up. And then we also give our clients the opportunity to switch portfolios. So our portfolios are named colors. So we have purple, red, and blue. So if they're just having a really bad time with Ryan on red, then I'll suggest, well, hey, you know, we can always do a team switch. So-and-so has been here for this many years, blah, blah, blah. I think you guys would be a personality fit, and then we'll move them over there. And we can usually save about 60% of unhappy people when we do that.

Wow. I tell you what, if we could save 60% of our churn, we would be a lot bigger. Welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. Hey, I appreciate all you listeners. I'm really thrilled today to introduce Taylor Haas to the show. Welcome, Taylor.

Yes, thank you, Peter.

It's great to have you on the show. So, Taylor, you are the president of Colorado Realty and Property Management. And what I love about your company is it's a family business, which is fascinating. We're going to get into that., and you guys, so you're in Denver and your company is about twice as big as mine, which is exciting for me cuz I get to learn from you and dig into just a bunch of issues that my company's facing selfishly and learn from somebody who's kind of been there. So I, let's just dive right in. I want to talk to you about how your company's organized. So, you know, people who've been reading my newsletter probably know that we're set up as a departmental structure., but we're, we're kind of flirting with the idea of trying out like a pod-departmental hybrid where the owner has more of a single point of contact. So I'd love to hear from you at your company, how are you organized and have you ever experimented with these different models and sort of what's been your experience?

Yeah, so our company has been set up as departmental since it was originally started by my parents almost 20 years ago. And as we've grown, we've held on to the departments, but what we've done is kind of convert into more of a hybrid structure. And so for us, our departments consist of a maintenance team, leasing team, and accounting team. And then, as you mentioned, our portfolio is about 1,200 properties. And so we have divided that up into 3 groups. So each pod, or each team rather, is managing anywhere from 350 to 400+ properties. And on that portfolio team, there's a leasing representative, a maintenance representative, and an accounting representative. And so those three work closely and handle all, you know, owner communication, tenant communications within their specialized area.

Okay. Really interesting. But the company still— it sounds like the company is still set up departmental. So your accounting people are kind of together in their little accounting area rather than in a traditional pod structure, you would have like your accounting person, your leasing person, your maintenance person, like they would be all together in like a little cubicle area or something like that?

Great question. So, we kind of do a combination of both. So, our team is fully remote. We have remote team members, we have stateside staff, and so, we will have like cohort days, if you will, where you are working with your department. That way you can ask a bunch of questions that you may be experiencing on no charging something, this maintenance request. And then we have other cohort days of working with your actual team. So you're talking about the owners and tenants that you have, properties that are vacant, stuff like that.

That's a really interesting concept. I can see how that would be really valuable to bounce back and forth between your peers that you're all working on the same group of properties and then your peers who are all like doing similar type of work to you, even if it's not on the same properties. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. So you've been departmental this whole time and, but you have sort of an interesting hybrid and it sounds like that's still working pretty well for you. Haven't been tempted to switch it up?

No. Every once in a while we'll like re-review how you have like the PM, the APM, and then whatever that supplemental person is. But no, for us it really works well and we hold our team accountable that, you know, no matter what position you are, you have communication with the owner and the tenants.

So. Yeah, and I just released my list of top 20 largest PM firms, and departmental is definitely dominant on that list. This is a new thing I asked this year is, you know, how is the company organized? 55% of the top 20, which I guess that's 11 out of 20, are organized as departmental. So pretty interesting. It definitely seems to be dominant among the larger companies. Okay, great. And I also wanted to ask— I know we're diving right into like the tactical stuff, but I wanted to ask about your, your phone setup. Something that came out of the PM Trends report is that owners really want to hear from their property manager by phone and not necessarily by email or text. And that, that holds true across all ages, which surprised me. But I know you were on the NARPM podcast and did a great job kind of breaking down you know, how you think about phones, but that was almost 2 years ago now. I'm curious, what phone system are you guys on and how do you, how does it, how is it set up today when someone calls into your office? Because I know back then you were saying like you had recently rolled out like a very basic phone tree and that was new. I'm curious if you stuck with that.

So we use RingCentral for our phone provider and we're fairly happy with them. And so we do still have a very basic phone tree to this day. We actually have only 3 options. One is to talk to a business development team member if you're an owner interested in our services. Two is if you are somebody that prefers to speak in Spanish, and then three is for everything else. And so if they go through the first one, it goes to our business development team. Spanish line, we have some fully bilingual team members that speak Spanish that you can post. Oh, cool. And then we have our very own call center where all other phone calls trickle in and we have our own team of receptionists that triage and troubleshoot those before passing them on to the team. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Well, that, yeah, that tracks and that seems to be working really well for you guys.

It is. Yes. I would say, you know, owners do call in and they will ask our team for their direct line and we don't ever share. Our team members' direct phone number only because if somebody's out of office, that's of course who the owner's going to call 6 times in a row and it's going to go to voicemail and then they're going to say we never answer our phone. So we try and have everything come through that front line to keep it as simple as possible. But to your point, yes, owners, anybody honestly wants to definitely have that communication over the phone and, you know, our company, we do struggle and have to send reminders of like people first, tech second of not just hiding behind email. And so something we actually started last year is, you'll probably think this is crazy, we call every single homeowner every other month and every single tenant on the opposite of every other month. Wow. They hear from us at least 6 times a year.

That's not crazy at all. We did, I can't remember what the latest is, but for a long time we were doing something similar, though I believe it was either quarterly or every 6 months. So it wasn't quite that same frequency. But that is admirable and I think that's a great idea because people are used to really only hearing from their property manager when there's a problem. And so to get a call just checking in like, hey, don't worry, nothing's wrong. It's a great way to sort of make a deposit into that bank of goodwill that you may need to draw on when it's time to replace the AC or something.

Yes, exactly. And we have like one dedicated team member that does it. So every month they're like, oh, it's Pam. You know, they get to then talk to Pam and then she passes it along to the appropriate person. But Yeah, we've saved a few people that we thought were going to end management with us. And then we found it to be really helpful, like, yes, just checking in, but then also like this time of year we're doing sprinkler turn-on. So we're sending reminders about that, opt-ins for them to, you know, get their HVAC or some service. So little things like that that just get deleted in email.

Yeah, they don't, they never respond to email about stuff like that. So yeah, that's a great idea. I like tied in with the something seasonal. Mm-hmm. Cool. So you guys are a family business. Your dad, was it your dad or both your parents that kind of started it?

Both my parents together.

Yes. Okay, great. And just listening back, it was cool to hear how you sort of worked your way up through the ranks. They didn't just install you as president. You started answering phones and doing leasing and you went through the whole journey. That experience I think is really awesome and I'm sure that it probably feels good, right? I mean, it was a lot of work and a lot of grind during the season of working your way into a leadership role, but I bet you're thankful for that now and feel like you've really earned it.

Oh, 100%. Yes. Started from the bottom, slowly worked up, and I've been here officially 10 years. And so, there's a few other employees that have also been here as long as I've been here, and You know, they're very appreciative of the fact that I wasn't just given this big fancy title. I started from the trenches with them, and so there's a lot of mutual respect there, which is nice.

That's awesome. And I think I saw you mentioned in Crane that you guys have multiple offices there in Denver. I'd love to hear more about that and sort of the strategy.

Yeah, so for our marketing focus, We give a big emphasis to our SEO and kind of Google ranking there and also our Google reviews. And so for those of you familiar with Colorado, we service from Colorado Springs all the way to Fort Collins, which is a huge chunk. There's, you know, a metro area in Denver, a metro area in Colorado Springs, and then Fort Collins is a little smaller. And so in order to get credit with Google, we essentially have an office in each of those locations so that that way we have a Google My Business page that gets credit. Gets boosted for people looking in those specific areas.

That's really neat. And just for fun, I pulled up an incognito window and I Googled Denver property management. You guys are number one. Woo! Number one on the map and number one in the organic search results. So, yeah, good work. Good work. I see you have a 4.6, which is awesome. We're, we're only at a 4.3 rating. So the, the multiple office strategy, Do you guys, like, how did you get started with that? Because we, we just have one office and the idea of opening like a second office in Columbus feels intimidating to me. Feels like a lot of work for an SEO bump. I mean, is it something where you could start with just like a virtual office and get a post, like a post office box or like what actually is involved?

So I will say this isn't specifically my specialty, but with that, I think it has to be an official address.

It can't just be a PO box. I think you're right now that I think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what we've done is it's like tiny little office spaces. We're talking like 500 square feet with a desk. And, and so our team never works out of there. We don't allow any sort of visitors there. We don't accept mail there, anything like that. So it really is just a satellite office that gets credit just on the map for, for the SEO purposes.

Really? So there's, you don't even use it to work or anything? Nope. But I don't, you have to accept mail there to get the Google postcard or whatever it is?

So like, we do get mail there, yes, and our team every once in a while will go and check the mail, but it's like we don't have like tenants sending rent checks or like insurance certificates, nothing like that going there.

So this is literally like a— it's like a ghost office. Yep. This is like something you'd like— like an investigative journalist would be like digging, you know, they're like at the window at night with like the light looking in. There's an empty office in Colorado and we're, you know, we're looking into this. Yep, exactly. That's so crazy. Do you know of anyone else doing this? Because this sounds like a serious, like, investment.

Gosh, no. I think people have asked about it and we've shared what we do, but I don't think a lot of people take the dive. My dad's background is all in marketing. He's super passionate about that. So we— and this is my dad's third business that he has started. So he's learned a lot on the whole Google stuff and getting credit.

And you don't just have like 1 or 2 of these. I mean, I looked on your website, you've got like 5 or—

Yeah, we have.

Yes, we have 5. So what about like subleasing these to somebody or like, would it be fun to like turn them into like little coworking spaces for like you or your team to just like work in different areas just to mix it up?

I mean, we've never considered doing anything. Like I said, it's literally a desk. There's not even Wi-Fi. Like you, we don't pay to, you know, actually work out of them.

There's like the power's off. Like it's like, it's like dark.

The door's locked. No one's there. Yeah, exactly. So no, there, I mean, it is a line item for sure, but it gives us such a boost that it's kind of totally a wash and worth it for us.

All right. I'm texting my marketing guy right now. Ghost offices. Get on it by the time I'm done recording. Hey everyone. Today's episode is sponsored by AppFolio, the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Speaking of future, AppFolio has an event coming up that you absolutely cannot miss. You know AI is changing the game in real estate management, but do you know how to actually use AI in your business? Are you looking for innovative ways to drive more value to your customers or more training and education on the AppFolio technology you're using today? Future Conference is the place to have all your questions answered, and it's happening October 13th to 15th in San Diego. Future is not your typical industry conference. It's where the future of real estate isn't just talked about, it's built. 3 days of powerful keynotes, incredible insights from industry experts, hands-on workshops led by your peers, and real-life takeaways you can implement in your business to drive real performance. There'll be sessions on Agentik AI, marketing and leasing, risk and fraud, leadership skill development, and so much more. But it's not just about learning, it's also about connecting. Real estate leaders, industry visionaries, and top tech innovators come together from across the country to build the future of real estate together. Attendees last year raved about Future Conference, amped with new ideas, valuable interactions, one of the most impressive conferences I've been to ever. So if you want to be a part of the next wave of innovation in real estate, head to futureconference.com right now to register for Future 2025. Early bird pricing is available through July 31st. That's futureconference.com. See you in San Diego. Yeah, let's stick with marketing for a minute. I know it kind of sounds like this is Lyle's area of expertise, but I mean, getting to 1,200 doors is no joke. Now, you guys have been at it for a minute, but just knowing myself operating 6— we're, by the way, we're at 699 doors today, so we're just anxiously awaiting that 700. I remember I was with you when you guys hit 1,000. I think it was at a conference. It was a very exciting weekend or week. Yeah. Just knowing myself at 700 doors, just to keep up with the churn and like our churn's not even bad right now. We've got it under control, but just to keep up with that is significant volume of leads and, and new doors. And at your size, it's double that amount. So I, I, I feel like everyone asks like, oh, what do you do to get more leads? But just maybe 2 minutes on what you're seeing that's working right now for your team in terms of keeping the leads flowing and keeping the new doors coming on. And I really respect your BDM chops, by the way. When I first got to know you, you were in a BDM role and you were crushing it. I remember talking with you about like closing rates and stuff. So I know you've got some good thoughts here.

Yes. As far as like keeping the leads coming in, we write about 5 blog articles a week on, you know, legislation.

5 a week?

Wow. Okay. Yeah, we pump a ton of content and then with that we'll do anywhere from 2 to 3 YouTube videos a week that accompany those blog articles. So we're getting the boost for, you know, having the SEO from those articles and then also any sort of YouTube SEO as that's becoming more popular. We do spend some money on Google Ads. We have a small budget that we work with with that as well, and then we give a huge emphasis on Google Reviews. Our expectation from their team is that they ask for 3 reviews a week. And so our goal by the end of the year is to have had 500 Google Review asks in order to meet our goal of keeping our, our Google rating at a positive number. And of course, having that, you know, number of total Google reviews.

Okay. So you're, and they're tracking that somewhere to make sure they're asking for 3 a week and Yeah. I assume you're using the common script to sort of incentivize people to leave reviews. Like, hey, if you mention my name, like I get a gift card or something along those lines.

Yep. Exactly.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay. So, and yeah, you mentioned YouTube. I checked out your YouTube channel, extremely active. I see that you guys are putting out a lot of content and I see that you're putting out even YouTube Shorts. Mm-hmm. Tell me a little bit about that. I saw a funny meme one where it was like song and you were reaching across the desk to turn on a monitor for somebody and Just funny stuff like that.

Yes. So we recently learned that, you know, socials are going to be taken into consideration with Google ranking. And so we were working to increase kind of that experience and Shorts is a big part of that because now I don't do this, but people now use YouTube like they use TikTok and they just scroll the Shorts on there.

I've been doing that.

Guilty. Yes. My dad's big into that.

Yeah.

So, so we've started making the Shorts about that and then. And so, you know, with that, we find that people are wanting to learn more about like us as a company, not so much about property management and what we can do for you. So yeah, we've been making some of those kind of comical TikTok-esque videos where they're just humor, totally unwork-related.

So, and is this, is this part of like, is this fun for you or are you just like, this isn't my area?

We'll do like a power hour on these little videos, like once a month where team members will come into the office and we'll record. The team plans it. They all look up videos they want to do and tell me what to do. But yeah, otherwise I would never do it unless it was like a requirement.

That sounds fun though. So a power hour where like the marketing team is, you know, everyone knows they're going to be walking around with cameras and everyone has like, I want to do this meme, I want to do this skit and let's have this song and okay, that's cool. Yeah, I like that. That's neat. Now it sounds like a lot of your team is remote, so it's just kind of whoever's in the Denver office there.

Yep, exactly. So we have 25 staff members and we have 12 are remote. So we're about 50/50 of local or rather US-based and then worldwide talent.

Okay, got it. 25 team members and there's no, no in-house maintenance? Nope, no in-house maintenance. Okay. And what about in-house brokerage?

I assume yes. So we made the decision this year actually to to no longer do brokerage-type sales. Mm-hmm. So we refer that out. There's a handful of us that are licensed in our office, but we do, we would do about 25 transactions a year, which is a decent amount, but it just wasn't our like area of expertise and we just really focused and centralized on property management solely.

Got it. So was, were you going to do a name change to Colorado Property Management? Drop the realty.

We need those SEO points, Peter.

No. Yeah. You spent a long time building that domain juice.

SEO juice.

Yeah, exactly. So the marketing, you know, obviously the, the blog posts are working. I can see that when I Googled, you know, Denver property management ranking number one in a highly, highly competitive market like Denver is no small feat. I was just talking with somebody the other day and they were saying that like longevity is a huge factor in SEO rankings. You guys have been around a long time, so that helps. Are you seeing that YouTube is turning into owner leads? Are you able to like directly attribute it back in that way at all?

No. Great question. Not yet. We do have little tracking things to see where the leads are coming from, if they're coming from YouTube. And no, there's not a direct correlation in that regard, but it's more or less like engagement, recognition, and impressions kind of thing.

Speaking of things that you've tried before and are no longer doing, your website has a great list of like things we don't do, right? And it's a lot of, it's like the normal stuff. Like we don't do association management, we don't do furnished rentals. One of the, there's a few on there that I thought were interesting. One of 'em is you don't do lease-ups, like lease only. We actually just started trying that. We're experimenting with it. Is this something you've tried before? Any top tips or just stay away from it completely? What, what are your thoughts?

I would stay away from it if it was me. But yeah, we did do it before and we were always like, we're going to convert them to full service management. This is just opening the door. Literally never happened. We would do like 10 to 15 a year and yeah, they would never convert. The owners would never adjust their price. We would have this big like kind of back and forth on getting the property ready. And so for us, it was just, it was taking more time than the actual people that we managed for that it just wasn't a high payoff activity.

All right. Fair enough. That's sort of what, what I would've speculated would be the downside. Another one I saw on there was about home warranties. It looks like you do allow them, but you charge an extra fee.

Is that right? Yes. We don't love home warranties. They are very time-consuming. Oftentimes we'll send a vendor, we'll send the home warranty out. They won't communicate with us. They'll communicate with the owner, leaves a huge downtime for the tenant, which makes it frustrating for them and for us. And so we're happy to work with them, but since it is a bigger burden operationally, we do charge extra. And so we kind of hope that that inspires people to drop it.

So are, what do people, you know, are they just happy to pay the fee just to find somebody that'll even allow them to work with a home warranty pretty much?

Yeah. Usually when we'll have the conversations with BDMs, people will be like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And it won't be until about a year later that they'll officially drop the home warranty after they realize that they're not getting a ton of benefit out of it.

Yeah. Once they pay the home warranty cost plus your fee, it's cheaper to just pay the maintenance as they go. Exactly. Yep. Another thing I saw on your website, which I thought was cool, was you've got a button that says landlords apply here, which, you know, I was like, wait, did I read that wrong? Is that supposed to say tenants apply here? And I clicked on it and no, it is actually, you know, landlords apply here and Share a little bit about the thinking there, because you were, you know, I mentioned you were in the BDM role, so you were highly concerned with leads coming in and how those conversations were going and how your company is positioned as you start to talk with a prospect.

Yeah, our website, we make changes to it about once a week and we do a lot of, you know, testing, A/B testing to see how things work. And so yeah, we'll try different buttons and call them different things to see with our test cookies. Yeah. What actually gets people to click on it. So that was one that shockingly, we, once we tried that verbiage, started to get a lot of interest on the landlord supply here. So we've had that one for a while. And then some of the other buttons on there, one time we had, I have no idea what I'm doing. And it had a little thing on there.

That's the button.

Yeah, that was the button. What do I do with my property? So yeah, we just try things out and see what gets clicks and where people spend time and stuff like that.

That's really cool. And I think, I have no doubt that works really well. And that's like, if you talked, if you spend a lot of time around like SaaS companies and software companies, I mean, they're always doing this stuff. You hear jokes about like, oh, we A/B tested like the different shades of blue on like the book now button and stuff. And in property management, most property managers, I think, truth be told, they don't have enough volume of activity on their website to be able to do like anything interesting here. I don't even know if we do, but because you're so big and you've been around so long, I'm assuming the volume of traffic on your website is, is significant, probably hundreds a day. Mm-hmm. So that you could do some cool testing like this and actually have like statistically meaningful results. So just all about, you know, converting traffic into booked calls basically with owners, I'm assuming.

Exactly. Yes. A lot of that. And we own our website. We do it all in-house. So we're not with like, um, one of the providers. So for us to go in there and make changes, that's really easy for us to just go in and make those changes as we see fit. Or like one week we had a ton of new lead calls that just asked about guarantees. So then all we did on our website for like the next 3 weeks was showcase the guarantees and then we started getting new questions. So then we pivoted to a different topic. So it just changed constantly.

Yeah. You have a lot of guarantees. I was clicking through there. I think, yeah. So I was going to ask you about those guarantees, but I guess that answers it. It seems like people are responding well to the idea of eviction guarantee, leasing guarantee, lease renewal guarantee, just any, any word plus guarantee. People are like, okay, great, sounds awesome.

Yeah, it's one of those where I think there's some article out there that someone wrote of like the top 20 questions to ask a PM, and it's like, ask about their guarantees. Yeah, because I would never say that, in my experience at least, that that's like the deciding factor for someone to choose us versus someone else, but it's kind of one of those added benefits where they're like, oh yeah, that's, that's really cool, I like that too, you know.

So yeah, on the sales process, I remember just having really great conversations with you about your sales performance as a BDM. So I can't remember if you guys ever worked with RentScale to help document your playbook. Yeah, you're shaking your head. Yeah. So maybe share a little bit about your journey into sales because you didn't start out doing sales and you sort of how you leveled that up because this is an area of the business that so many property management owners either are asking for help with or don't even realize how important it is and how much they do need help. So, I think it'd be great to get some of your wisdom here.

Yes. After I was a leasing person, I became a BDM and it was a very classic, like family-run company story of my dad used to do those calls and then one day was like, "I'm not going to take these calls anymore. You are." And so, literally, The lead came in, my dad was like, you know what we charge, I'm going to go to lunch, you got this. And so, yeah, had no training, didn't really think I was a salesperson at all.

No script, no training. Was LeadSimple even around back then?

We did have LeadSimple. Did I know how to use it? Nope. So, so yeah, it was totally random. And so going into that, you know, before we worked with RentScale, I think I had been a BDM for about a year. And so it was still just a lot of stuff that like I had come up with, you know, little scripts I'd put together working with LeadSimple and figuring it out. And then we went to RentScale. It was the time that we hired a second BDM. And so it really got her and I aligned to be on the same page, making sure our company message was the same and really just made it a whole lot easier than I'd originally thought that it was.

Got it. And you two were fairly competitive, I remember. Yes. And you were talking about back then it was like 30, 40 doors a month each or something. I mean, it was significant volume that you were doing.

Yes. Yeah. And she's still here to this day. We've both been here about 10 years, which is fun. We both started in college. That's awesome. But, oh yeah, we are friendly competitive. Like, we definitely wanted to beat the other one on doors closed per month, but it wasn't cutthroat where we'd like try and steal deals or like take stuff after hours and stuff like that. From the other person. But yeah, we— our goal was always at a minimum we had to close individually 20 doors per month.

Were you relying just on the inbound leads or were you doing outbound prospecting and kind of building up your own pipeline as well?

Solely inbound leads. We are blessed that we are able to receive a significant amount of leads for us to make that happen.

Okay. Yeah, we, we are trying outbound. We've been trying it for probably 6 months now with mixed results. Have you ever experimented with that or just, you know, never needed to?

We've never really needed to. With how the market has changed in the last couple of years, we've started considering it. The most outbound that we've done is we've started contacting all of the lost leads that we have in Lead Symbol from like the beginning of time. Yep. Of like 15 years ago. And then basically cold calling, outbound calling them to see if they're at all still interested or even have a property. And so that's about as cold calling as it's gotten. We did at one time do like lunch and learns with realtors at their offices. We had a few really great referral partners that we would do that with. But no, it's, it's really just kind of sitting there working our pipeline that comes from inbound.

During, so the sales scripts that you guys would be working through, would you be making sort of similar adjustments to those just like you described with the website where you're just constantly tweaking and tuning and trying different language and different closes and like different, phrasing?

Yes. So, like, prior to the last few years, like, the script worked perfectly. Like, we were bringing on huge deals. As the market has shifted, yes, we're having to do similarly a lot of A/B testing of figuring out what words work, what doesn't, what's important to people, and making those changes. I actually uploaded the playbook that we had RentScale help us with into ChatGPT, and I had it, like, give its little synopsis, and it's like, your 3 points of difference are X, Y, and Z, which was hilarious because that's not even what I considered our 3 It's different.

Mm-hmm.

So we've made a big change of kind of updating everything based off of that feedback too.

This episode is brought to you by PropertyMeld. Let's be honest, when a work order comes in, it's rarely simple. You're trying to make the right decision with limited information. You don't know if this resident is at risk for churn. You know you should dig through reviews to find the top performing tech, then check schedules to see who's available fastest. But instead, you refer to that preferred vendor list you built last year and hope for the best. We've all done it, myself included. The thing is, it's not just a guess, it's a risk. If you lose this tenant, your owner relationship suffers and may even churn. That relationship with them you've worked so hard to protect, it's on the line. When the stakes are high and the options are overwhelming, you need perfect decisions. And that's exactly what PropertyMelt helps you do. The second a work order comes in, it tells you if that resident is a churn risk. And you can see which techs have the highest ratings for that type of repair. You get a quick view of lead times, you know who's available, and you make a call you feel good about. One that keeps residents happy, protects owner NOI, and drives profitability. No more guesswork. Your brand new maintenance coordinator? Now they've got the decision-making power of a 30-year veteran. Because with PropertyMeld, you're not just managing maintenance, you're making Perfect decisions. Thanks again to PropertyMeld for sponsoring this episode. How do you think that the priorities of leads have changed since you were in that BDM seat? What are your BDMs hearing now from owners that wasn't as much of a priority when you were in it?

Yeah, I think it's more related to the sales cycle. Our sales cycle was anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks. Now we're at like 2 to 6 months. It's just a lot more people that, yeah, they're just not quite ready to make that change. They're concerned, they're hesitant. And we've seen a big shift from, you know, people that were first-time property investors to now, you know, this is kind of plan B because they can't sell their property. So they're a little bit more needy, a little bit more handholdy. Than kind of people that had reached out to us ready to sign up.

Yeah, sort of the return of the accidental landlord, which those who have been in the business a long time, even longer than I have, were around during that 2008 to 2012 when there was a huge volume that I guess people talk about that as being sort of a first wave of maturing of our industry when there was just a huge growth in third-party property management.

Yep, exactly. And our company started then. So like my dad, Lyle, yeah, he's always like, well, this is what people did and we still manage this handful of people. So hopefully that will be the case for this next surge.

Yeah, I hope so too. I'd love to see just a big kind of tailwind that helps out everyone in the industry. I want to ask about, you know, the company's been around a while and you've got a great size in terms of number of doors, how does that affect your willingness to switch up software and vendors? So there's a, a new crop of property management vendors that have really shown up at conferences, and a lot of 'em are sort of next generation technology with AI built in from the start. And it's very tempting as an operator to dabble and maybe try switching things up. You guys have been around a while, so do you switch things around less frequently than you used to? Or maybe it's even easier now that you're bigger because you have more resources. I'd love to hear some perspective there.

So main software, like our property management software, we have only changed once in our entire company history. And as everybody knows, it is very challenging and we hope to never have to change that again. But smaller, like supplemental softwares, like showing software, inspection software, we do change that as we see fit. Our team is, uh, we're a very tech-based company in the fact that our team is very like tech savvy. They like new and exciting and like recognize when it's time for us to move on. So pretty much always everybody's pretty supportive when we do need to make that change and kind of getting excited and diving into that stuff.

I sometimes, I feel like people are too quick to just jump to the latest thing and they're, and they're very critical of existing solutions. They sort of get lured by these promises. Do you find that you lean more toward, hey, let's stick with what works until it's so painful we can't stand it? Or are you more like, hey, if there's even a 5% improvement, let's just swallow the pill and make the switch now?

I think maybe the happy medium between both. If it's something that, you know, we have a great relationship with the team, we know that somewhere on their roadmap they're making these changes and might be slower than others, then yes, we'll, we'll stick with them. But if it's like, like for example, we've been with the same showing software for like the past 7 years and we just recently made the decision to change because this other company I found was way more advanced, had a lot going on., and so we made that change, but I was totally happy with them. Like I never would've made the change unless I had just gotten this one sales email and I was like, oh, got 'em. Cold email works. Yep. I was like, all right, I'll do a demo.

Oh no, you're about to get a bunch of cold emails from vendors. Exactly.

She's susceptible. Yep. I'm open to it. So, but yeah, so it just, it really just depends. Usually if there is something that's better out there, we'll make the change. Similarly, if pricing is a huge change that all of a sudden happens, we'll make a change.

Things like that. Yeah. Yep. And we're seeing that right now with private equity, you know, picked up a few of these showing softwares and rolled out price increases shortly thereafter. So what's some of your most controversial opinions about property management operations or software owners dealing with owners, property management agreement clauses? Love to hear something that you all are doing that's outside the norm or the sort of groupthink that sometimes goes on in our industry. Maybe something with fees or contract length, termination fees. What's some of the other controversial things people talk about right now? Like service animals or fair housing stuff, tenant screening.

You guys do anything wild?

Clearly nothing's coming to mind. Yeah.

Just by the book. Yeah, pretty by the book. I think we don't have tiered pricing, which I know is something that was a hot take that everybody did tier pricing.

Yeah, that is pretty unusual. I noticed that on your website.

Mm-hmm. So yeah, we just have our one service package and we've just found that it works best for us and it keeps our team accountable of, you know, making sure that every owner's experience is the exact same versus having to remember what all the different components are that they signed up for. I would say with our fees, we charge 3 fees and that's it. I mean, we have other stuff that's like add-ons and stuff like that that's situational or opt-in, but all we charge is around marketing, renewal, and monthly management. We don't have any sort of ancillary onboarding fees. We don't have any sort of walkthrough fees. It's all inclusive. And we found in our market that people in the sales process were getting really confused on what we were going to charge extra for compared to somebody else. Somebody else looked cheaper, but at the end of the day, we were. So we just tried to make it as simple as possible with just 3 easy fees.

Okay. That is different. And I'm assuming that you're talking about owner fees, so tenant fees different, but I was looking at your website and is your actual specific price on there or is you just have to submit to get a quote?

Nope. All of our pricing is on the website. Yes.

Okay. Got it. And it's a percentage if I remember right. Okay. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yep. And is that different if you have multifamily versus single family?

Yes, we do have a multi-property discount, but similarly, yeah, it's just those 3 fees that they can count on that might be a different percent.

Mm-hmm. Got it. Yeah, I could see like in a crowded market like Denver, if everybody has 3 plans with all these fees and everything else, that makes sense to me that, hey, we're going to keep it really simple and that's kind of going to be our point of differentiation. Hey, it's just 1 plan and 3 fees.

Next question. Right.

It's like, keep it really, yeah. Is that like when you're on a phone with a prospect, what are, what is your point of differentiation that you would bring up to sort of like right off the gate, make sure they remember which company you are?

Yeah. So we really lean into that we are locally owned and operated. We try and say locally owned and operated versus family owned and operated, just because sometimes people feel a little weird about that. So being local. And then the other one is kind of like we talked about earlier is our hybrid departmental approach. We have some of our bigger competitors that are set up very, very different from us. So we use that to be a big differentiator. And then we also talk about what we also talked about earlier is the calls, how we reach out to them every other month. We don't want them to just expect bad news from us.

Okay, nice. So they're getting kind of some warm and fuzzies thinking that, hey, these guys are going to reach out even if there's nothing going on. So thinking again about operating 1,200 doors, churn becomes very important. We are, you know, I've wrote, written a lot about churn and our approach to tackling it at RL Property Management. What's been your journey here and what are some maybe like couple tips for operators who want to keep their churn down? And we talked about the phone calls, Anything else you guys do to really make sure that your owners are sticking around and happy?

Yes. The phone calls is a big one for us. We have, we have a list. It's called at risk. And so anytime one of our team members feels like they have a bad interaction that an owner expresses concern, we put them on that list and that way we give them extra emphasis to making sure that we're trying to give them a good experience. And so everybody's aware that, you know, Jane Smith is unhappy right now. We need to like really step it up. And then we also give our clients the opportunity to switch portfolios. So our portfolios are named colors. So we have purple, red, and blue. So if they're just having a really bad time with Ryan on red, then I'll suggest, well, hey, you know, we can always do a team switch. So-and-so has been here for this many years, blah, blah, blah. I think you guys would be a personality fit. And then we'll move them over there and we can usually save about 60% of unhappy people when we do that.

Wow, that is huge. Yeah. Okay, so switch to the purple team. You're on the red team. How would you like to have a whole new property manager? Yes.

And usually people are pumped because they're like, I'm so over so-and-so, I want to work with this team. We have it on our website and stuff.

I'm like, great, I'll make the introduction. Wow. Okay, this is fascinating. This might be my top takeaway here because I can totally see a property owner who's had a frustrating experience, whether it's took too long to lease or tenant eviction, whatever, whatever, whatever. The owner being like, because I feel like what owners, what goes on in their head is like they get this idea that I need to do something. They're like, something's not right and I need to do something, or I'm not a man anymore. I don't know what they're thinking. They have this ego about it or something, or maybe their husband or wife is on them. You need to do something. I can't just let them get away with that. And so that prompts them to have these conversations about terminating. But you're basically, you're kind of giving them an out. You're giving them an off-ramp of, you're acknowledging the pain was significant for them and you're offering not just a refund and not just an apology, but hey, let's actually just move you over to somebody else. And because that's almost like getting a new property management company in their mind.

Yep, exactly. The team is totally different, different personalities. So yeah, we find that's pretty successful.

I tell you what, if we could save 60% of our churn, we would be a lot bigger right now. So that is really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, what else? What else do you got? What other secrets are you keeping over there, Taylor, about churn? And this is— that's a goal I gotta keep. I'm gonna keep digging in this mine.

What else? Oh gosh, I think that's our biggest secret. I would say we are very analytical with our churn. We review it on a monthly basis, and so we as an entire company, all 25 of us, we will go through one by one and discuss the property owner, and we have the main category. So are they leaving us because they're selling, taking the property back, transfer of management, whatever? And then our subcategories of like cash flow issues, burnout, unrealistic expectations. And so as we go through that, we try and find trends on, is there a specific time of year that this happens more often? Are BDMs just not bringing on realistic home property owners? And we go through it that way. And so we have made changes to some of the verbiage that we use specifically. Like we had a lot of people that were really cash flow issues. So then our BDMs did a big push on talking about what kind of reserves they need to have in their own bank accounts, how much things cost. And so, yeah, we just really very much analytical go through it. So that way our sales team is aligned and then also our ops team.

I love that. That is great. And I assume there's some big Google Sheet that has like, you know, all this tracking and some graphs and dropdowns to select reasons and stuff like that.

Yep, exactly.

Year over year. Yep. Yeah, that is very, very cool. We've recently started to get more analytical with our churn as well, but it is difficult. I'll tell you what, even once you make the decision to start to be more analytical with churn, it gets really complicated really fast because you have— well, first of all, you've got unit churn and you've got client churn, and those are different. And then trying to go back and categorize historical churned owners to do analysis becomes really hard because you're like, all right, I don't remember why that owner left. And I feel like owners will usually just say whatever they'll say like, oh, I'm selling. But the real reason they're leaving is because the churn was too expensive. And so that actually is expectation. So it's really hard to tease this out.

Oh yeah. And that's a big thing we talk about. It'll be like someone says they're moving back in, but we're like, they could be going with a different property management company and they're too shy to tell us or whatever. But yeah, we, the person that handles our churn isn't related to the portfolio that manages the property. So we'll usually get some good unsolicited feedback because there's no like bias. She's got no skin in the game to ask the feedback from those people versus if it was their like maintenance person. They don't want to like offend the maintenance person.

I don't know. You know? Okay. So the person who's doing kind of the offboarding, they'll do like a debrief with the owner to try and— okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Okay.

Awesome.

Great.

So you are going to be presumably, and you mentioned this on Jordan's show, taking over the business at some point. And do you have any siblings? Nope. Okay. Just you. So going to be just you at some point. I was going to ask, like, have you ever considered or would you consider at that point taking on a partner? Because kind of was like your mom and dad. So they were kind of like partners. Do you envision— you're about to get married, by the way, congrats. Do you envision your husband being a partner in the business or is he kind of completely doing his own thing? I'm curious your thoughts here. Because it could be lonely. I have a partner and I'm glad I do.

So yes, no, absolutely. My fiancé actually works in the business. Okay. He has worked here for— is that how you met? No, we met coaching girls volleyball. Okay. But yeah, I think he's worked here, I want to say, 6 years, 7 years, somewhere around there. So a while. And you know, my parents are really good role models of like work-life balance and kind of keeping the two separate. So when Billy started working here, you know, I had that really great role model system and we work really hard to kind of not bring it up in our personal lives. But to your point, oh yeah, it is definitely great to have someone that knows everything that you do, that's an equal basically, that you can talk through issues with.

Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like, so he's quite involved with the business. He's getting married to the president. Great, great move, Billy. And at that point in time, like, is it in your mind that like when you eventually take over that like he'll be co-owner with you, or have you just not even really thought that through to that point yet?

We have talked about it a few times, yes. And so like to this day, my dad is still, my parents are still full owner of the company. So I'm not an owner just yet. And so we've talked about like what that'll look like as transition comes. And so yeah, Billy's expressed interest. He likes it. He's having fun. And believe me, I've given him numerous outs. I'm like, you don't have to do this. It's a hard job. Yeah. But no, we, we enjoy working together. I mean, gosh, like I said, we coach volleyball together. We do this together. That's great.

It feels really natural for us. Yeah. If he's 6 or 7 years into property management and hasn't left yet, he must be He's probably going to be sticking around because he knows what it's about by now. Yes, exactly. Cool. How about a new market? You know, you guys are— I mean, you're in— I guess you kind of are in multiple markets because you're sort of up and down, you know, north and south of Denver there, but different states or anything like that? Or do you feel like, hey, there's just so much opportunity still in Colorado?

Still a lot of opportunity in Colorado. We did like the main 3 markets on the Front Range and My parents actually live up in a mountain town. It's a ski town, Steamboat, Colorado. And so we have started the very slow rollout of potentially expanding up there and doing, even though it's a ski town, not doing vacation rental, but still doing long-term management like we do now. So we have two doors under management up there. Nice. Baby steps.

All right. Yes. Great. So Taylor, you are, you mentioned on Jordan's show that you're a systems thinker. And I'm a systems thinker too. And so you and I, you know, we see the world in processes and getting things organized and, you know, checklists and things like that. I'll tell you, I find that mindset makes it difficult to relax. And property management in general is a very challenging line of work to be in. It's hard to leave everything at the office. So what are you doing to relax these days? Because I'm looking for tips and ideas on how I can unplug and be present with my family when I get home. And I— you must have given this some thoughts. I'm curious what you're doing these days. You don't seem like the type of person who's throwing, throwing back 4 glasses of wine or anything like that, so there's got to be some healthier options.

Yes. Oh gosh, so I love coaching youth sports. I've done it for also the last 10 years, so that's a big outlet for me.

Tell me more about that.

What's, what's working for you there? Yeah, you know, the, the age group that I like to coach is anywhere from 14 to 16, so they're like still nice, you know, they're not super crazy girls as they can be.

Okay. Wait, are they, are they nice cuz they're, they're old enough or they're nice cuz they're, they're young enough?

Kind of the sweet spot of both. Yeah, okay. Not like too young where you can't relate to them, but they're not too old where they think they're too cool. Okay. I have a ton of fun doing that. They just keep you young. It's a good outlet. I'm very competitive, so coaching competitive sports kind of lets me kind of release that side of things. I do a lot of yoga.

And is this before work or after work that you're doing yoga? Before work, 5:45 AM. 5:45. Wow. Yeah. You're doing this at home or you get up and you go somewhere and it's a whole— Yeah, get up and go somewhere. Wow. So I work out at 6:00 AM once a week and I just told my trainer that we need to stop doing 6:00 AM 'cause it's too early. Just even the once a week, I'm like, we gotta, we gotta move this to a new schedule.

Yeah, it was a big transition to make that change. And then, gosh, I, the other thing I do is I, My friends, our friends love it because we don't say no. Our friends are like, oh, do you want to fly out, go skiing? Sure. We're like yes men. So we put a big emphasis on experiences and there's those like cheesy quotes where you're never going to remember, you know, that work thing you were working on and why you missed the trip, but you'll always remember that you missed the trip. So that's kind of how I live my life by. I don't want to be controlled by work all the time.

Yeah, that's great. And that's, you know, it's a good mindset to bring, especially to a family business where it'd be easy to be sucked in. Yeah. Great. Well, awesome, Taylor. I appreciate your time today. This is fun, you know, getting to catch up and hear more about your company and how things are going.

So thanks for your time today. Absolutely.

Thanks so much for having me. If folks want to follow along with you and Colorado Realty and Property Management, where is the best place to do that?

Yes. You can find me on LinkedIn and then also you're welcome to check out our websites, both of which I think you'll have access to. Yep.

We'll put that in the show notes. Thanks again, Taylor. 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.