AI Agents, PM Policy Tracking & the Pod Hybrid Model with Wolfgang Croskey

It's hard to believe how quickly things are changing and the capabilities that are being added to these tools on almost a daily basis. I think things are going to look a lot different for the run-of-the-mill or just the average property manager in terms of their day-to-day workload and capabilities within just, you know, less than a year. I mean, I know guys like you and Todd have been building your own apps.

Yeah. So within a year, less than a year, we've gone from, look, I could fab up my own calculator to now I'll just dictate to my own AI and it's delegating tasks. I mean, like that speed is, I know for some is very, you know, creates a lot of anxiety. For me, it's very exciting. For us, what's nice about it is a piece that we were stuck on in Crane was this thing around policy and being able to track what's happening. It's really, really expensive. Like really, really expensive, but we did it. I'm 98% confident that there is no other tool in the property management industry right now that you could get free or paid that will bring in federal, state, and local policy data right to your inbox.

Welcome back. Welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. I'm here with Crane co-founder Wolfgang Kroski. Wolf, how you doing today?

I'm doing well.

Well, it's fun to be back on the mic with you in the podcast format. Of course, we have our monthly show, Peter and the Wolf, that we do, but a podcast is a little bit of a different vibe. We get to go deeper and we can be a little bit more focused. And today we are going to talk about some things that are top of mind for both of us right now. One of those is going to be AI, but don't worry, it's not going to be the whole show. We're going to talk about Wolf's two agents, Bruce and Sophia, his AI agents running in his property management business and what they're doing for him. And I also want to know if they ever get into arguments. We're also going to talk about a brand new member benefit for Crane that I think will be interesting for anyone who's in property management. and we're going to talk about how we implemented that. Some real challenges that we've had in rolling it out is actually delayed quite a bit, but it's finally working. So we can talk, we can kind of announce that. And then lastly, I want to talk, go into detail about, which I haven't done publicly. I want to go into detail about my own property management company's transition from a departmental style to a pod hybrid style of organization. So we have about 750 doors under management. We were running into some issues with departmental, and so we totally reorganized the company and we went live about 5 to 6 weeks ago. So it's been long enough now that I can share some of the results and how that's been going. So let's kick it off. Where do you want to start, Wolf, on those kind of 3 subjects?

Um, let's talk about Sophia and Bruce. Okay, that's a good one. They'll kind of weave into our Crane HQ updates and how we've gotten there. So, uh, actually you started down this journey before I did, which is not the norm. You, you started playing around with OpenClaw and experimenting and doing stuff, and I did not until—

wait, what were you doing that week? You must have been taking a nap.

Yeah, I don't know. I was—

you fell behind.

I know what I, I know what I was working on. We'll, we'll be talking about that in a little bit, but I didn't get into it for a couple reasons, but one was mostly, you know, and I think listeners can appreciate this. There's every day you open up your inbox and there's some new AI tool and it's like, oh my gosh, another thing. Do I need to master this? Is it noise? And honestly, you were all into it. I was like, I'll just let him experiment and figure out what he wants to do.

See, that's what I normally do with you. I'm just like, Wolf's going to figure it out. He's going to let me know.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's like, okay, Open Claw, started researching and seeing what other people are doing. And Open Claw is cool. I mean, I don't know if you were able to do some cool stuff. What are some of the things that you got it to do?

Well, I was able to get it monitoring a competitor's website, like another property manager in town who, who shall not be named, and notifying me when a listing had been up for like I think I gave it like 28 days or something. So on that 28th day that the listing was up, it would identify the rental owner and then do a little bit of initial research to try to find their contact information and add it all to a spreadsheet. And then we could go and use that data to do targeted outbound direct mail or even try and get contact information. Add them to our email newsletter and basically like, hey, here's an owner who's in pain because their listing's been sitting, you know, unrented for 28 days. And that was a project that I had wanted to get working for months and months, and I had messed around with it on and off, spent many hours pre-AI trying to get this working 'cause it's kind of a complicated workflow.

Yeah.

But I, I like one-shotted it with Claude. I just like told it what I wanted it to do and gave it, a competitor's website and it got the whole thing up and running. So that, like, that specific workflow has since transitioned to a different tool, but it opened my eyes for what's possible with AI.

And so you ran OpenClaw on a Mac Mini and did that way.

Yep.

And so I didn't want to do the Mac Mini way because it's like, I gotta keep this thing running the whole time, which it's not like it's using gobs of energy and it's not that big a deal to have a Mac mini running. It's no big deal, but I just, I didn't want to do that. So I said, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do the run it on your own server, you know, virtual private server. So I did it, loaded it, went pretty easily and got to do some cool stuff, right? Like it's, it's interfacing with my Google Suite. I had it interfacing read-only, really important, read-only. In AppFolio, and what was nice about it is I could, from my phone, just ask questions and it goes to AppFolio and it brings back all the information, then it suggests what it wants to do. I was like, oh, this is so much nicer. I don't actually have to log into AppFolio to then query. And even though the AI inside of AppFolio is nice, I still gotta log in to AppFolio. I could do this from a text message, which was That's pretty exciting. But everybody's talking about the security and all this, and so made me ask, what the heck is OpenClaw? Like, what exactly is it? And it really is not that big of a thing. Basically what it is is AI instructions to your choice of language models. So either OpenAI, you could tell it to work with Google or Claude or whatever. But this concept of memory was the big one because most of the tools, you close the chat, it's gone and you gotta start all over again. This thing is learning you and supposedly being better. Oh, okay, well, could we just build our own? So I asked Claude, I'm like, hey Claude, can we build our own OpenClaw? And I think it actually, it didn't laugh in voice, but it said, yeah, no problem. That's not that big a deal. So we now have built our own. And so we have Sophia, which is my personal executive assistant. And then we have Bruce. And Bruce is because that's my dad's name. And it's the way to kind of, you know, build it past the generations. And so our team can do a couple things. One, they can call, we have a phone number you can call and have live, we have our own conversations now. And that's not that earth rattling. What's earth rattling is this is on our own server. We're not paying for all these extra tools, but you can call, ask Bruce, you could schedule a showing, do these things. But what I learned very quickly is I was able to ask it stuff like, well, who's the previous tenant at 123 Main Street? And it freely gave the information. And I said, oh yeah, and here's their Social Security number. Yeah. What, how did they pay their rent? And so that's where I learned about the whole, like, I've heard the term, uh, prompt injection, but that's like, I did it and it scared me. So we're now Bruce's internal facing only. You can still call him, but you can Telegram him, you can Slack, and it has access to the team's knowledge base inside of Notion, which we're pulling out and putting into a different database. Has access to our AppFolio and the team can now interface with Bruce and Bruce is doing things on a schedule, which are what they call cron jobs, which is one of the big things that OpenClaw made easy was, you know, 6 o'clock every day, I want you to send me today's agenda and, you know, do all this different stuff. It's now doing that with our AppFolio data and giving it to the team. What's really cool is it's connected to our LeadSimple and every email that comes in, it's triaging it, determining what is it about, what's the sentiment, what's the priority, and then assigning it to the right person. And if they don't interact with it within a certain period of time, it then sends them a Slack message follow-up, not just, you know, an autobot, but like has it, prods a conversation and says, hey, do you need help with this? That's as far as we've gotten it. So, but that's 100% on our own machine and we're using Opus to power that, which is the more powerful cloud version. And it's just really exciting because we're just a little property management company and we are now having our own AI agents. And I think it's something that more companies will start to have in the future. The key part is we're only able to interact with the tools that are giving us access, right? Either through API or scheduled reports or, you know, whatever. So the companies, the SaaS companies that want to win in the future are going to be the ones that freely open up and allow your AI agents to go in and interface in a secure way.

Okay, that's really interesting. I got a few questions right off the bat. First, was it hard to set up your own So like, is this a server running in your office or in the cloud?

It's a, it's a VPS, a virtual private server. Claude didn't like the hosting company that I had for other, and it recommended a different one and it told me why. And I said, okay, fine. So I had to set up the initial account and won't get too far in the weeds, but create a very specific type of username and password. I gave it to Claude and then it just went directly and connect and it set it all up.

Wow. So yeah, I mean, how do you actually communicate with that server? Like I have no experience working with remote servers. Like what is, how do you do that?

So, uh, it's called SSH. I forget what that stands for, but it's basically, it is, it looks like alien code. I don't know what it's, I kind of know now as I've seen it come back and forth, but It's sending commands to that server. The server does something and responds back what happened, and then Claude interprets that and it's just back and forth and it's—

but how do you like install software on that computer or restart it or stuff like that?

Through commands.

Okay.

That Claude sends.

Huh. That's wild.

Yeah. Yeah. So Claude will send Bash, I think it's called Bash, bash/bin, I don't know, but basically says, Here's where this particular tool is that we need, download it, install it, and it does its thing. Then it sends a command verifying that that worked, and when it comes back positive, it says, okay, then I'll start doing the next thing.

Hmm. Okay. And then the, the thing with Claude that I thought, or with OpenClaw that was really interesting is the ability to communicate with it over text message. So you can text with over iMessage if you set it up on a Mac, over Slack, over WhatsApp, over Telegram, Signal, Discord. Like you can configure it so that you can chat with it through any of those channels. And for me, and you touched on this too, like that was a huge game changer. Like the ability to just, I know it sounds stupid, but like opening up ChatGPT and starting a conversation, the friction there is significant compared to just opening up my Messages app, which I live in all day long anyway, to communicate. There's just something about that. So how much of the success of OpenClaw do you think was specific to that nuanced detail of being able to chat with it compared to like a third-party app?

I think a lot, you know, that because that makes it more personal. Like, I just sent it a text message, like it has its own phone number. You know, Bruce has its own Google presence that is used to interface with everything, you know, its own identity. But I think that's what made it cool was I could interface and talk and receive information in the channel that I use the most daily. So being able to pick between If you use Telegram or you use iMessage or you're using Slack or whatever it is, but like, that's where the communication for me naturally happens. So that's where I want to interface. I don't want to have to, because if I have to log into a site to communicate, I might as well just do whatever I'm going to do. If you made me log in, then I might as well just go take care of whatever I need to do. You know, when I can on my phone dictate a message to Sophia and just say, hey, Sophia, I need to remember to ask Paulina to do this. I need to update on this turnover, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It takes that. That's all I had to do. And Sophia now can process that audio, turn it to text, extract the actionable items, determine who I'm talking about, and then go reach out to those people on my behalf. That's huge. I don't have to. Take it. Okay, let me convert all those into to-do items, put it into Todoist. Okay, delegate this, delegate that. It just, she does it. Now she's not perfect yet. Like that's the one downside to building your own thing is you have to train. But the reality is all these AI tools that you would pay a monthly subscription for, there's still a training component anyway. So I might as well just train my own thing that's housed in our own machines and has our own data. But that's, that's where I want to eventually get, where it's just voice dictation to Sophia and then she'll take care of whatever and then message back.

Really interesting. And so I recently started using Claude a lot more than ChatGPT. In fact, I just ran a poll in my newsletter this morning asking like about what model people are using for their daily driver. ChatGPT is still winning that significantly. It'll be interesting. I'll rerun that poll again in like 6 or 8 weeks and we'll see, you know, the change in what's getting popular among, you know, my audience. But a lot of engagement on that poll. We had over 100 votes within just a few hours. So, you know, pretty good data. Anyway, getting back to Claude, they've in the last just few days released a bunch of new features to compete with OpenClaw. They released this thing called Dispatch where if you have Claude running on your desktop, you can get the app on your phone and now you can message through Claude back to your work machine or your desktop and have it do things for you similar to OpenClaw. Now you're still communicating through the app, but then just like yesterday they released like a research preview of connections that let you hook up like WhatsApp and Signal and Telegram and a few of these, the channels, so where you can start chatting with it through that channel. Which I'm really excited to get that turned on for my account. I've stopped playing around with Open Claw as much, but yeah, stay tuned. I mean, it's, it's hard to believe how quickly things are changing and the capabilities that are being added to these tools on almost a daily basis. I think things are going to look a lot different for the run of the mill or just the average property manager in terms of their day-to-day workload and capabilities within just you know, less than a year. I think it's gonna be a big upending of what people spend their time doing, how these software products are priced, how they're competing. I mean, I know guys like you and Todd have been building your own apps, like full, like Calendly replacement, like all kinds of stuff. I mean, I should really code up like a replacement for our NPS scoring. You know, we're paying like $150 a month to Retently. That's an obvious, You know, I'm sure I could vibe code that in half a day or less. Now there's some details. There's some—

Bruce is doing that. So the concept of CRM, right? And so there's so much context that's more than just email. So that's what we're working on now is the MPS, building our own and having that in the CRM. So definitely doable.

Okay.

And that's where, you know, going into to Crane. So in Crane, we have what we call Crane HQ, and it started with, I think, Peter wanting, like, wouldn't it be cool to have a map so I could say, hey, I'm going to Austin, Texas, what Crane members are nearby? I'm like, yeah, we could do that. So we started that, and then it was like, well, shoot, wouldn't it be cool to know who uses what software? And more importantly, what software did they used to use? And so this Crane HQ has exploded and we're now doing a lot of cool stuff with it. But that app, I would say, is, I don't know what makes something enterprise-worthy, but I mean, it's more than just one of these, like, a lovable calculator. It's in production, it's working. It's definitely had bugs that we worked on, but that was 100% Vibe coded.

And— Damn, I ran into a lovable calculator catching strays here in the podcast.

I have one on our— matter of fact, we had our L10 today and we're going over some marketing data and we have a lovable for DIY landlords and it's still generating hits, right? Like it's doing so it's, we're still paying for it, but, and I don't think that's been a year.

No, definitely not.

Yeah. So within a year, less than a year, we've gone from, look, I could fab up my own calculator to now, I'll just dictate to my own AI and it's delegating tasks. I mean, like that speed is, I know for some is very, you know, creates a lot of anxiety. For me, it's very exciting. For us, what's nice about it is a piece that we were stuck on in Crane was this thing around policy and being able to track what's happening Inside of—

well, let me frame it up. Let me frame up the problem from the property manager's perspective. So what Wolf is talking about is Crane HQ is this pretty sophisticated piece of software that we built to enhance and extend what we can do for our members. Yeah. And so members, of course, in Crane, they have Circle, which is the community. There's dozens of conversations happening in there all the time, but then Circle only takes you so far. It's commercial software. It's good, but we know the needs of property managers go above and beyond just a forum, essentially. And so Wolf started building out a lot of cool capabilities inside a custom app that he's developed called CraneHQ. And so early on, I was pestering Wolf here with my— of course, the nice thing about owning a company is you get to like implement the things that you, that you care about the most, right? So something that's always been a challenge for me, and maybe it is for you too if you're listening, is where I am in central Ohio, basically the Columbus MSA, there are like a dozen quote cities around Columbus. Now, if you talk to any of those people and they're traveling, they're visiting friends in New York, and their friends in New York say, oh, where are you from? They'll say, oh, I'm from Columbus, right? It's the Columbus MSA. But they actually live in Hilliard, or they live in Dublin, or they live in Westerville. and all of those are little incorporated cities, and all those little incorporated cities get big ideas about how they want to regulate landlords, and they pass laws about security deposits and tenant screening and source of income discrimination protection and rental receipts and everything you can imagine, rental registry, Lots of stuff. So even though we're, we're basically in the city of Columbus and all these dopey little cities use the city of Columbus's services for a lot of things 'cause they're small, the reality is we have a dozen of these little municipalities plus the county that all can and do pass different laws that affect how we do business 'cause we manage properties within these jurisdictions. And so it is practically becoming a full-time job to keep up with all these stupid cities and all their little laws that they're passing. And it was affecting our operations because like, oh well, if it's in this little city or that little city, we, we have to offer the tenant the ability to pay their security deposit in installments. And if it's this little city over here, we have to do a rental registry. And if it's this little city over here, you know, they don't let us use, you know, criminal history when we're tenant screening or whatever it is. And, you know, implementing these changes is a headache enough, but even just keeping up with them and understanding you know, I would find out about it a year after the fact that some city had passed something because what am I, how am I supposed to keep up with all this? So my request to Wolf is, can you build a tracker? Can we find a data source that like keeps track of all this? Because surely there's some like, you know, B2B business data provider that's cataloging all these meeting minutes and everything because we can't be the only business facing a problem with all these local, you know, regulatory agencies. And then can you build a little subscription thing within our Crane software so that property managers can subscribe to specific cities and then get email notifications of any law changes. And that's the dream because what I want to get is a once-a-week summary of here's all the meeting, here's a summary of the cities that you're subscribed to, you know, that are within your service area and all the stupid things they're trying to do to make your life harder as a property manager, because there's a lot of things I can do with that. First of all, I can create content with that. That is great content to put out on social media, to put in our newsletter, to put on our website in a blog post and just to talk about so we can show owners and prospective owners that we know what's going on and we're delivering them valuable news. And of course the other thing we do with that is we either fight the legislation if we have, yeah, you know, we can notify owners who own properties in those areas or if it's passed, you know, if we too late or we just, we're unsuccessful, Okay, well, now we know and we can be compliant with the law and make updates to our operations. And so, so that was the problem. And I kicked this over to Wolf and said, Wolf, could you solve this? I'm going to go do some other stuff. I'm going to go record a podcast with somebody. All right. So that's where you come in, Wolf. So talk about the journey of how— and spoiler alert, this is live and is now working and is working to make a big announcement in about a week and turning it on for all Crane members. But Talk about the journey of how you actually got this going, 'cause it was a, it was difficult. Sure.

So I drew upon my experience having been on a city planning commission and running for council. I was like, well, Peter, state and federal, that's easy 'cause there's, there's databases already there that structure the data very nicely. They have a very clean schema. The issue's going to be at the city level because cities, there is no universal formula. Most of them just like literally photocopy their agenda, scan it as a PDF, and they upload it on their city website. I'm like, this is, you know, but being the realtor, I said, yes. I said, yeah, no problem. We could do this. And I just figured out like, okay, how are we going to make this happen? Because scanning a PDF and pulling out text, like AI can do that. That's not that big a deal. But times, I don't even know how many cities there are in the US. How the heck do we do, like, I don't know if we have a budget for that many tokens. Like, okay, let's figure this out. So I found the, the service provider for federal and state, LegiScan. Great, very easy. Got the API logged in. We were up and running, but you know, it was not good enough because the goal was local, at the city and county level, what's going on there. So we eventually, we did find a data provider there. Quite frankly, the onboarding experience was terrible. Yeah.

And let me pause and just say, like, this is specific. I'm specifically interested in city level data because obviously the federal is well handled by NARPM and others. There's tons of reporting at the federal level. Even the state stuff. Like that's easy to find. I mean, there's a million articles covering state-level legislative changes having to do with landlord-tenant laws, although not as much. The big deal for me was the city stuff.

Yeah. And so was able to get the inside of Crane HQ. People could go in and say, I'm, I'm interested in California. Boom, here's all the results. And that was great. But quite honestly, user, you know, our Crane members didn't use it a whole lot because Who wants to log into a site, right? I want it to come to me. So found the provider for the local data. Onboarding was real rough. It's really, really expensive. Like really, really expensive. But we did it.

We made a big investment in this. This is not cheap. Yeah.

This is like buy a car, nice car investment.

And that's like even before any of the AI tokens and stuff, this is just to get access via API to the data. Yeah.

So finally got it going, but I was limited because I've been using Replit to build this and Replit is a very solid tool and, you know, worked on this. Okay. Let me go do something else. Let me come back to it. And just was always stuck at the same part and really was, I think, limited by what Replit could do and was almost to the point because Peter was getting frustrated. Where it's like, well, I think we might need to hire somebody that actually went to school for this. And at that point, the Claude code and everything was, you know, spun up their own AI agent. And so I said, let me try it using Claude code. And Claude code was able to help me work through a couple of pieces that then brought gas to everything else. And that was basically how do we get the AI to interpret? Because it's gobbledygook, even paying this really expensive service and then bringing them the data because you're just imagine like, you know, here's, here's this city council's agenda. It's just this PDF and every city is doing different. So it's a really hard task for AI to do, but we got it. And so now we can officially say that this thing is working. And so people can go in and say, I want, my office is located in this city. It says, oh, well, within a 30-mile radius, here are all the other cities. Which ones do you want to add? You're like, oh yeah, boom, boom, boom. And we're not talking city council, we're talking city council, school board, any governing agency where the population is over 2,000 people, we're now able to query. And you've put it in, we've come up with, I don't know, 20 categories of topics. You say, I want, these are the topics that resonate with me. Boom, it's done. And then every time you can sign up for either daily or weekly, you'll get a really nice email. And I'm looking at an updated version right now. And it will say an AI-generated title of why this meeting's important to you as a PM, not just Columbus, Ohio City Council agenda, but why this is important. And then an AI-generated summary. And if you really need more, you simply click and it takes you right to that PDF to the original source. Yeah, original source. And there you go.

And just to clarify, it's not going to give you updates for those cities of everything that's happening. You can pick the categories of updates that you want. Maybe you only want landlord-tenant. Maybe you want to add in zoning, maybe you want to add in— there's like 15 different categories that are like real estate related and real estate property manager adjacent. And you can add or remove those different categories and you'll only get updates when there are proceedings related specifically to those categories. So what I didn't want was like, oh, well, great, now I have 15 million PDFs to read through every week. Like, yes, it's technically in my email, but how does that really help me? We're doing all that work for you with AI. So once, once you get signed up and you tune your settings how you want them, you should only be getting the most relevant information specific to you, specific to the locations that you're interested in.

Yeah. So here, here's an example. This may or may not apply to Peter, but in Wilmington, Ohio, there's a public hearing on adult family homes zoning amendment. Right. And so if he manages homes that are in a 55+ community or whatnot, this could, this could impact that. And you can, you can tighten how much you want or different things like that. Zoning tax amendment, you know, there's quite a few in here. So and this is just focusing on his area, right? So I can focus on my area, etc. So our Crane members are going to have access to this. And if you're listening, you're like, And that's kind of lame. Let me tell you right now, I'm 98% confident that there is no other tool in the property management industry right now that you could get free or paid that will bring in federal, state, and local policy data right to your inbox.

Yeah. So we're excited to get this into the hands of Crane members and help them stay informed about what's happening in their local area. You— oh, we should mention, by the way, if you're interested in CRANE, if you're not already a member, we're opening up to new members, which we only do twice a year. We have a big launch event and the membership window opens on April 2nd. It's a program called Access CRANE. It's about an hour long. Wolf and I are hosting it. We're going to go into all the details about CRANE and we have a bunch of announcements that we've saved up that are relevant to not just CRANE, but anyone who's in property management. So if you're a current Crane member or a prospective Crane member or even just someone who's interested in the property management space, you should all register and attend that. We've got special guest Jordan Whaler coming to give a little sneak preview of the PM Trends report that I'm working on with him. We've also got special guest Brad Johnson, CEO of Profit Coach, to introduce a secret project that I've been working on with him that Wolf and I have been collaborating with Crane and Profit Coach and, be able to start to reveal some of that during that show as well. So we'll of course have a registration link in the description. And if you are interested in joining Crane, the window's gonna be open for about a week and a half. If you attend that show live, we're gonna give away one lucky live viewer is going to win a free one-year Crane membership. And we got a bunch of other kind of surprises and stuff throughout the show to keep it interesting. So yeah, make sure you register for that.

Definitely. But yeah, that's, that's where AI coding has led me. So pretty, pretty excited about that.

Really cool.

Big changes for us. Now you were talking about going from departmental to a hybrid, and I know you don't make changes unless the juice is worth the squeeze. So what was the pain that was causing you to make a major organizational restructure?

The pain was mostly around churn. Now, our churn had gotten a lot better, so I published updates on our company churn from time to time in my newsletter with graphs and charts and all kinds of stuff, and it had been getting better. But we still were continuing to hear from rental owners that they never knew who to talk to at the company. That was the number one complaint. Now, years ago, the number one complaint used to be I can never get ahold of anybody. So that was a different problem we had to solve about answering the phone and handling email inboxes and response times and things like that. But once we got that problem solved, it became, I never know who the right person is to talk to at your company because I've talked to 12 different people. And that's frustrating for the owners because they don't want to feel like they're contacting the wrong person because That's kind of embarrassing. Also, it's just frustrating because you feel like you're not getting the answer. You're not talking to the right person. You're getting bounced around. And the data from the PM Trends report, the original one I did with Jordan about a year and a half ago, also supported this idea that property owners are very sensitive to this communication, like communication issues are very important to property owners. And that for most of my professional property management career has aggravated me because my engineer brain is like, calm the hell down about communication. We're doing what we're supposed to be doing, and that's what we've agreed to in our contract with you. That's the whole reason you've hired us is because we're experts at managing property. Let us manage the damn property and stop getting up on us about this communication stuff. Who cares if we get back to you tomorrow instead of today? We're not ER doctors. You're— this is not a life-threatening emergency. Who cares when we get back to you as long as we do get back to you and the information is correct and we're doing our job, we're renting your property, we're collecting your rent, we're doing your disbursements. Like it was— I just like got so angry. You can even hear it coming out now. It still gets me worked up. It's so frustrating with these rental owners about their communication expectations. But I just— I basically just had to give in and give up and say, this is the way of the world. I'm not going to change everybody. I can't swim against the tide anymore. I got to figure out how to meet these people where they're at with their expectations. And so although our churn had been coming down, like I said, we did kind of reach a plateau of 1 to 2% churn per month. You know, we were hitting, you know, I don't know, 20% churn or something. And now that was a big improvement from where it had been, but it still wasn't great. And like, I knew we could do better and I knew if these owners— my thesis was property owners don't want to call their property management company, they want to call their property manager. They want to be able to reach a specific person who they know is in charge of their property. And yes, maybe that person doesn't do everything, but they're accountable to the owner for results and they're the single point of contact. And I thought if my hypothesis was if we can set up our company that way, we're going to have better results, more streamlined communication, happier owners, and things are just going to be better. So That's what we did. We reorganized the company and we took different people who were doing different things around the organization and we assigned 3 of them the title of property manager, which we've actually never given out that title before because we were pure departmental. Yep. So it's the first time ever that I've hired a, you know, employed a property manager. So we have 3 of them and each of those 3 property managers has about 130 120 to 130 rental owners that are assigned to them, and they do all of the comms and they do all of the lease signing and the PMA renewals and like all of the interfacing, the external interfacing happens through that property manager specific to those properties and those owners and maintenance concerns that get escalated go to them and everything else. So That's the setup. You know, we went live with this new reorg about 6 weeks ago. And what do you want to know before I talk about results? Some early results.

One, one thing so people don't miss it. You said it's 120 to 130 owners, not doors. A lot of times people get caught up in the— yeah, how many doors property manager manage. So you did it on a number of relationships they manage. Yeah. Are those 120, 130 door or owners Do those equate to an evenly distributed door count, or how did you determine what is an equal workload based on a relationship model opposed to door model?

So we're still figuring out those details. That's— those are great questions. It works out to about 250 doors per property manager. Now, again, these property managers are still supported. There's a whole ops department that's doing the work. They're running the checklist, they're leasing the properties, they're handling the turns. Like, so the property managers are mostly there as like account support, like account servicing. So the— don't you know, if you look at our overall staffing, we're more like 60 doors per person. But specific to these property managers, they have 250 doors. We don't yet know if that's a great number for them. We took a guess. And it could be that each property manager can manage 200 owners, or maybe now they've been pretty busy recently. It's hard to say if that's just because it's like new and transition or if they're just still busy month after month. Hey, maybe it turns out that each property manager can only handle like a maximum of 100 clients, in which case we would need to hire another property manager or elevate somebody.

And so what is the workload you've assigned them when it's quote unquote manage clients? Is it just whatever clients email, call, text in, you deal with it, do you, or do you set like annual portfolio reviews? What is, what is their scope of work?

It's everything having to do with owner communications and escalated tenant communications. It's everything having to do with lease renewals and PMA renewals for those properties. It has— they're over there, like in charge of the leasing. So they're kept up to date when there's a vacancy. Or though each of them will usually have a few vacancies at once, you know, what's going on with the listing, what's happening with showing activity, you know, communicating, collaborating with the leasing team to make recommendations on rent prices. They're kind of overseeing, they're not like directly overseeing, but they're in charge of making sure that the turns are happening on time, communicating with owners about funding requests. I should pull up the job description, but it's like we tried, we try to minimize the operational workload for these people and move as much of the communication to them as possible, which frees up the operational people now from having to stop doing operations and communicate. Right. Because if you've ever met a really great ops person who's just like incredibly task-oriented and like a get-er-done type of folks, they don't, they're not the best on the phone with owners. They don't really want to talk. They're, they're like me. They're like, why, why are we talking? I'd like to go back to working where talking is not working. Whereas great property managers like account manager, account support people, they love talking. They're great with people. They have this warm and friendly personality. They ask about your kids, right? And that relationship building is super important. We now know to property owners and to them feeling like somebody gives a damn about my property and is looking out for it.

Mm-hmm. Great. I just wanted to define kind of the terms you're using, what people do. I think that will help. Yeah. Because I'm sure as people hear this, they'll have lots of questions. So you've had the pain point around churn. This was— were there other solutions that you looked at implementing to help with churn, or did you— this was the one that you know what, this is really going to move the needle the most?

This was— we had pretty much done everything else we could do up to this point to tackle that problem. And this was something that my VP of Ops, Brennan, had been pushing for, was this model. We looked at squad, like pods, like more traditional pods with 2 to 3 people in each one. These are basically like one-person pods. So I call it like a pod hybrid because it's one-person pods, but then supported by departmental style on the backend. So yeah, we, we'd pretty much exhausted everything else we could do. I think, under the pure departmental model.

Okay. Any pushback from team when you're rolling this out, or anybody like, uh, screw this, I'm out of here?

No, I think, you know, we— it had been a long time coming. So we had been talking about this idea or one like it for about a year with the leadership team, kind of, and like warming them up to it, getting their feedback on it, talking about How, how specifically are we going to organize this thing? What are the roles going to be post-reorg? What specific things are the property managers going to do versus the operations department? So there was a healthy back and forth with the leadership team about how it would all be set up. And we took that in stride and incorporated feedback from them along the way. But no, nobody— in fact, the team was very enthusiastic about it. There was a big lead up, like 60-day lead up period where we got everything ready and did a ton of cross-training for everyone's new roles. And then there was this big go-live date where we emailed all the owners and the property managers reached out to introduce themselves. And we've had no pushback at all. The team seems to be really happy with the new setup from what I— from everything I can see and hear.

Nice. Okay, so what are the results showing?

Results are good. Property owners seem to really like it. The NPS survey results that we're getting back are positive. And just the anecdotal comments that the team will paste into Slack from property owners seems great. And in fact, just this week we had somebody put into Slack. So the head of the property managers is Tiffany, who is our director of accounts, I think. And so she shared that two different clients who were trying to terminate were saved from churning by their property manager and that one-to-one relationship. And so that was a huge testament to the fact that this is clearly working. Something about it is working. Now, everything in life is trade-offs. Don't get me wrong. There are certainly some things that aren't going to be as smooth or efficient under this new model. Compared to the old one. There's no silver bullet, but I think we are achieving the goals that we set out to achieve with this new structure.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think, you know, people have talked about the concept of, well, property managers really need to be asset managers. And there's this— I think we're all feeling that we need to be something better, but we haven't really nailed down what does that And I think what we're feeling is that we need to be better at managing the relationship. Like most, most of my clients, you know, the asset management role, it's, it's not what they want, right? They own one house. They don't need an asset manager. They need a, they want a friend who has good experience and knowledge and tools to help them with their, their problem. And I, what you're doing, I think is going to be interesting to see how that plays out long-term because I think that's kind of the right direction where it's how do we set ourselves up better to manage the relationships? Because with AI and our tech and all this stuff, the, the nuts and bolts and managing the property, that part is getting easier. So it should free us up to be able to do a better job at managing the relationships.

Yes. Yes. I, I'm, I'm very curious as well to see the long-term results. You know, we, there's a few things that are still sort of an open question. One is workload on the property managers versus the ops team staffing needs. We've always been kind of heavily staffed relative to our size, even once you account for the fact that we have in-house maintenance. And so I'd love to get to the point where we're just a little bit leaner. I don't want to get rid of anyone, but I'd like to be able to grow without hiring anybody. For a while. So that will be interesting. The other interesting thing is we've got a few early NPS survey results back, but I'd love to like 6 months in when we've had a whole round of those NPS surveys go out to rental owners, 'cause I think they go out every 4 months. At that point, we'll be able to have a really clear, like, here's the NPS survey and then here's the big bright line where we made the change. And then here's the survey results afterward. Obviously looking for a, positive change there on the, you know, on the survey results. So yeah, very curious to let this play out a little bit more, but early results are promising.

You check, which I'm sure you do, as far as tracking owner referrals? Because I think that's another indicator to show success in this is because that basically when somebody does that, it means, yeah, I trust these people.

We don't, I don't know that we have a good way of tracking. We don't get a lot of those, which maybe that's an indicator itself, but Yeah, I think the property manager relationship will help owners feel more comfortable because I think like, right, if I'm talking through this out loud a little bit, under the old model, if an owner wanted to give a referral, they wouldn't even know who to give it to. So it's like they wouldn't— it's like because what you want to do, if you think of your— put yourself in the owner's shoes or just any consumer you want to be and your friend owns a rental property. You want to be able to say to that friend, oh, Jeff, you need— I— let me introduce you to my property manager, Cindy. She's amazing. She's going to take care of— you've been complaining about this rental property for years. Let me hook you up with Cindy. I'm going to text you. I'm going to put you guys in a group chat right now. Right. That's what you want to be able to do because you kind of look like a hero to your buddy, right? Like, oh, you have these connections and you have it all figured out, right? It's like a feel-good moment. But under the old model, there was no way to do that. What are they going to say? Well, I like my property manager, but I mean, I guess just call the main office. Come on. No, you're not even going to bring it up because that's— you're not going to get anything out of that.

Exactly.

So, yeah, exactly.

I think it goes, goes back to the whole we manage relationships of trust. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great— that's a great distillation of what we're up to in property management.

Yeah.

Cool.

Well, we've gone AI, vibe coding, policy tracking. Departmental to a hybrid of relationship building. This is full circle.

Yeah. And refresh my memory, what's your setup?

So we're kind of similar to where you are in regards to, we think it's all about the relationship. So we have some centralized services, but then a property manager that has, their goal is to build those relationships. And we kind of backed away from that a little bit because we want to be efficient and No, don't give out your cell phone number and all that. And I think it hurt us, to be honest. So wanting to go back to, 'cause it's about, well, how do we manage the communication, make sure somebody doesn't get lost when somebody's sick or whatever. And if you're only calling their number, I don't know, right? So I'm hoping that AI can help with this. That's where I'm gonna be building with, I won't give his name because it's related to another product in our space, and I don't want them to think that I'm copying, but the ability for them to, the AI to keep track of stuff. So I could then ask the AI like, hey, Paulina's out, what should I know? Okay. Right? So I can take care of it. And it will be able to bring all that in because it's the centralizing communication. There's a lot of efficiency gains there, but there is, some relationship hits, in my opinion, from that. And so how do we kind of get the best of both worlds?

Let's close out the recording on this topic because I also am really intrigued about the right way to set this up. And I think between the two of us, maybe if we talk about it for 5 minutes, it could be helpful. So one of the things I was really clear on when we did this reorg is like, I want— remember back to what I said, like, people want to call their property manager, not their property management company. When I have an issue with Chase Bank, unfortunately I can't bank with Enterprise because, because of the state laws in Ohio. If they were here, I would. But so with Chase Bank, I don't call 1-800-GO-CHASE. I have the cell phone number of my business banker. His name is AJ. He's great. And so when I have a problem, I text him or I call him and he calls and he calls me back. Or if he's on lunch or whatever, he calls me back later if he doesn't answer. And it's fine. It's great. It's so much nicer for me than having to go through like the main line or whatever. And so that's the experience I want to deliver for our rental owners. I think that's the right arrangement for the type of business that we are. But you just identified a main issue, which is the cell phone number thing. Now Chase has decided that their business bankers can give out cell phone numbers. Okay. But I don't think that's ideal. And so I was thinking hard about this when we rolled out this change and What's the communication I want to give to these rental owners? Do I want to give them their property manager's work email like jeffsmith@rlpmg.com? Or do I— and or do I want to give them like a, like a catch-all email, which is like for owners called owners@rlpmg.com? Or do I want to set up like, you know, Pod A, like, oh, you email poda@rlpmg.com because then if their property manager leaves, I can slot in a new property manager and they have access to all the old conversations. So you got the email question, then you also have the phone number question. Do I have the property manager give out their cell phone number? I really don't want to do that. I don't want to ask the property managers to do that. I also don't really like— I'm losing control now of that relationship. I don't want to give out the main phone number because now we're back to like, call— you don't want to call your property management company. So what we ended up doing is all the way we have our RingCentral set up is that everyone has like a direct line. Like of course they have an extension, but they also have a direct line. So I had the property managers put their direct line in their email signature. So it kind of looks like a cell phone number. I think it says something like, you know, call me direct, here's the number. So it kind of, it's almost like a cell phone and you can configure RingCentral. So like during business hours, that number will actually ring their cell phone too. So if they're in the field or they're at lunch or they're whatever, If they can, they can pick it up even if they're not at their desk. So that's kind of where we landed on it. And we ended up for email, we had them, it's still going to owners@rlpmg.com, but there's a, there's a Zap that automatically assigns those conversations to the right property manager. Although I think LeadSimple, like the day after we got the Zap working, like released an update where it's now can be automated through from within LeadSimple natively using property groups or something. But So that's where we landed. But I'm fascinated by this whole topic, and I think that the tools that we're using are not keeping up with the ways that property management companies are actually organized. And they're not— they're just like, I want to like take a half a day and whiteboard all of this phone number, email, and texting owners, tenants, vendors, company line. Shared inbox, like I want to do like a white paper on this or something and figure out what is the ideal setup or what is the ideal 1, 2, or 3 options you get to pick from to make this the best it can possibly be from the perspective of the owner, the tenant, and the property manager?

Yeah, no, because it's, it's problematic. So that's where I'm wondering if— because owners want a single single point of contact, not just a single person, but also I just want one number to save my contact. The problem with that is they save it, Wolf Cross Real Estate, but then somebody else from the company calls them, I don't know, number, and nobody picks up their phone.

Well, you can't— we basically all, all communications through the property manager. So they're really from, from us, from our post-reorg, there almost would never be anyone else calling. And even if there was, the only other number they would ever have would be our main line because we can set it up with RingCentral.

You have— so depending on your software that you're using for your phone, that may or may not be a feature set where you can say all calls, the outbound caller ID is this. So that's something. No, but that's, but that's what owners want. They want one little literal contact in their phone. And when the phone call comes in and doesn't trigger that contact, They're not going to pick it up. Right. And so that's the— how do we as a company then monitor that communication? Not because we want to micromanage, not because we want to eavesdrop, but just simply when that property manager's sick, on vacation, in a training, whatever, we can still attend to that owner's needs, stay in the loop, know what's going on, etc. And coming up with the right tech solution, I think, is the next table stakes piece that either SaaS providers need to come up with, or I know there are people in our space, myself included, we're starting to kind of vibe code our own solutions and build it out. But that is the next piece that needs to take place is I need to have awareness of the context in the communication and be able to dive into it when needed, but I don't need to be carbon copy on every single email. To stay in the loop. I just need when they're out sick or whatever to be able to jump in real quick, see what's going on, so I don't sound like an idiot on the phone.

Right. Okay, well, I guess I don't know that we're going to solve that here now today, but I think there's a lot.

No, but we're dropping seeds, so whoever's listening, those that have ears will hear, and maybe they can come up with a solution.

Yeah, because I don't think we're there yet. I, you know, I don't think that the final the best optimal setup has been configured and is available to property managers in the way that's going to make the most sense for phone, text, and email.

Yeah, I agree. All right, well, I agree.

This has been great. Thank you for joining me. This is secondly your third or fourth appearance on the show. And if you're listening, we'd love to see you at the Access Granted live launch for the Crane Spring application window.

Yep. April 2nd.

We'll see you there. 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.