AI-Powered Tenants Are Now Suing PMs (Seriously) with Adam Willis

Someone will come in and say, hey, I'm a customer making $300,000, $400,000, half a million dollars a year. And I'll say, okay, cool, we can't pay you that, but if you can grow this division and you can pull these types of levers and being manager, director, vice president, executive type roles, giving them the right tools that they could then get a piece of the pie. And so I try to be very, very selfless in the sense like, let's grow the pie together and your slice of the pie gets bigger. In one of the scenarios, it was like, you grow this division, you get X amount above cost recovery. So it's like we back out, you know, you take it from $500,000 to $1 million. I back out your salary, operating expense, and we split the proceeds together. And that scales and that really incentivizes them to be really judicious, not only with what their needs are, And, uh, but like that need usually costs me money and I'm like, cool, like I'm gonna recover my cost and we're gonna split any upside. But my job as a CEO is to place bets now on these people who are way more skilled than I ever could.

Friends, welcome back to the Peter Lohmann Podcast. I'm here with a rare, repeat guest I have in the virtual studio with me today, Adam Willis, CEO and owner of Nestwell Property Management. How are you today, Adam?

I'm fantastic. I mean, we're coming up on the end of the busy season, and so we're trying to get all of our houses occupied before the snow flies here in Utah. It's very seasonal, and so a lot of vacancies.

When does the snow start? Around you guys?

It held on me on Saturday. I coached my second grader's birthday. The snow really starts flying around Halloween. Like, there's countless Halloweens where I'm trick-or-treating and I'm in like a parka under and over my Superman costume. Yeah. So around October, end of October, first November, you start seeing some snow. It doesn't start sticking in the valley for a couple months, For like a month after that, but—

No, I gotcha. Okay.

Yeah.

All right, well, we're gonna jump right into it. We're skipping all your background, your bio, all of that. First of all, no one cares. Second of all, if they do, they can go listen to the first episode you were on. So I wanna check back in on your current status of like a couple different things that we talked about in the first episode with you. One of them is using self-help portals. So you were the first one that showed me your setup of how you created like knowledge bases for your tenants and for your owners to try and reduce kind of the support workload, as it were, for your team. So my question is, are you still doing that? How is it working and what software do you use for that these days?

Oh man. All right. That's fun. Yes. The knowledge bases and the self-help, the self-soothing portals, whatever.

Self-soothing. I mean, it's like a skill you treat to a baby or you treat to like a toddler.

Here's a binky.

Yeah.

You know, like, oh my goodness. That's what it is. It's self-soothing. I mean, and they want to do it at 2:00 AM and I'm not, I'm not going to take their call at 2:00 AM. So yeah, fast forward to now, we, Ian Joseph and I are good friends and he and Stephen Glover and I are good friends. One of those two had recently said, hey, we're, we're into client experiences. And so we have these knowledge bases, we have these wealth of knowledge, all of this public-facing content. And we're like, I don't think people want to come to our websites anymore. I think in the near future it will be that we need to be creating experiences. And I can't remember if it was Ian or Steven that talked about that. We're all in on the experience, right? Like a LeadSimple task is Is here's an email, here's an email, like an onboarding.

Yeah.

Like here's an email, do this. Here, here's how you set up your utilities. Here's how we get your banking information. Not an experience. So what we have shifted to is we have portals, like truly homegrown portals where a tenant who wants to move into our property is, they can interact with us on an app. They can interact with us on a video. They can interact with us via text message. So think like Delta Airlines, It's like you can go to their app and you can book a flight or report an issue or whatever, or you can just text message them. We are this close. Parts of it are already live.

Hmm.

So we have these experiences where all of this knowledge is sitting on the backend and we will walk someone through how to move into our rental from applying all the way to, you know, signing their move-in acknowledgement in person. Recording a video of the condition of their property, all homegrown. Pretty awesome. So like if I was talking to a tenant and they're like, I have an issue, and I'm like, I don't understand, I could click a button, say video chat, video chat pops up and we can interact with the, the people that way. And it's recorded and it's chronologically, all the communication is chronologically organized.

Uh-huh.

'Cause nobody's doing that very well. So experiences around communication and talking to them the way they want to be talked to, all in one house. It's crazy cool.

So it sounds like you are moving away from like a self-help knowledge base where you're like typing a keyword into like a search query and coming back with a list of articles to read, moving away from that and more towards like, Hey, just text us and we'll help you with whatever you need.

Both will be an option, right?

Okay.

Every— everyone digests information a little bit easier or differently, right? Like visual, you know, writer, audibly. We have all of those things. You know, you go to support.nestwell.com or whatever it is and go review and type stuff in. But no, I, I, I don't think people want to be coming to our sites for very much longer. In fact, I think their AI bot, their ChatGPT is going to be like, I want to pay my rent. I want to renew my lease, and it's going to be talking to our systems. I know that's pretty foreign right now, but I think eventually we get to that.

Yeah, I do think there is something along those lines. I always think about, I mean, the ideal situation for a tenant or an owner is they save a contact in their phone that says Nestwell, and that contact has One phone number and one email address and anything they need at any time, they can text or email that one phone number and that one email address and get near instantaneous help from an ownership level of sophistication. Like as if they were texting with you, right? That's the dream. And it's like you said, I don't want your app. I don't want 15 different emails. I gotta remember which one to email. I don't wanna be getting phone calls and texts from 3 different Phone numbers. I, you know, there's not 3 different phone numbers for Delta support. There's one. And in an even more ideal world, it would be blue bubbles with iMessage. So, and that should be true for maintenance requests, for like anything they need. Should that— this is the dream scenario. And I'm actually surprised that— I'm really surprised that no one is building that because that is so clearly Where are, where I would want, that's how I would want the experience to be as a tenant or as an owner. And it's very difficult to execute on for a bunch of different reasons, but that is clearly the right direction, I think.

Yeah, I am super excited about it. So my business partner, Mark Cropper, he's like a vibe coder extraordinaire. He's kind of has a reputation here in the industry, but he'll be like, what do you want? I'm like, what's an ideal communication look like between me and my CPA or me and my dentist, you know, what do those relationships look like? I'm like, this is how I'd want to communicate. And he's like, I think we can build that. And honing it around, like speaking the way they want to come into our world. If they're email champions, great, we can digest that. What happens on our side and the reason why no one is building it, in my opinion, I mean, I'm no expert, but because like the big players out there that are going to build it, they have to build it, you know, an agnostic way so it serves everyone and then it gets diluted. When I'm building my own stuff the way I want it for my customers, I can build it one time my way and we can tweak it and customize it. And that would— you couldn't do that 2 and a half years ago. Now we can. So it's like—

Yeah.

Possibilities are super fun saying like, I like United Airlines communication tool. I like the way Help Scout Integrates conversation.

And so, like, I don't mind a vendor being opinionated about it. Like, because most people aren't going to vibe code a solution, like 99% of people aren't going to do that. So I do think there's room for an, for a vendor to come in with an opinion and be like, this is the right way that this should be happening. And I left an important part out of my little rant a minute ago, which is same phone number that they could call, right? So call or text and then email one contact on their phone. That, like, how could you argue that that is not the right solution for the customer? So I think a vendor could get pretty far by taking a strong position on communication, how communication should work at a property management company, and then building a product around that thesis. And I'm, I know that there's a bunch of players, including LeadSimple, working on like unified comms and streamlining communication, but I haven't seen anyone come out with that as the, as like a picture. It's like the first slide on a, on a sales deck. It's like, this is how we think it should work. One phone number, one email address, whole company operates outta that streamlined experience for the customer.

Yes. And that is, that is an— I mean, yes, holistically. The, I mean, the problem is like you have, you know, LeadSimple does this. Incredibly well. You have PMS or point solutions that are doing this and that, and then all of a sudden you're like, my team is now communicating in 4 different tools. We run departmental. We're going to debate that, you know, in January.

Mm-hmm.

But like, they don't want to use each other's tools. My accounting people don't want to go into PropertyMeld, and my PropertyMeld maintenance coordinators don't want to go into the showings tool.

Mm-hmm.

And so I'm like, how, How do I fix this for my team members? And I need it chronologically because I got to go to court over it next month. Right. So it's like, I get to build it the way I want. And that's so fun.

That is really fun. That's cool. That's great that you have Mark to help with that. Okay. Along the same lines, how about, how are you handling shared inbox slash ticketing? I know that you were a big Help Scout guy, or maybe you still are. What is your, how does your current thinking fit into this whole paradigm of like, do we have people who get assigned to emails? Is it a ticketing system? Do you have multiple owners? Do you have multiple inboxes?

Yeah, we're, we have reduced it down to just 2 inboxes. I think it's for rent to handle the situation where a prospect, an applicant communicates with that inbox. After the lease is signed, they get shifted to support@nestwell. So that's the prospective tenant to the tenant journey. And then they just are all living inside support@nestwell.com. Please don't spam it. All of our homeowners, they go from an onboarding at Nestwell, they hang out there for 90 days post property management agreement signed where they're kind of corralled and, you know, VIPs, new owners, and treated as such. After that, they get, you know, put into the pasture of support@nestwell. And it's one tool. We did have separate emails for tenants and homeowners through the lifecycle. That wasn't working because we were inside Help Scout. That was the, that's the platform we're currently on, is you're switching between 2 inboxes versus one inbox that categorizes or stores the homeowners' and tenants' contact information as well as vendors. So we've distilled it down. The way that's managed is we'll receive, I'm going to say 300 queries a day. Each department, again, we're departmental, will assign someone who kind of keeps eyes on that inbox and they will come in. A lot of it is conditionally logic shuffled out to the right person or the best person for the job to answer that solution. If it's not, you know, from 9 to 10, it's Peter, from 10 to 11, Adam is kind of on call and sending those conversations out to the right parties. And each department has one of those people, just like we're doing it with phone calls. We have a team member who's assigned to manage phone calls from 9 to 11. They live answer and they get it to the right person who can provide a resolution for the customer.

Okay, got it. And when your team is sending emails through Help Scout, do they sign their name? Do they sign their department or do they just sign Nestwell Support?

No, it's Who they are. I mean, we're still humans and we have liaisons as well that are like, I'm, that person is VIP and they're assigned to a certain party. Maybe that relationship's tenuous, but yeah, their signature would just be like a normal email out of Gmail. You know, here's my name, my title, my role. Sometimes it'll show their rank, whether you're an individual contributor or leader.

Don't you then have owners who are like, oh, I want to talk to Cynthia about this?

Yeah. Cynthia's great. We all love Cynthia. We all make a concerted effort to be more like Cynthia. So, so yeah, you get that a little bit, but I think that what the bigger question is like, how do we create a really fantastic experience like Cynthia has done?

You do it with a pod hybrid structure is actually how you do that.

I can't wait, dude.

All right, so for those who don't know, Adam and I are set to debate this very topic, so we're not gonna get into it today, at the PM Systems Conference in January. Fantastic conference. I've been many years in a row. I'm going back again. So if you wanna catch us debate what's the best org structure for a PM company, departmental, pod, et cetera, we will save all that for then. Today's episode is sponsored by Enterprise Bank and Trust. If you run a property management company, you already know that trust account banking can get complicated. Fast compliance rules, software integrations, vendor payments—it's a slog. That's why many property managers across the country partner with Enterprise Bank and Trust. They built a banking program specifically for our industry. Here's one feature that I think is especially interesting: instead of paying traditional interest on your trust accounts, which many states actually don't allow, Enterprise offers a competitive earnings credit rate program. In plain English, you earn credits that can be used to offset bank fees and even pay for third-party expenses like property management software, bookkeeping services, consulting, crane, and more. That's a pretty meaningful benefit if you are already paying for those tools. But it's not just about the credits. Enterprise also has a dedicated team that specializes in property management trust accounts. They'll help you open and structure these accounts correctly, stay compliant, and integrate with the software. That you're already using. They also offer lending solutions if you need financing for acquisitions, growth, or other opportunities in your business. Bottom line, Enterprise understands property management. If you want to learn more or connect with their team, go to enterprisebank.com/property-management or just click the link in the show notes. Thanks again to Enterprise Bank for sponsoring this week's episode. Okay, great to get an update on those things. I know we have a bunch of really fun stuff. I don't want to I want to keep going so we get through these topics. Let's talk about real estate brokerage. So I do not operate a real estate brokerage in-house, never have. We refer, you know, refer leads, so to speak, or property owners who want to buy or sell to some partners that we have referral agreements set up with. Do you have in-house brokerage?

Yeah, we always have since 1980. Yep.

Since 1980? How old are you?

Family owned and operated, baby.

I somehow didn't know that. I don't know why I didn't know that.

Yeah, it's been, it's been small. I mean, it was before I took over, it was, we were like 80 doors or 100 doors or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we've always kind of sold real estate. The adages like property management was get on base. The grand slam was doing a real estate transaction.

Do you still believe that? Do you still believe that?

I mean, we are getting a lot of doubles and triples in property management these days, right? Like it is our bread and butter. The revenue and margins are to where we can do a lot of really cool stuff, like be very intentional about building a real estate brokerage. I know some of my best friends and people in masterminds with me have intentionally gone away from real estate brokerages, and I'm leaning into it. We were lucky enough to find a high-powered executive that was disenchanted with a huge household name worldwide, brand in the real estate world. And he's like, I want to come back and make a boutique play and work with 30 to 50 real estate agents and help them. And so, yeah, yeah, we, I'm skating towards real estate brokerage to, it's kind of like the hub and spoke, right? Like the hub will always be property management, being really great at doing real estate, being really good at doing commercial or whatever the hubs are and just making it a who issue. So we have a really fantastic who that's beating that drum and actively recruiting real estate agents.

Nice. And how many agents are you up to now?

3 full-time, and they all do really, really well. I mean, they make a ton of money.

Okay. Yeah, I remember you telling me about this guy that you were bringing in, and definitely sounds like you've solved this with a who, which is exactly what I would want to do if I were to take this on, mostly because I've never even I've never acted as a realtor. I've never helped anyone buy or sell a house, so I don't actually know how to do it. So I would want to bring in the right person to stand it up just like you've done. Sounds like you're pretty happy with that approach. You would recommend it?

Yeah, I think you only have so much attention as a small business owner and you bump into capacity every single day. And so a lot of people will be like the hedgehog methodology and just like, I'm going to be the very best single-family residential property manager in XYZ state. I applaud you. I think you can do that and I can do that. But then if you want to go into a different division or grow vertically or horizontally, you just have to have the right who that's like, I am hyper-focused on XYZ. My compensation is built around that structure and I can turn them loose and then we can still maintain like a one-stop shop. I can help you with all of your real estate needs.

Yeah. Okay. And what about the name Nestwell Property Management? Do you have a separate brand name for the, for the real estate sales?

It's Nestwell Real Estate. One thing that we learned, we have a separate general contracting company called Team Tool Belt, and managing various brands is very arduous from tax compliance to filings to disclosures to email accounts. And me having to own multiple domains and websites And just all of the marketing that goes into it. That was a real pain in the butt because Nestwell has a really great reputation in our market. We're doing it all under one brand. So Nestwell Property Management, Nestwell Real Estate. The way our licensing works is I have a principal broker over here and I'm the principal broker on property management.

Okay. Interesting. So they're 2 different entities?

One entity DBA as Nestwell Real Estate. But yeah, there's the filings, the structure, and then there's the compliance with the state.

Yeah. I can't remember if it was you or somebody else who I was talking to about this, where they pointed out to me that when you decide to do brokerage, you have to think carefully about the name because like in our example, my example, RL Property Management, that would not work as a name of a brokerage. Like you don't want to see like a for sale sign in someone's yard, for sale by RL Property Management. You're like, wait, what? Doesn't make sense. So I would need to do like RL Realty, or, you know, I would have to come up with some parallel name that tied back to RL but wasn't referencing property management in order, I think, in order to do well in that area.

Yeah. You also have to think about trademarks. Nestwell is a fairly popular phrase across the country and our Trademark attorney is shutting down companies honestly every single month who are trying to do that. So if you get too ambiguous or too big, like, you know, general, you can't trademark it. If you get too specific, you can trademark it and then you can protect your brand. 'Cause this is a, this is an asset, the brand.

The trademark attorney who's doing that, I mean, do you perceive that to be a good thing or is it more of a nuisance and you wish you didn't have such a common name? I'm assuming it's not free.

No, no. The trademark attorney's going to make a lot of money. But no, having the mark is fantastic because, you know, real estate trademarks or brands or domains, it's situs. There's only so much of it. And to not have that trademark, like if at one point I was Roost Property Management and my dear friend Lisa Wise in DC, we all know her and love her. She sent me a cease and desist letter. I remember this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've told it a few times and we're good friends, but I'm like, I have to respect your mark. And the reason why it came into her world is like we started ranking and someone on her team, Lisa's not going to bother herself with it, but someone on her team is like, wait a minute, there's this company in Salt Lake. And we now do that on a monthly basis to other companies across the country.

Interestingly, there's a Roost Real Estate in Ohio. I know the guy Chris, and I wonder if he's gotten a letter yet, but I guess we'll see. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Very good. Okay. How about speaking of sort of parallel businesses that attach to property management, let's talk about maintenance and GC type stuff. I think I saw in the notes here that you're resurrecting an old GC company. Tell me about that and why you're messing with it and what, how it's going.

Yeah. The impetus around that was We did not like, we loved all the vendors we were doing business with, but we did not love the experience that we were receiving, the pricing that we were receiving. And like any entrepreneur, you're like, I can do it better for cheaper, right? Like you totally disregard someone's work and saying, I can do it better. And so we kind of birthed that because we wanted control over our turns and we kind of have a reputation for being able to do our Turns in, you know, 5 business days. Like, that's the job. We're, we're a little bit behind that now, but the only way we were able to do that was to do it our way to our standard. And that birthed kind of this general contracting company. It limped along for probably 7 or 8 years with just a couple of handymen that were kind of coming and going and constantly kind of churning out that, that demographic of employee. And then we came across Josh, who is a retired military guy. So again, a who issue is we brought him in. Retired military, fantastic big presence, speaks at all the conferences now. Yep.

Yeah. Josh.

Yeah. We all know him. Like, yeah, I think you guys have hung out a few times and he comes in and he's like, Team Tolwell. Yeah, I can, all these things, all these things that you think are hard are actually really easy. And I said, sure. Like, let me, I'll write a check. I'll figure, we'll, we will figure this out. And he's done fantastic work to where we're like 7 or 8 techs. We're doing all of our turns in-house. And we're looking at kind of our list of all of our third-party contractors and saying, all right, who do we want to buy? Who do we want to bring? What do we want to bring in-house? And getting really clear on that just so we can own that entire vertical and own that experience. And for the benefit of our shareholders, our homeowners, our tenants, like we want quick turns and we want 'em done on time at a certain price.

Yeah.

And having that control is actually really great. It is hard. I highly recommend it. Most people don't do it, but we are, and it's worked out very well.

I will echo all those comments. We have had in-house maintenance for almost the whole history of the company. We have similar number of techs to you, and it is great. It's great value for the property owners, great responsiveness and value for tenants as well. And we make money on it, but it is hard. It is the number one source of occupied brain cycles of the leadership team is like maintenance. What's going on with turns? What's going on with occupied maintenance? What's going on with keeping technicians staffed? What's going on with technician compensation? We messed this up. We forgot this. We need to do this. There's a lot because it is a totally different business. You're basically running another business inside your management company. And it's made harder by the fact that It's not even just one business. You know, you're basically trying to run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical, like handyman, 4 or 5 or 8 or 10 different trades, which themselves are actual businesses, are all falling under the roof of maintenance in a property management company. Now, there's challenges to not having your own maintenance of a different nature because you have to have an outstanding vendor network and You, you know, when you're dealing with vendors and contractors, you can't necessarily say, I need you to go to over to this property right now and take care of the situation. You can do that when you have in-house. So there's different challenges, but it's not for the weak man. And you do need a who. My business partner ran it when he was still involved with the business, and we've cycled through a couple different, several different directors of maintenance since then. I think we landed on a great one now, but it's been a journey and it's still not without its challenges.

Yeah. Major challenges, major liability. That one we actually have under a separate brand, separate entity. I have business partners in that one as well. Josh is one of them.

Yeah.

And, and that's been really fun to see him take it on and talk about all the things that we think are hard. He makes them look very easy. But every morning at 9:00 AM, he is beating, he is absolutely flogging his team members to make sure everything is delivered on time. It's funny. I mean, think of a drill sergeant every morning at 9:00 AM. I have to put in my headphones and he's berating them and making 'em do pushups and all sorts, all sorts of fun stuff. I mean, he has their buy-in, like they will run through walls from him, but he has a very commanding presence.

That's great. So I'm assuming he's gonna be at MX Summit.

He is. He's speaking.

Yeah. So my director of maintenance, Michael, is as well. So shout out to MX Summit. PropertyMeld puts on a great show every year that's coming up. This episode is coming out, so we're recording on August 31st, but I think this episode's coming out this week and there's still a few weeks left if you want to grab tickets. I'll be there. It's going to be a really fun time and I'm going to try and get on a horse and do a little rodeo action. We'll see if they let me do that this year.

I saw photos. I've been there once in South Dakota. Where is it? What is it called? Rapid City. It's amazing. It's such a great place.

Yep. All right, so tell me about some people stuff. So I got a couple notes here. A-players and having conversations with them. You love helping people achieve their goals. Fractional executives. Are you working with some fractional executives right now?

Yeah, I have one in, one that is actively working with us. His name is Ben Farberwitz and he comes from a commercial background, commercial real estate background. And he has been with us, yeah, probably about 5 or 6 weeks. And he came in as our CFO and you could not afford this caliber of guy outside of a fractional role. And so he's—

And there wouldn't be enough for him to do anyway, I would, I wouldn't think.

No, I mean, he's quickly learning that property management, while it's not rocket science, has its complexities and doldrums. And, but yeah, he came in and he did it the, the way it kind of worked is I needed someone fractional. I don't need someone full-time. I interviewed several people, both local and, you know, across the United States, chose him. He came in, did a diagnostic, charged a few thousand dollars to say, hey, this is what I'm seeing after interviewing everything and digging into your processes. He wrote a 14 or 15-page executive playbook plan on how he can clean things up. We worked out a retainer fee and it's project-based. He comes in. And if he knocks all 15 things, 14 things out of the park by the end of the quarter, then we'll revisit just having him stay on retainer and work with us in kind of perpetuity. And that's been fantastic. And you have a caliber of a half-million-dollar type person for a fraction of that, because he'll bring order to the organization with— and he ultimately has the goal of saying, hey, I think we could probably outsource some of your stuff to a fractional controller, which would be less expensive, or a, you know, a group of remote team members. So once we do all the housekeeping, it's just keeping the train on the tracks. And he's, his goal is to kind of work himself out of a job, although I adore him so much, I'll probably keep him around.

Yeah, that's really great. What are some of the things that he's doing? Like, I'd love to hear just a couple little juicy bits of what types of projects or what things he's tackling.

Yeah, we had started, we got to the size where a 401 made a lot of sense. And so we went down that road and we bumped into capacity issues on the administrative side and we said, ooh, this sucks. Yeah. Handed it off to him and now he's taking it through, you know, the final steps, the cleanup and, you know, stabilizing that.

Gotcha.

God, he has, you know, one thing that's always kind of embarrassed my company, I'm just owning it, is that we write a ton of checks. Still like paper checks. And that's always been an issue for me. And so he can't— he's going to come in and say, hey, this is how instead of going to ACHs or Nacho files, he's like, let's go partner with the right bank and do real-time payments and just start moving. The velocity of money can go a lot quicker.

Mm-hmm.

And that's something that our accounting team doesn't have the knowledge or the capacity to adopt those changes. So he can come in, write the playbook on it, teach it to our team, and our team can then execute on it. Those are a couple. He has 14. Some of them I can't share their secrets, but those were some high-level ones.

Yeah, I love that. It's so pleasurable when you find a highly competent person like that who can come into your business and solve the specific issues that you've had in a way that makes you feel great. You know that they're doing it the right way and they're not just guessing or making stuff up. We've had a lot of success with fractional folks as well. So we have a fractional HR team, Lauren Neisel with Red Cedar, who's been with us for many years now. And we also have, I guess what you would call kind of like a fractional controller, actually Bri, who's a Crane member who sold her business last year. If you want to listen to that episode, she came on the pod, but she has a background in finance. And so she's come in and really took off of my plate all the last little finance things that I was still handling. And has a bunch of projects kind of similar to your fractional CFO on her plate that she's doing like a one-time cleanup on training the team, documenting in Notion, and then, you know, she's out of it from there, which is awesome. So what, how do you recommend or how have you found these types of folks? Because I find that is the biggest challenges because you're really making a bet on that person and you don't want to like get 9 weeks into it and realize that they weren't the right person. So how do you— How do you find and screen these types of people?

Yeah. Who, I'm drawing a blank on his name. The guy that does EOS, he comes and does your quarterlies. I can think of his name.

Chris Kaplan?

Chris. Chris. Love Chris.

Yeah.

I think he might've been, we're standing at a NARPAM event. I think you were about ready to take stage and he came and said hi to me and he thanked me for me connecting him to several other people. I think you as well. And I said, hey, I'm looking for— he goes, what's working? What's not working? I said, accounting's not working. He's like, I know some people. And so he made some recommendations.

Oh, great. I love that.

Yeah. He made some recommendations and I think one of them was Ben. LinkedIn was super powerful. You can go in and be like, CFOs, and you can search. And then all of a sudden LinkedIn is going to start serving you candidates. I think I had posted to a few groups. And so through my SOI, I had just made posts and queries and I had, you know, 3 or 4 that were introduced to me. There was a local guy who was taking companies from, you know, $5 million to $50 million and then exited, and he just happened to be available as well. So it was a toss-up between those 2. In fact, if Ben can sunset everything and get everything done, I might bring in this local guy to do the same thing from a different perspective. Yeah, just having the options.

Sure. This episode is sponsored by Haven AI. I've been hearing a lot of great things about Haven AI recently. A couple weeks ago, I was on a webinar panel about AI and property management, and Evernest talked about how Haven's AI agent transformed their leasing operation, handling most of their top-of-funnel leasing interactions across text and email. And you might have heard Haven mentioned on a recent episode of my podcast where one of their customers, Matt Luke, Told me about how he's managing 350 doors with no W-2 employees. That's not a typo or a misspeak. Zero W-2s. He's using Haven's AI agents for maintenance and leasing to make that work. There's no shortage of AI hype in property management right now. Everybody's got an AI something. But what caught my attention with Haven is that it's not just a chatbot bolted onto your website. It's a platform of configurable AI agents that plugs into your existing software and actually takes action. We're talking creating work orders, dispatching vendors from your preferred vendor list, triaging emergencies, qualifying leads, scheduling tours, and following up with prospects across phone, text, and email around the clock. They're Y Combinator backed and were just named one of the top 50 AI startups in real estate. The operators I've talked to who are using it seem genuinely impressed. Which in our industry is not easy to earn. If you want to see what the buzz is about, book a demo at usehaven.ai. And thanks again to Haven AI for sponsoring this episode. Staying on people for another few minutes, tell me about creative compensation plans. What are you doing there?

Yeah, I've talked about it a little bit. I think I spoke at NARPM events around performance-based compensation. I'm a no-profit coach and those guys are are really high on it as well. So we have, when you're bringing in executives, you can do them in a consultative way where it's like, here's the 14 things that I'm going to do. And you negotiate a price for those deliverables. You give it to a C-suite fractional type person, they go out and do it. That's what we've done with Ben. With other executives that we have on our team, it's like, you know, phantom stock is something that we've toyed around the idea with, or literally Starting a sister company and saying, hey Josh, do you want to be my business partner? And that has served us really well. The goal here is for me to, as the CEO of what probably is going to turn into a conglomerate, would be like finding really fantastic people, finding out what their needs are, what their values are, what their goals are, and then helping them achieve them together. I have my unique abilities, they have theirs. So if you can find those partners, then I'm totally happy to do like, let's do an equity play on this. And that served me really well. I've done other type compensation structures where someone will come in and say, hey, I'm accustomed to making $300,000, $400,000, half a million dollars a year. And I'll say, okay, cool, we can't pay you that, but if you can grow this division and you can pull these types of levers and being manager, director, vice president, executive type roles, giving them the right tools that they could then get a piece of the pie. And so I try to be very, very selfless in the sense like, let's grow the pie together and your slice of the pie gets bigger. In one of the scenarios, it was like, you grow this division, you get X amount above cost recovery. So it's like we back out, you know, you take it from $500,000 to $1 million. I back out your salary, operating expense, and we split the proceeds together. And that scales and that really incentivizes them to be really judicious, not only with what their needs are and, but like that need usually costs me money and I'm like, cool, like I'm going to recover my costs and we're going to split any upside. But my job as a CEO is to place bets now on these people who are way more skilled than I ever could. And so I'm to a degree, I don't like poker, I don't like Las Vegas. I know you have a lot more fun than I do when we go to those events, but You make me sound like I'm some high roller.

I think I've gambled maybe $200 in my whole life.

I'm up on Vegas $350, and I have been that way since I graduated college.

That's awesome.

And I have not played since. But like, we're just— I'm placing bets. I'm saying, hey, I'm putting this bet on red. And it's fun because sometimes they don't shake out, but a lot of times they do. But it's risk mitigation too, right? Like, you can gamble On an unbeknownst, something that you can't control, or you can do really great interviews, really enjoy this person, really, and they are, they've gone further and farther than you ever could alone. You recruit 'em back to the cause and be like, I'm placing a bet on you. And these are 6-figure bets and it's so fun to do that.

Tell me about some creative compensation structures that didn't work out. Or that you considered and decided against?

Ones that have not worked out. Originally, I read a book called Compensation by Verne Harnish. It's somewhere up here. One of the ones that we had done was, and I've spoke about this and I need to retract it, but it was like always bonusing over year-over-year growth. And For the most part, when the company is growing, well, let me give you some context. If Nestwell Property Management does $100,000 in net income in 2025, and then in 2026 we do $150,000 in net income, I was taking that $50K and dividing it amongst the entire company. And that worked well when the company is growing. What really sucks is in 2027, Instead of $150K in net income, we only did $75K in net income. And the bonus pool, the pool of money that's eligible is only on year-over-year growth. And so I'm always protecting the house. I always have working capital. In the example I gave you, I always have $100,000 in working capital because that's protected. We're only paying on upside. What really sucks is you have a remote team member in you know, Spain, and they work themselves to like the bone and they just grind. But then we don't have a really great year and the bonuses are only based off of year-over-year growth. It's really disincentivizing saying, sorry, there's nothing for you. Or I feel like—

The bonus amount was smaller than last year is what you're saying?

Yeah. Meaning it's only based on year-over-year growth. So if you do 100,000—

Oh, so no growth.

It was no growth. There's nothing. There's no growth. I mean, we've always been on the fortunate scale of, you know, of a hockey stick. We haven't had any bad years, but there have been years where it was like, or quarters that weren't like hyper, that weren't prolific.

Yeah.

And that sucks because that person is, you know, wanting to pay for their kid's school or buy a car or whatever. The other one that when you're basing it just off of the company's net income, Let's see, when you're basing it just off of net income, a lot of the times these people do not have the means to really impact it, right? So it's like that entry-level individual contributor doesn't have the ability to pull really big levers. Or I go out and I say, hey, we're doing M&A. I just spent $500,000. I've vaporized any—

I mean, I could have told you this was a bad idea before any of this, so you should have called me because Clearly not a good idea.

Yeah, we have pivoted, right? Like, you know, sometimes I just got to go through it. I got to put my hand on the stove. I got it. Yep. But, but it's worked out well. We have different bonus schedules based off of contribution margin. Some people are not impacted at all, so they're protected. Their bonuses, their incentives are totally protected from any decision that I make that could drain, you know, net income and whatnot. But those that do have the means do participate with me on, on growth and, and bonuses are, their bonuses are structured on their ability to pull really big levers.

Yeah, there's, there's always tension when you talk about creative compensation. There's tension between complexity and sort of susceptibility to gaming or outside factors and simplicity. So the ideal compensation structure would be dead simple to understand by anybody, impossible to game, and directly correlated with the individual's performance, right? That's essentially impossible. So everything we are doing is trade-offs off of that perfect compensation arrangement. Where I've landed on all this, and you can tell me if you agree, is like for most team members, so non-leadership, it has to be unbelievably basic and simple and the simpler the better. So obviously they're making hourly or salary. And then what we do is year end, there's a bonus and it's like a single digit percentage of their base salary that they earned that year. So if they came in halfway through the year, then it would be half of a full-time person making the same amount. And then it's like, and then I tweak it up or down a little bit just depending on their performance or their, yeah, their performance for that year. So let's just pretend it's 2% of their salary. If I think they did a great job that year, really carried their department or showed a lot of growth and jumped in and solved some stuff for us, maybe I bump it to 3% or 2.5%, or usually I won't go below like whatever our base is. And that's pretty much it because I think if you were to try and like introduce all these complicated structures, now you're having all these arguments about like, well, you know, I saw you got a new car. Was that coming out of the net income for the company? Like, well, you know, just like you, you're immediately into the weeds. So then on the leadership side though, I think there's more room to be creative, probably in a case-by-case basis, probably some type of Profit sharing. I'm in favor of that over any type of equity. I think with equity, people A, don't really understand it. B, are suspicious of how it's calculated. C, they're not, they don't properly value it. So like if you were to grant somebody 5% equity in your business, right? For which for you, Adam, would be like an unbelievable giveaway. They would essentially value it at zero. I can just tell you that right now.

Yeah.

Like anyone who's not a business owner, they assign no value to that. So if you were to ask them to buy into that, they would be shocked and offended, you know? And so just, it's kind of apples and oranges when it comes to employees and business owners with equity. I think the closest we've come to that is like our, my compensation for years was tied to, as CEO, was tied to Revenue growth percent and profitability as a percent. And it was like a spreadsheet that was kind of like, you know, obviously the higher the growth and the higher the margin, the more my bonus was as CEO. That was something my business partner and I agreed to that worked well for us and has for many, many years. And so I don't know, I admire people who want to grant equity and stuff and try and be really creative. Like you always get into it when you're like trying to compensate salespeople. Like you wanna come up with these complicated formulas of like, okay, well if there's multiple units, then we do, it's multiple, there's a multiplier, but they have to stay for 90 days. But then if one of the properties turns out, we have to back that percent out. And you soon, you're like, you're, you're so chasing your tail and, and then they're coming back, they're arguing with you about like, well, this actually wasn't a qualified lead cuz we found out later, you know, so it shouldn't count against me. And, uh, you know, they, they messed up the onboarding, so that wasn't my fault.

100%. We're, we're in the middle of that right now. Yeah. 2 things. One, waiting till the end of the year to pay bonuses, I get it. I mean, that's when your fiscal year closes. That's when you are feeling generous because of the, you know, it's December and, you know, that's just a season of celebrating the wins and abundance, right? We do ours quarterly and because, you know, second quarter is hard. And so we want to acknowledge and compensate our team around that. The other thing was like, there's some subjectivity to yours. You know, Peter, a little bit where it's like, well, you know, they really showed up for me this quarter. I'm like, what does, what the hell does that mean, Peter?

I know, it's true.

You're right. But, but ours is the same. So I'm, I'm with you. Our, our bonus structure is 50% based off of KPI performance. So, right, we have all these metrics. Are you doing your job well? Blah, blah, blah. 50% of their bonus based off of that. The other 25% is like peer review. So how are you showing up for your team members and your, your supervisor? And so that's where it gets a little bit subjective is I'm sure they're all like, hey, I'll give you an A if you give me an A, right? Like, duh. Horse trading. Yeah. Horse trading. And then the last one is like quarterly rocks. 25% of their bonus is based off quarterly rocks. So we've gotten really clear on like quantifying those are, 'cause those really can move the company forward and we want to compensate people for going above and beyond and doing their quarterly rocks well.

Nothing will encourage you to identify a smart rock like compensation being tied to the completion of that rock. Very specific.

Yeah. Yeah. And they earn 'em. Sometimes they miss. And when they miss, we say, this is why you missed. Yeah. And that's uncomfortable.

Yeah, I bet. Yep. All right. So, um, you had a great note here about AI, AI empowered tenants. So we talk a lot about how empowered we are as businesses and business owners with AI. Tenants are coming back. You said filing an unusual amount of small claims lawsuits about security deposit dispositions. And complaints around fair housing. I know my team is dealing with this as well. What do we do about this?

It's, it's so tricky because I mean, AI, your chat, your Claude is like, Adam, you're so smart. Peter, you're so smart. I think that's a great idea.

They're telling that to everybody. It could be a serial killer and they'll be like, yes, I love this plan.

Yeah. And, and so we're running into that. There's like, we're double digits on the amount of fair housing lawsuits. And the number of security deposits. Yeah, we're winning them all. That's the problem is like, people are like, here we go. Like, we're suing you because you discriminated on XYZ and they're filing something with the, you know, labor division. With no attorneys. No, this is all pro se. This is all pro se.

So there's no ability to even get like, you know, win their attorney's fees back or anything like. Yeah.

No. And then security deposit disputes, we're— so we're double digits between both of security deposit disputes and small claims. And then also little hearings saying, hey, you're under investigation for discrimination. We're doing neither of those. What to do about 'em? I don't know. Because it was like, AI can do so much for us, but like, what is it doing to us as well? And I'm like, it's really creating a massive drain. on our court system, but more importantly, like myself, my team members' morale, just the trauma that you have to go through in order to settle these things and just all the fact-finding and going through and submitting everything to the courts just for them to say, hey, you guys are doing really great. There's nothing to see here. Like that is a major problem for us. It's so bad.

You ever hear your BDM or, or just Talking around the industry and someone will be like, yeah, man, like all the other companies, all I hear is like no one can ever get ahold of anyone there. Right. You ever hear that complaint? I hear it all the time.

Really? Yeah.

And the older I get and the more longer I've been in this business, when someone says, yeah, XYZ company, I can never get ahold of anyone over there. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I think I know why. Because the longer you've been in this business, the more you're like, let me make myself unavailable, uncontactable. Because the only thing that's coming through that other end of that, uh, phone or that email address is AI-generated lawsuits and complaints about security deposits. And so it's kind of like, the more I hear those complaints, I'm like, yeah, I get why people are like unreachable in this business because No one's ever calling you to say, I think you did a great job today. Thank you for maintaining a safe and habitable home. My family's so happy here. Like, I appreciate your landscaper. Like, never. So I think the inevitable, like, last third of every property management company's life is just like, close down the phones and emails and just do the bare minimum.

Well, what's unique is that when you do get that person on the phone and they can't generate these Tyrannical emails to you, they're actually like a lot of times pretty reasonable. You can be like, hey, what do you really want? Like, I understand that you went on this diet trap. Okay, cool. I'm— I just want to have a conversation. Like, what's up? Like, what do you want? And all of a sudden they're like, oh, they're, they're actually a human being again. They're not this like tyrannical, awful person. They actually can be really reasonable. But they, when they get so— human nature, when People attack you and get really aggressive, you have no other choice but to become defensive. If you're really mature, you can get really curious, right? And if we can get away from us constantly being so defensive and always feel like we're under attack and just saying, I just want to get curious with you, Mr. Resident. Hey, homeowner, I just want to get curious. What's the real issue for you? And you can actually connect on a human level. So everyone who's avoiding this, You're actually probably making it worse. Oh, 100%. We were in, yeah, we were in, we went to court. So case in point, we were in small claims court 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago. I showed up, I had 2 other directors there. So this meeting is easily $600 an hour for us. We went pro se, tenant shows up.

Wait, how did you go pro se?

We don't have to. Our attorneys are like, when we show up to small claims court, And we come out and we have to teach these judges who are attorneys that are just doing some volunteer work. When we show up, it looks really bad and you're the big bad landlord. So a lot of times we'll go just solo. And this is like—

This is for not a property. This is for a property you don't own though?

No, we represent the homeowners in court.

I don't think that's allowed, my boy.

No, we do it all the time.

That's crazy. You're, you're like practicing law.

Well, they're suing us.

Yeah, but you're just an agent on behalf of your principal.

That's a great perspective. I would love to not go to court, or I would love to not go to court on behalf of my clients, but we've been doing it for 40-plus years. I think most property management companies in the state of Utah are doing it that way as well.

I bet you're right. And I can see why that is effective for the reason you articulated. Definitely not allowed in Ohio. And Wow. I haven't been in a courtroom for this business in 6 or 8 years.

That's fantastic, Peter. Like we, I need to reflect on that and be like, hey, you know what? We can't represent you in court. Here's an attorney. You gotta pay them, you know, $400 an hour. Yes. $650 an hour. Yes. To represent. And, and I think they might be a lot more willing to settle. I'm, I'm thinking out loud here. I know we're supposed to like, I'm an expert in this, dude.

No, no, we're all figuring it out.

We're all fake. We're, I'm, I'm faking it. Like underneath this composure, I'm just frantically trying to stay above water. Yeah. So we, sorry, we went to court the other day. The tenant who had a security deposit dispute, we made like a $1,500 claim against the security deposit that was like $3,000. He was pissed, filed a claim, did it. ChatGPT empowered him. He filed the suit. We show up, he goes, can I just read this, Your Honor? And he read a ChatGPT script. The judge turns to us and like, anything you want to add besides what you had already submitted to the court? And we just said, yep, You know, the law says this, the lease says this. And in 3 sentences she stopped and she goes, sorry, Mr. Tenant, I have to rule with these guys. You've completely wasted the court's time. I don't know where you're getting these facts. And just, she was very nice, but also really embarrassed this guy. And I'm like, what a waste of the court's time. And that's what I like. And, and I can't go get, I can't go back to my homeowner and be like, hey, we won in court and you owe us $750. I guess I could and I probably should.

You absolutely should.

In fact, I should not be going to court.

Yeah. That's one of the things I— you don't have a clause in your PMA about like court hourly rate for court representations and all that?

You know, we do. And that's outside of the scope of normal property management, but we've just not done a very good job at implementing clauses or standing behind the clauses in our PMA.

Yeah, man. Thank you.

For helping me realize this on a podcast that hopefully 20,000 people will listen to.

Yeah, hopefully you're right. All right. So yeah, AI, I had something I was going to add there.

AI is amazing. It's also very dangerous.

Yeah. I don't know where this is all going to go because this is happening across every industry. And especially when tenants don't have any legal fees that they're out of pocket, there's no incentive for them to do anything except file, file, file. Whereas for us, we're out, you know, we're, it costs us money or time or both, even if we win. So it seems like it's an exploitation or it's like a weakness in the legal system that's being exploited now. And AI is kind of turbocharging that. So that's tough. Okay. Oh, let's see. What else do we want to get into here? You mentioned wanting to ask me some questions. We've got 6, 8 minutes left. What are you curious about? Happy to see. You know, turn the tables.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's only fair. You're such, you're so good at interviewing other people. I'm like, let's pull back the curtain on Peter and like where his mind's at. And so you obviously have a pretty great SOI and a pretty breadth of knowledge and fortunate enough to connect with so many, you know, different people that I'm like, hey, I wonder what Peter has to say about this. And you're pretty good about vocalizing your opinions and scattering it through all these people that you're interviewing. But like, what are you working on? Like, obviously this podcast and the Peter Lohmann Show, we all love and adore it. Tell me what the pro— where this is going, where you see it going.

Yeah, the media business has kind of turned into a going concern sneakily. Started with just the podcast and shortly thereafter the newsletter. Both of those started mostly just for fun, then discovered I was able to sell sponsorships and Now I've ramped up the podcast. It's now a year-round show and we have video and the newsletter has now gone twice a week and I'm scattering in these various reports and surveys and things that I'm putting out, like the top 40 largest property management companies. And I just love it. It's some of my favorite work that I do is using the platform that I've got to move the industry forward and help operators. The filter that I use for everything that I publish is, would this help a property management business owner to know this, to learn this, to see this, to hear this? If the answer's no, I generally, I won't publish it because it's either not relevant or it's essentially gossip. And so now sometimes things are kind of like right on that line where it's like, you know, AppFolio's involved with such and such a lawsuit. Does it help the average property manager know that? I think so. There's maybe an argument to be made that it's kind of like not relevant or I'm just trying to get views or whatever, but I do think it, you know, it's important that people know what's happening in the industry with some of the larger players. And there was no one really doing that work. Like no one has like court reporter with keywords getting notified. And like, you know, I've been able to break some stories, which has been extremely professionally rewarding. And help property managers know what's going on. So yeah, it's really fun and I love doing it. I'm glad that I've gotten the management company to the point where I actually have time to do this stuff because it requires a lot of research and writing. And AI is of course helping a lot with that. I've also been bringing in reporters to help. I am actually, I sent a reporter to Broker Owner in the spring. I'm sending another reporter to Zillow's conference coming up here in the fall. They have something called Zillow Rentals Unlocked that is a pretty new event, but it's like 2 or 3 days, I think, in Scottsdale. I'm not able to go, but I'm sending a reporter. She's going to attend everything and write up a bunch of stories, and we're all going to find out together what Zillow's up to, what they're thinking, what moves are they making. That's the type of thing that I love being able to do. So it's really been fun.

It's really interesting. And thank you for being like a voice of SFR stuff and being a friend to so many, I'm going to say NARPA members, but I think your breadth is even expanding beyond that now. I'm really curious to know, where do you think owners-operators like myself— this is totally a self-preservation question— where do you think we're susceptible for massive disruption or catastrophic ruin? Or do you think we are? I mean, I get text messages from a friend every day of Fearmongering posts like, oh my gosh, the world's gonna end. Where, but where do you think, like distilled down, where do you think we have problems?

Yeah. 2, 2 attack vectors are possible for property management business owners. First, I think that, you know, I don't know if this is good or bad, but people who are our age, I'm, I'm 41, I think are fine. Like we have another 10, 20 years, you know, we're gonna, we have this established base of clients, we have our network. We have a lot of built-up reputation, whether it's our domain or our local presence in an area, meaning like actual humans know your name and know your business, what you do. We're going to be fine. I think for people who are listening to this and are like under 40, I think there's 2 attack vectors to really watch for. One is we talked earlier about how AI is being used against us in these court filings. There's another way that AI can be used against us, which is all the things that we're using AI for to make our business smoother, more efficient, save costs, get work done for us. There's no reason that property owners can't do that too. So property owners can and are using AI to do things that they previously would've hired a full-service property manager to do. And software like TurboTenant, which just acquired TenantCloud, are supercharging that ability with just, first of all, a nice platform that can do all the things you would expect, like collect rent online, maintenance requests and all that. But now supercharging it with AI and bringing in local services in certain markets to supplement the things that landlords really don't want to do, like showings and maintenance coordination and things like that. So I think software that's aimed at self-managing landlords, supercharged by AI and augmented with local services, local à la carte services like boots on the ground, go take pictures, go turn this valve, go post this notice. That is a real disruptive threat to professional property managers, 100%. It's something I'm, I've been reporting on and watching carefully for years now, and AI is really speeding it up. The other attack vector is going to be The 25-year-olds who are growing up in an AI-native world and are able to build and scale a property management company with an insanely lean staff. Like there's some people in our industry who are our age who have incredibly high DLERs, like run very lean, and it's going to make those guys look like the most bloated management company you've ever seen. I'm talking 1,000 doors with 2 people. Level of efficiency by taking advantage of AI, vibe-coded software, and everything else. And so what does that mean? It means they can charge almost nothing, right? Imagine this, the full suite of service that your customers are accustomed to, but at 10% of the cost. That is a, that is a threat. And again, I think this is, this is a threat because Kind of like in the same way that you and I came up and we took advantage of like online rent payments, owner portals, owner knowledge base. Like a lot of the stuff that you and I did early on got us a little foothold and got us to grow and scale much faster than companies that had been in our markets for many, many decades. The same thing's going to happen to us or to those who are a little below us, and AI is just going to accelerate it even more. So those, those are the 2 vectors that I think about to answer your question.

I love it. I love it. I, the differentiators, I, do you think like, you know, someone who comes in and has these 1,000 doors with 2 people and a whole slew of AI agents, do you think they immediately race to the bottom and undercut us? Or do they take care of, do they bite off some of that margin and maintain that for a while? But they, if in the event of a race to the bottom, Or do you think they go, hey, this is going to be a large-scale play. I'm going to be a low-cost leader and I'm going to grab market share in a significant way and then boil the frog and find, you know, get into the black or find some margin that way. I wonder what the play is.

Well, I think the early, the people who jump on this early will probably just charge half of what you charge and the rest will be margin. But the problem is once you get 2 of these AI-powered groups in a market, now they're going to raise to the bottom and they'll, they'll, you know, eat away at each other's margins till they're barely profitable. And maybe there'll be some VC-backed, you know, player trying to, trying to go, you know, roll up across the country with, with a model like this. But yeah, it's, you know, now will it be successful? Will people accept it? Can you truly scale? Or is this just too much of a personal relationship, boots on the ground business where it will be resistant to this type of an attack? Time will tell, but I'm sure people are going to try.

Yeah. And I think the way I always just, when my team is like, we're all doomed, you know, or my friends from the industry, we're all doomed. I'm like, you know, nobody's going to court. No AI bot is going to be able to go to court. Apparently I'm going to court for free, you know, like I didn't even know, like I'm just showing up for my client. Like there are those things that are differentiator. Is there any way where you see like we could get like really big big wins or, you know, kind of Wayne Gretzky, like skating to where the puck is going? Like, where do you help out operators? Right? Because a lot of this was built around like, hey, you know, Peter's a voice for the people and aggregating information and breaking news stories. Like, where are you seeing like, hmm, this is like a tangible win that I need to share? Is there anything that you're sitting on that you want to share?

I don't think I'm sitting on anything. I think It could be really fun to try to be one of those people who starts an AI-native property management company. Like, what if I tried to start a management company in Cincinnati with like a different name and a totally, like, not sharing any of the resources from my current firm and just pretended I was that cracked 25-year-old, you know, and go, go 100% AI-native. That could be like a really fun, interesting way to sort of head it off or just have some fun and see what's possible. Call up all these AI vendors who are always in our inboxes and be like, you're on. Let's see how good you really are at handling maintenance with like no input.

So we white label your product. Yeah. I wonder if there's like a version of RL Lite or Nestwell Lite where it was like, hey, this is, there is this core product. This is who we are. If you want a freemium or a zero-cost option and like you go ahead and be like, I'm gonna, if there's a demographic that shows that desire, do I just do the light version where it's like no human interaction? We can do all these things. We like white label all of these, you know, third-party vendors that are in our space and be like, yeah, like let's just do that. Nestwell Light. Sure. $10 a month. You know, like, could we do that? Yeah. It would be a fun, fun test.

Yeah. Well, Adam, appreciate you turning the mic on me. This has been great. We are at time. For folks who want to follow along with you and Nestwell, where would be a good place for them to do that?

Our social media is coming around. Nestwell, Google Nestwell, or, or on any of the social medias, find us on Nestwell. If you want to follow me, LinkedIn and Facebook a little bit.

Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Adam. This was great.

Yeah. Peter, great catching up with you, man.

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.