Claude Just Changed Property Management Forever! (Tutorial)

This video is sponsored by Rentvine. More on them later. A lot of property managers are sleeping on Claude, and I'm going to use this video to show exactly how I'm using it at my property management business to forecast things like lease ending dates. I can ask Claude code which months have the most leases ending in them. That helps me forecast my workload at my property management business. A couple of minutes later, I've got a nice chart I can distribute to our team so they know how to plan for our upcoming turns. I also have checks running for owner ending balances that don't match between the software that we use. I've been using this software in my business for a few months now, and this is the first video that I've recorded where I'm really gonna go in depth and show exactly how we're taking advantage of Claude Code to run my business more profitably, reduce problems and inefficiencies, and make information visible to everybody who needs it. In this video, we're gonna go through 3 levels. Starting with connecting one piece of software to Claude Code. Then we'll connect all the tools we need to run some important checks across my property management business. And finally, we'll get all of this running on a schedule. The final system prepares our month-end owner distribution worksheet and saves me about 8 hours of manual work each month. So if you're a property manager and you're wondering how to get started with these tools, here's what I recommend. Download the desktop version of Claude and make sure it's updated to the latest version. Next, what I want you to do is go into Claude Code. And I know a lot of people aren't familiar with Claude Code and they may be put off by the word code that's in the name, but Claude Code isn't just for programmers. In fact, it's the most powerful version of their software and you can use it to do amazing things in your business as the owner or operator of a property management company. What a lot of people don't realize is that getting your API keys from the software that you're already using into Claude Code is what turbocharges it and turns it from just kind of like a useful chatbot into a real business workhorse. So you got to get your API keys in there and I'm going to walk you through how to do that step by step. So if you've never done this before, I want you to select one of your softwares that you use in your property management business. Ideally, it should be your main property accounting software. So for me, that's Buildium. For you, it might be AppFolio, it might be Rentvine, or it might be something like PropertyWare or RealPage or something else. Now, a lot of these softwares are going to charge you extra for an API key. So you need to check and see if your plan allows you to get an API key at your current level. Without upgrading. The notable exception here I want to highlight is Rentvine, who does a great job of making those API keys available regardless of your plan level. The software that I currently use does charge extra for API usage. Actually, they charge quite a bit. And so I had to pay extra earlier this year. We did upgrade. And so now I have API access. But whatever the case, if your current software doesn't give you API access, grab the API key from a different platform. You're likely working with different tools like PropertyMeld or RentEngine, or there's a bunch of different tools that we use every day in our property management businesses. And a lot of them, if you dig into it, will find that you can get an API key out of. Now, if you're not sure if the software that you're using provides API access, ask Claude Code. Pull up Claude Code and explain that you run a property management business and list out some of the software that you use and go ahead and ask Claude, how can I gain access to a few of these API keys? Is likely going to go out on the web and research the API documentation and try to find out if your plan includes API access or if it's on all plans. And in any case, it will give you step-by-step instructions on how to actually get that API key. What I want to do here is I want to get you to have at least one tool that you use every day. The goal here is to get you set up with at least one of your software's API keys that we can plug into Claude Code. So assuming you've got that, pull up Claude Code and just tell it what you want to do. Give it some instructions, something like this. Say, I'm a property management business owner. We work with XYZ software. Let's use Rentvine as an example. And I want to plug my API key from Rentvine into you so that I can ask you questions about my property management business, my occupancy rate, leasing, maintenance tickets, whatever it is. So you just click send. It's going to think for a while. By the way, I encourage you to use Opus 5.5 or higher for this. You can use Fable if you want. It's a little more expensive. Opus 5.5 is going to work awesome for this and is relatively inexpensive in terms of your usage. Fire that into Claude Code, and what you're going to find is it's going to say, great, here's how you can get your API key. And when you have it, I want you to paste it in chat, or it may give you like a more secure way of doing this. Once you have the API key and you've given it to Claude, now you've really unlocked like a superpower. And what you can do from here is you can start asking plain English questions about your business as it relates to that software. So if you plugged into maintenance coordination software, you can ask it something like, how many open work orders do we have? What's the average tenant rating on on our maintenance requests? How many vendors do we have that are active in the system? Do you see any duplicate units? I mean, the sky's the limit in terms of what you can ask it once you've plugged in the API. Another thing you need to understand about APIs is they each work a little bit differently, and Claude Code doesn't come built in with knowledge on how every API ever built works, and they also change. So ideally you would point Claude Code to the API documentation for the software that you're asking it to communicate with. And you can also tell Claude Code, hey, for now let's just work with read-only access. And that's going to keep you safe, keep you from accidentally overwriting data that would be important for your property management business. Some of my favorite things I like to ask it once you've connected your property accounting software like Rentvine is things like, what's our average rent? How many units do you have active in your system right now? What is— the example I gave earlier is you can ask Claude Code, hey, I'm trying to forecast my turns for the next year. Can you give me a nice graph showing the breakdown by month of upcoming lease endings or upcoming moveouts, and it will go into your system. It will read your rent roll. It will take a look at everything that's going on and give you back a really nice graph that can help you forecast your loading, which is going to help with staffing and capacity for the next season or 2 of turns coming up. The thing I love about this is like the tools that we use every day. So most of these tools have built-in dashboards and they're great as far as they go. But if you're anything like me, as soon as you see a dashboard, you immediately have ideas of other data that you could add or how much more powerful it would be if you could incorporate data from multiple sources into your dashboard. Now, it's not like dashboards are a new invention. Business intelligence or BI dashboards have been around for decades. The thing is, though, we as small business owners never really were able to use those because it required an expensive software developer to write custom software, or you had to figure out how to work with like Microsoft Power BI or something, which I barely even know what that is. And it was just— it was beyond reach for the average property manager to pull together a fancy business intelligence dashboard. That is no longer the case. So now with Claude Code, you can plug in a few of your API keys, which we're going to talk about in a minute, and you can ask it to build you a real-time business dashboard for you as the owner that pulls data from multiple sources. You can even plug in your email, you can plug in your Slack. The sky's the limit in terms of what it can do for you once it has API access. That's really the key. A lot of these tools have great AI built into their platforms. Like you can go into a lot of these different softwares and you can pull up like a chat interface that's connected to their AI and you can ask it questions about your data in their platform, but that limits you in terms of what's possible because you're stuck on their platform. You can't set up any type of custom reporting and you can't integrate data from different sources and pull that all together in a cohesive way that tells a story about what's happening with your business. So let's take it a step further. You've got Claude Code pulled up, you've got your API keys entered on a couple of your key tools. Now what else can you do? So if you haven't already, really encourage you to connect Slack at this point to Claude Code. And if you're wondering how to do that, just pull up Claude Code and say, Hi, I'd like to connect Slack. How can I do that? And it may ask you a question about like what you're trying to do with Slack. Do you need the ability to have two-way communication or do you just need notifications? Usually notifications are sufficient in this example, which simplifies the implementation or the integration with Slack. So in the example I'm going to walk through next, we were having a problem with rental owner ending balances. So as you property managers know who are managing third party, you have a trust account and every property owner that you work for has a property balance inside that trust account. And in Perfect world, those trust account balances for every individual owner would never go negative. Of course, that would never happen at your property management company, and it certainly never happened at my property management company. Just in case that were to ever happen by accident, we want to know about it, right? We need to understand immediately if a particular owner's account is negative. And of course, if you have a property owner with multiple properties, then you're allowed to take the sum of all those properties when looking at their account balance. So if they have one property that has a negative $500 balance and another property that has a positive $700 balance. Their overall balance is still $200. That is not a trust account violation. But if they have multiple properties when summed together or only one property that has a negative balance, that's an issue. And you need your team to know about that right away. The problem that we had is that our software didn't automatically notify us when there was a negative property balance. We would find it when we went to do disbursements once a month, and that was great. But I wanted to know on a more regular cadence because a lot of times when you have an owner with a negative balance, if you don't address it right away, it becomes harder and harder to fix. More and more time has gone by since whatever incident caused it to go negative. The owner forgets, the property manager doesn't remember the details. The account may become even further into the negative and the problem just gets worse. So you really want to head that off. So I didn't know of a way to solve this before Claude Code. I'm sure I could have hired a programmer who would have come in and spent hours and hours. It would have been a long deployment. It would have been this custom software that once it broke, I would have no idea how to fix it. But now with Claude Code, I was able to come up with a solution, work with Claude Code, and deploy it in an afternoon. And if it ever breaks, which it has, I can go in and I can just pull up that same chat session in Claude Code and I can get it working again. So it's beautiful. So what's actually going on? How does this work? Well, Claude Code now, because it's plugged into our property accounting software, it can pull those rental owner balances at any time. So what's the actual solution here that I implemented? I worked with Claude Code to the point where it could reliably pull the rental owner ending balances anytime I needed to know that information. And I specifically had it filter out and do some math to figure out what are the rental owners that have an overall negative balance. Not one property, not all the properties with all of their balances. I really want just a short list of rental owners who across all their properties are in the negative. Took a little kind of fuss and feathers messing with the way that Claude Code communicates with our property accounting software. You know, I needed to tell it to filter out the inactive properties and I had to explain how to like sum the multiple properties. But again, this is not coding. I was not programming any of this. I was just typing into Claude Code, hey, here's what I want you to do. When it would give me something wrong, because I can run kind of a similar report directly in my software and compare when it would give me the wrong answer, then I would just sometimes even just take a screenshot like here, here's what it's supposed to be. What do you think the problem is? And it would figure it out and it would fix it and then it would know and it would always give me the right answer after that. So from there, that's great that I'm able to run that report, but I'm not actually the one who's going to be fixing that problem in my business. And that's where the Slack integration comes in. So I told Claude Code, what I want you to do is identify the rental owner balances that are negative by property manager. So in my company, every rental owner is assigned to one of 3 or 4 different property managers. And that That property manager is the owner's primary point of contact for everything relating to their property. The person who's going to solve this negative balance really is the property manager. So I told Claude Code, hey, when you do this report, I want you to push it into Slack and I want you to list out the owners and their negative balances and which properties they're on. I want you to group them by property manager and tag the specific property manager if they have any owners with negative balances. And this works awesome. So now, spoiler alert, I'm getting ahead of myself in the video. Once a week this report runs. I'll explain how I did that and it automatically posts in our Slack channel, it tags the property manager, and they know exactly who the owner is with a negative balance, and they can jump right in and solve the problem before it gets out of hand. We don't have to wait until the end of the month now to figure out who these owners are. The property managers can jump right in and start fixing it. When we first got this going at my company, there were a lot of issues. We actually caught over $50,000 in negative owner balances over the first couple months of the tool running, and I'm feeling great now that basically I is sleeping better at night knowing that this tool is running in the background and is catching these problems before they turn into big legal issues. So here's another really interesting use case for this tool once you have it plugged into a few different APIs. So in my example, I have it plugged into my accounting software and we also have it plugged into our maintenance coordination software called PropertyMeld. And the issue, as you know, when you're running multiple softwares that all do different things for your property management business, sometimes they can become out of sync as it relates to the properties and the units that you're managing, especially as you're constantly onboarding and offboarding new properties to your business. So in any given month, we're probably onboarding 10 to 20 new properties and we're offboarding probably 10 to 15 properties as well. And so across all the software that we use, I was finding when I would manually check once a year or so, like, hey, why do we have 690 active properties in our accounting software. We have 730 active properties in PropertyMeld. That doesn't make any sense. And by the way, that costs you money because those properties that are active in one software but not active in the others, each of the softwares that we use typically charges us by the unit. And so we're paying extra every month for properties that may not even need to be active anymore. But how would you know? So I built a little checker into the software using Claude Code that talks through the API to all the software that we use, and it reconciles and looks at all the properties and the units and the owners and tries to figure out any discrepancies that exist between them. And every time I run this, I find a few. There's like properties that are somehow active in one system but inactive in another. And I happen to know that we de-managed those properties 6 months ago. This is a pretty easy thing to set up. You can just explain to Claude Code like, hey, I'm trying to make sure that I don't have any properties or units active in any of these softwares that don't need to be because sometimes they go out of sync when we de-manage a property. Please connect to these APIs and inventory and audit this And you can even tell it like, listen, I want you to do this once a week or once a month and send me an email or tag me in Slack with the results. That's just another example of how these tools can save you money and save your team huge headaches by automating stuff you were doing manually or taking care of things that you just straight up weren't doing because they were too manual or they just weren't worth your time. I'm really loving it, and that's kind of why I'm making this video and trying to share some of what I'm figuring out with other property managers. This video is sponsored by Rentvine. Let's talk about something I keep coming back to when I have evaluate software, and that's how open the platform is. Most companies say they integrate and the sky's the limit. In reality, that just means you have connections to a handful of partners that they've signed deals with. Rentvine's taken a different approach since day one. They've had a free and open API from the very beginning with no limits, no price caps, nothing in your way of building tools like the ones we're talking about in this video. Their latest move is MCP, which stands for Model Context Protocol, and they're the first in the single-family rental space to move on this. It connects Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever you're using to Rentvine using your own permissions. Ask a plain English question and get a real answer instead of digging through reports. Build your own command centers and manage tasks and communications. If you want AI without locking into one vendor's version of it, head to rentvine.com and see what they've built. Rentvine, the sky was never the limit, your software was. Thanks again to Rentvine for sponsoring this video. Okay, so now that you're up and running with Claude Code on your computer, and you may even have it running some weekly or monthly or daily checks, reports, They're notifying different people in Slack about some things that are going on. You might be wondering, do I have to leave my computer on all the time now? Like what happens if I take my laptop and I go to a conference or what happens if there's a power interruption or my computer crashes? Are we gonna lose all this and it's just gonna stop working? Well, as it's set up right now, the answer to that is yes, but I have a solution. The solution here is what's called a VPS. That stands for virtual private server. It's basically just a computer that lives in the cloud that you lease and get access to and you move everything over to that computer. Now it's running on some server in a data center, and it's no longer reliant on your local computer or your laptop to run all of these programs essentially that you've written with Claude Code. I know we really sound like software developers now, don't we? Now the good news is you don't have to really know about any of this because once again, AI can basically do it all for you. So I signed up with a service provider called Hetzner. I think it's H-E-T-Z-N-E-R or something like that. And I signed up for one of their cheaper plans for a VPS. And then I went into Claude Code and I said, I just signed up for a VPS with Hetzner. I would like to move all everything that we've done together in terms of API access and updates in Slack and the monthly checks on the owner balances. I want to move all of that over to the VPS, but I don't know anything about servers and I don't know where to start. Please walk me through this step by step. That's literally exactly what I did 4 or 5 months ago. And I don't even remember exactly what it had me do because it was so long ago and I didn't understand understand at the time, but it will basically tell you, okay, you need to log into Hetzner. Did you create an account with them, you know, using the same information where you purchased the server? Yes. Okay, it's going to give you some SSH key or something. Again, we're way beyond my technical ability, but Claude Code will walk you through this step by step. It will establish a connection to your VPS using like a secure method, and it will give you instructions on everything that it needs to do in order to move everything over. It's going to install some software on that VPS, and it's likely going to connect through GitHub, which just like a file syncing tool that programmers use to keep track of their code and keep track of their programs. So likely what you'll end up doing is you're going to want to sign up for an account with GitHub, make sure that GitHub is syncing and connected to your local instance of Cloud Code. Cloud Code is very good at working with GitHub, and then you will be able to deploy code when you work on it at your computer. It will deploy that code to GitHub and then GitHub to the server or to your VPS. Yes, and then it will be running on the latest version. So sounds a little bit complicated. It's actually pretty straightforward. And again, if you get stuck, you can just ask Claude Code, hey, what should I do here? I'm stuck. Or here's the error message that I'm seeing. I do a lot of taking screenshots of things and pasting them right into Claude Code and saying, hey, here's what I'm seeing. What do I do now? So if you don't have like the shortcut memorized for taking a screenshot on your computer, encourage you to figure out what the shortcut key is or create like a little button somewhere that you can click, bind it to a key on your keyboard or something like that, because screenshots is something you'll end up doing a lot of if you're working with Claude Code. So once it's connected to your VPS and you've got GitHub up and running, all you need to do is tell Cloud Code, hey, now that you're connected to my VPS and GitHub, I want you to deploy everything we worked on today to the VPS, and I want it to run on a particular schedule. What's going to happen then is Cloud Code is going to talk directly to your VPS. It's going to set up what are called cron jobs. Cron, I believe, is short for chronological, and it just means scheduled tasks. So you can set up a cron job to run every 5 minutes, once a week, once a month, once a day, and just tell it like, hey, I want this to run at this time on every Monday. Or on the 10th of every month or every 15 minutes or whatever it is. And then it will execute that job and it will give the output in whatever format you prefer, whether that's a Slack notification, an email in your inbox, or any of the other tools that you're using that it's plugged into. Sky's the limit in terms of what you can do here. If you're curious to learn more about that owner disbursement worksheet that I created that saves our team a lot of time, I wrote a whole newsletter article about it and I will link that in the description. It's pretty helpful because it helps prevent us from sending money back to owners who just sent us money for something like a turn or a maintenance request. I don't know if you've ever been guilty of doing that by accident, but I certainly have. And so the tool that I built with Claude Code prepares a worksheet that tells us exactly how much money to distribute to each owner so we don't do that by mistake.