Exploring AI’s Impact on Property Management: A Deep Dive with Wolfgang Croskey

Thanks for checking out today's episode. Just a quick note that I'd love to have you join me inside Crane, the new private community built exclusively for property management business owners. Go to joincrane.co to learn more.

You have to have policy in your company around AI because if you don't, things are going to go off the rails really, really fast. So developing that policy, how we use AI, are we going to use AI agents? You know, just all those things. Have to be set up because whether you set it up or not as the company owner, your employees are going to use these tools. Whether you tell them, hey, don't use that. Okay, no problem. They're going to be on their phone coming up to answer, copy, paste it in. It's going to happen. So you just embrace it, develop policy and implement these tools because AI is really going to start separating businesses. And I'm a firm believer that those that don't incorporate AI in a a useful sense more than just help me write a better email, they're going to get left behind.

Friends, welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. We're back on the air today. Thank you for tuning in. I'm here with my guest and business partner in Crane, Wolfgang Kroski. How are you, Wolf?

I'm doing well. Glad to, to be here. Always, uh, great to be on, uh, the podcast and it's just a lot of fun.

Yeah. So you've been on the show at least once or twice, maybe twice before. And this episode is going to be syndicated out all over the internet through, you know, Crane and through probably some of our personal social pages. So if you want, you can check out the video version on YouTube. So yeah, this is gonna be a fun special episode. The big news, which we'll just touch on briefly and then we're, we're gonna get into the meat of it. The big news is that the Crane application window just opened. So, you know, if you haven't heard, Wolf and I run a paid private community for property management business owners and operators. It's called Crane. We have about 120 members in the community, all working together to improve their businesses and get back control over their time. And we only open up this window twice a year for about 10 days. So you're going to be hearing a lot of talk about Crane over the next few weeks through my newsletter and everything else. But I just wanted to, you know, get the word out there for folks who, I know there's a bunch of people on the waiting list and a bunch of people I've run into who have said they want to, you know, get in once it opens up again. So this is your official notification. It is.

Yep. You just go to joincrane.co and application button is right there in the menu, also on the homepage. And we would love to have more people join the community. We're looking for, you know, members that have over 100 doors, they have employees, they've been doing this for a while, and they're looking to be around some of the best operators in North America. We do have members in the US and Canada, so we are an international group. Some really great conversations and everybody just working to achieve that one thing, and that is freedom of time. And we think that we have some of the best people around that are accomplishing that. We're talking about people that are taking 4 weeks off from their business, like off, off, detached. They don't even know what's going on. So that is amazing.

Yeah. So we're gonna sprinkle in some Crane updates throughout the episode, but Wolf, I need to talk to you about AI because I've been really busy and I have not had time to check on the AI news this week or even this month. And things are changing super fast. It's exploded beyond, you know, just another ChatGPT update. There's all kinds of stuff going on. So let me, you know, I've heard some discussions about how AI is like a threat to a lot of business models. And I'm curious, like, what's your take on this? Do you think that's true? Do you think some of these companies, like software companies, need to be worried? Or how should I be thinking about this?

I don't know if worried's necessarily the piece, but they definitely need to embrace and understand why somebody may choose, in what you're referencing as an AI agent, opposed to signing up for their SaaS model. Because for a lot of people, they're like, I pay this amount per month for this software, this software, this software, this software. You know, here in the PM space, it's just adding up. And, you know, the economy we're in, people are analyzing their expenses a little bit, you know, tighter. And so people are like, well, if I can just have this AI agent that runs 24/7 and does one specific task really, really well, I don't need the SaaS. Because for the longest time, SaaS was kind of that hired employee that did certain work, enabled you to do more, and you paid a subscription, you accessed it, and life was great. Well, now you can kind of have your own SaaS, right? The, the AI agent on some of these is writing its own code and, you know, can do things for you. So I think If I was a SaaS company, I wouldn't be worried, but I would recognize that the cheese has moved and I would look at how do I make sure that my SaaS can play nice with as many of these AI agent platforms as possible so that people can still plug in and work with what we're doing. Because most of the SaaSes out there are very, you know, they have a niche focus, right? I guess that's redundant, niche focus. But yeah, they, you know, they're focusing on one specific industry. So if I can, for example, get my AI agents to connect with my Appfolio, that'd be great, right? It'd be phenomenal. And I think companies need to embrace that concept because those that don't, people are just going to create their own code. It's like a lot easier now.

Yeah. Like, so from the perspective of a property management business owner, Great. Where, where can I get started? What, what's a SaaS company, you know, expense I can eliminate? Uh, and maybe let's not pick on our PM vendor friends, but some of the other SaaS softwares, like, I don't know, I'm looking at my browser here, like Retently, you know, I've got a CRM that I pay for Zapier. I've got, you know, 90.io. —and we pay for Calendly. Is it realistic that I'm going to be able to cancel some of these subscriptions in the near future? Or like, how can I take advantage of this?

Yeah, I, I, I'm already looking. I'm not going to name names, but there's two that I'm looking at because I saw, you know, people are talking about, you know, I can tell this service what I want, it generates the code, and people are like making video games right now. And I think that's kind of entry level, but I'm looking at some of the SaaS that I pay for that really is, it only does like one specific thing. It's a pretty simple user interface, which honestly I don't really log into anymore. I set it up and it just runs. That's prime category for trying to develop your own AI agent to, to do that. So, but yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of people that get rid of some of their SaaS subscriptions in exchange for some AI agents that they have built out. I think if you're a consultant of any degree in the small business or medium business area, learning and understanding AI agents is going to be really important because I think people are going to be asking like, hey, can you help me build an AI agent that does X? Right. And yeah, no problem. We'll get that cranked out. For a while it was help me build these Zaps. I think that's going to change to help me build AI agents and get them rolled out in our company. Because I have specific needs. I can't tell you how many times I hear people say, yeah, I really love this software, but I wish it could just do this. Well, I'm gonna get an AI agent that does that, and hopefully it plays nice with that other piece of software. The problem companies are gonna have is that they don't have an AI policy. The Systems Conference, I did a whole session on rolling out AI, and I don't mean like the latest note-taker or the tool that's gonna make better videos,, but how do we roll out AI in our company? Who owns the content that AI use? Most companies that I've been interacting with, each employee's kind of got their own ChatGPT account. Who owns the content that's created? Where's it housed? What are we allowed to use it for, et cetera? You have to have policy in your company around AI, 'cause if you don't, things are gonna go off the rails really, really fast. So developing that policy, how we use AI, are we gonna use AI agents, just All those things have to be set up because whether you set it up or not as the company owner, your employees are going to use these tools. Whether you tell them like, hey, don't use that. Yeah, okay, no problem. They're going to be on their phone coming up to answer, copy, paste it in. It's going to happen. So you just embrace it, develop policy, and implement these tools because AI is really going to start separating businesses. And I'm a firm believer that those that don't incorporate AI in a useful sense, more than just help me write a better email, they're going to get left behind.

Okay. So what about like, I saw Jotform just came out with a bunch of AI agents. There's been a number of AI startups, like prop tech companies that have been making some headlines. What are you seeing out there? Have you played with any of this stuff?

So I've been playing around with the, that we use Jotform for things. So I've been using theirs and it's, it's cool. It's going to be pretty, pretty generic. I don't, I don't think that it's going to do more than just almost like their forms. You know, it's pretty basic stuff, but you get into AutoGPT is one, AutoGen is another one, Microsoft Copilot, they're really doing a lot, as much as I'm not a Microsoft person, but they are doing a lot to this whole component around your AI agent is there to help you. I remember the days of like when the internet was starting, Ask Jeeves, right? And they positioned Jeeves as like the butler. I think this is like Ask Jeeves 3.0 is basically going to be the concept. I've been playing around with voice mode of Grok or Grok, or however you pronounce it, X's AI. And it's amazing, you know, the speed, how clear the research capabilities. Most of these, the AI models now have what they call a deep search or deep learning mode. So all that's going to be playing into, into this. So yeah, I mean, there's no shortage, but if you want to start, I think the Jotform is a good one. It's very easy.. It's simple, doesn't require— What does it do? Advanced skills. So the Jotform agent, they have a couple of different AI tools, but the AI agent that they just released is really going to be around customer service and you loading this on your site. And I'm sure some people have already experienced this where they go like, hey, I'm the AI customer service agent for company X. What can I help you with? You put in your question and it goes back and forth and ultimately it can schedule appointments. It can do a lot of things.

Oh yeah, that's been around forever.

That's boring. It is, but it's now, what's cool about it is your one-man shop now has access to it and it's super cheap. Okay. That's the big thing. Not so much the tech, 'cause for a while you had to be like Delta or some large corporation to have this. Now, your one-man shop with like 3 doors under management can have a legit AI agent on their website.

On the website. And I, you know, we have one of those on our website. It's not AI. I think it's actually human, but it doesn't get a lot of usage. I, you know, I don't think people use those a lot.

That's like a SaaS thing more than, um, like a local services thing. Right. And so where JotForms goes further, so you have the website,, but then they have, you know, if you want to load it into like on a kiosk mode, maybe if you're doing a, uh, whatchamacallit, business expo or something, Facebook Messenger can handle, but then also phone.

Now that, now you've got my attention. Let's, have you played around with that at all?

I have. It's good. It's not good enough yet that I would want to, at least in the PM side. And I think it's because we have so many variables. I've used a couple of different AI phone companies to try to get to this point of where we don't have to answer the phones as much, but we have owners that call, we have tenants that call, and we have vendors who call. And they're— the knowledge base each one needs is so different. Yeah, it's kind of— what about mixing them?

I feel like the easy place to start here would be the leasing line. Yes. Like right now we're ShowMojo customers. We're going to talk more about this. ShowMojo just jacked their prices 20%. %. And so we're shopping around. They, they got bought by private equity. That's, that's the playbook. And you know, we're paying thousands a month right now. And now included in that price is this live answer service where they take our leasing line phone calls. Well, that seems like a dead simple, obvious place to deploy AI to start. And I'm sure there's already 2 or 3, you know, leasing AI type companies. You've got the Jotform phone thing, which I assume could be trained on that. Like, what do you think?

Is it worth— what?

Appfolio has it with their, uh, okay. Yeah. So, you know, what should we do for our leasing phones?

Is there just an obvious choice here or do I need to experiment? So the gap, because I— we're doing the same thing. It's like, okay, I'm going to shop ShowMojo and say, oh, the company that bought ShowMojo also bought Tenant Turner.

So I'm like, yeah, I wouldn't get started.

Yeah, I wouldn't sign on with those companies right now. No. So I think where the gap is, okay, I can build a great AI agent to do the phone part for leasing, but then the scheduling piece, it wants to— a lot of these want to connect to like your Google Calendar and that's how it's going to, you know, pick your time. Well, I got multiple agents and, you know, it gets a little bit more complex. And then, well, you know, scattered site, single family, I don't want to put Agent A over here and then he's got to drive 50 minutes to do this property and then come back over here. So that's the part where SaaS, I think, can still help, or at least a company who has engineers that can do prompt design, et cetera, to take the AI to a level that most of us can't do ourselves. But I think having an agent, an AI agent that can handle basic inquiries like, do you accept Section 8? What's your policy on pets? What properties do you have available? What's your application fee? All that stuff that we just like hate answering because we get asked like 50 million times a day. It would be great at doing that, capturing information and putting it into your CRM. That's what I mean.

Yeah. Right now.

Okay. Who should I have do that? So do you have anybody on your team that you have as like a tech person or system engineer?

Oh no. I mean like what company, what AI should I use for that?

Oh, so the, I think you could do with the Jotform, uh, the Smith, smith.ai I played around with. It does a really good job where it gets a little cumbersome is nobody interacts with, you know, if you're using ShowMojo, for example, your available properties, they don't have an integration with anybody. So that, that's where it's like, okay, I'm going to have to maintain an Airtable, a Google Doc, whatever, so that AI can reference it to see. What properties do we have available and what are the characteristics of each property. So that, that's the piece that's a little manual right now. If you're a ShowMojo customer or something.

Couldn't you like point it to your website, which has all your listings and all that?

You could. The issue with scraping a site is that sometimes AI can get lost in some of the other surrounding information on your website. So Building a very basic generic spreadsheet is probably gonna be the best for the AI tools that we have access to right now. If you want to scrape data from your website.

Okay. Well, this seems like a really easy—

Thank you. You know what? I'm wondering if you could have something run off of Notion. A lot of these agents now are, you can use Notion to, uh, as your knowledge base, maybe have a table inside a Notion that has all your properties and it's going off of that.

Yeah. Well, this seems like a pretty easy thing for one of the vendors that's already doing this to add. Like, you know, for example, like ShowMojo, if they weren't, you know, bought by private equity and in like a value extract mode, what they should really do is just replace their live answer human with AI version, slice the price in half, you know, and just run with that.

Because they have easy repair hotline. They've had AI now for, oh, we'll just say 2 years. It might not be that long. And they're using AI to monitor and follow up on work orders. And so, you know, things are getting done a lot, a lot quicker. Balls aren't getting dropped by the PM companies., but they're able to slash their prices quite a bit because of that.

Mm, got it. Okay. What about this, the chat, is it, I don't know if it's ChatGPT, whatever company has like the operator where it can like drive your computer.

So that's machine learning, but yeah, there are quite a few out there that have that. And that's another use of an AI agent. So I think that's a good point to bring up is that AI agents It's probably a term that's getting used in a lot of different ways. Like there's the chat phone agents that are like a customer service agent, but then there's the ones that are being taught to log into your computer. And what you're referencing is their new $200 a month plan, but it can log in, do some stuff, take the results. You know, there's a guy on X that has a video where he basically started a, like, piano moving business and it's going to, Facebook Marketplace, it's looking at anybody who's got a piano for sale. It sends them a message saying, hey, if you haven't sold it, I'll take it off your hands for like $20 or whatever. Are you interested? When they respond, it puts it in a spreadsheet and it does a deal.

So that's cool. So what I'm thinking about there is the, you know, I've got a whole team of people sitting at computers moving a mouse around and typing things on a keyboard. The easy place to start, it seems like to me, would be like entering bills. 'Cause we have a bunch of paper bills that come in, they get scanned in. Could I train an operator to like, every time a new file appears in this folder, log into Buildium, go to the bill section, click upload, fill in the data, and like get the bill?

Like, is that realistic? Yeah. I mean, so for example, AppFolio does that now. You know, there's smart bill entry.

You do that part. You just, you just put smiles on the faces of like 15 people who I know.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. You're like, could it do this? I'm like, Peter, you gotta get off of Buildium. Like, these things exist. So parsing data from a PDF and, you know, putting it in there. But I think where the AI will take it up a notch is not only did it extract that data and put it in there, it went back and compared to see like, is this bill high compared to the past 6 months, something like utility bills, and then alert a human and say, hey, you know, I just logged in this water bill and it's 50% higher than the rolling 12. You should look at it. Yeah, but even with that, AI is going to take it to the next level.

Even with that folio, I'm assuming that someone still has to like drag the PDF from the folder, click upload. No, you can point it to a folder.

No, you just, you just email it. So what we have is with our Fujitsu ScanSnap We scan it and it knows, it puts it in a specific folder and it gets emailed right to AppFolio. AppFolio pulls it in, fills in as much info as it can, and you're good to go.

Okay.

That's actually cool. Well, they didn't tell you that?

They didn't tell you that?

They, AppFolio's had that for a while, haven't they? Yeah, they have. Okay. Yeah. That's legit. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty highly accurate. You still, you know, we pay a remote team member that goes in and just You know, double checks, but the more you scan, it learns the format of your most common, you know, bills and stuff like that. Okay. And you can have your vendors, we have it where they just send it to that address directly.

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on from AI for the moment. I want to talk to you about two, two big topics that are on my mind right now, and you can tell me which one you want to tackle first. One of them is phones. So if we looked at the PM Trends report, I have this joke I've been telling people. If you don't wanna read the PM Trends report, I'm just gonna summarize it in two words. The whole report in two words: phone now. It's true. Phone now. That's— It's true. If you wanna summarize what your owners are thinking and what they're concerned about, they want you on the phone and they want to hear from you now.

Yeah. It's almost like ET, ET phone home.

It's like PM phone now. Exactly. So I want to talk to you about phones and phone systems and, and, you know, how we structure them and what lines we have and where do they go and how do you train your people and the technology involved and VoIP and all that. The other thing I want to talk to you about is this concept of like dashboards, visualizing the data that we have at our company, everything from churn to revenue per unit to utilization rate to You know, lead flow to closing rate to work order completion, satisfaction, NPS score, like all this data that's being generated across 5 different programs and spreadsheets. How do we get all this into one place? How do I get it looking nice? I'm, I'm lost right now. I'm, I'm, I'm in, I'm in the desert. And so I want to hear what you're doing on that.

Well, which one's more interesting to you? Cause those are both really good topics. No, let's just start with phones. Okay. So I believe right now, and I'll explain why I believe this, that there is no good phone solution off the shelf for PMs as of the recording of this video, which it is early March. Yeah. As of right now, there's no off-the-shelf turnkey phone system that is perfect for our industry. The reason I say that is some people I know that are super smart have companies have played around with everything, they went and built their own system. You know, I'm thinking like Ben Sensenbaugh, right? Like guys like that, they went and built their own system. OnQ did the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Which leads me to believe that they tried everything and like, you know what, it all sucks. So we need to build our own. And I think that's where going back to AI agents, that's, this is why AI agents are going to be kind of something to think about for SaaS because people, aren't finding their current needs, so they're going to go and build their own. And now with AI, building your own can be like really good stuff. So we currently, we were with RingCentral for a long, long time.

And what— because we're on RingCentral too. And when I think about a phone system, I mean, you know, I think back to when I first opened RL Property Management in 2013. I just called, I think it was AT&T, and I was like, I need phone service. And they're like, here's your phone. And it was like one— it was like one line. It was like a home phone, basically. And I went to Walmart and I bought a little cordless phone and the phone would ring and we would answer it.

Right. And it was like an actual, uh, uh, voice message machine too.

Yeah. Yeah. Or no, it was voicemail at the time, but, and it was like the phone would ring, I would answer it. And if someone called while I was on that phone, you'd hear a little beeping and you could switch, but like there was no other line where someone could pick it up. And like, it was just, you know, it would be like you called You know, your house, it'd be like calling your house. Exactly. Yep. And then we got RingCentral and that opened up, you know, multiple lines, users. You can text through it. You can send voicemails this way and that. You can have call queues. So to me, it seems like what could you possibly need that RingCentral isn't providing? It seems unlimited in its capabilities, but I know that I'm not getting a whole picture here because like you said, a bunch of people have built their own. So what was happening with RingCentral that you were like, you know what, no, we need to do something else.

Honestly, the RingCentral is the cost, you know. Yeah, it is expensive. It had no problems with the, the quality. I know some people complain about, but I think it's they don't understand the concept of latency and how when you, when someone makes a phone call, it goes across copper wires and then it jumps into the VoIP system and every hop introduces delay.

Well, you got to get it, you got to get the right router that has quality of service, right?

And if you don't do all that stuff, you're like, man, this, this VoIP is terrible. No, no, no, it's your network. But That's another podcast. So I've had really good quality. Feature set is pretty rich with RingCentral, but their contract terms, cancellation, their cost is a little brutal. So I shopped around and I was like, well, you know, we're already using Zoom for video. Why not get the Zoom Phone? And for the most part, it's the same experience as RingCentral, just a lot lower in price.

So for me, what's— so, so sorry, so Zoom Phone has like call queues and voicemails and multiple users, a phone tree.

It really— wow, okay, wow. Yeah, you know, note taker for if you record your calls. Like, it's got pretty much the same stuff. RingCentral does have their call center functionality, and I see that they just released an AI some new AI thing. So, but they're all, they have to compete with each other. So once one company does something, they are all gonna do it. So for me it was just treating it like a commodity and who could gimme the best price.

And so someone won. Yeah. Just real quick, RingCentral just came out with like, it's an AI receptionist. Yes. Yeah. Which is a great idea. I'm curious, do you, when someone call, if I called your, if I called Kroski Real Estate right now, would I get a live answer or would I hear a phone tree?

You would hear a very shallow phone tree just because the issue— we do sales and we do PM, and it drives our sales agents nuts when a tenant calls and says, hey, my toilet's broken. So we basically just want— are you a PM group or are you sales group? We ask that in a couple of different, you know, 1, 2, and 3 options, but that's pretty much our split. After that, you go to live person. I would love to have— and I think this is where AI is going to be able to do that— first ring, it is pickup, it's a person, it's able to, you know, what type of caller are you? Let me get you to the right person.

Yeah, because if you have a database of your tenants with their phone numbers, it should be able to recognize that and direct them without asking.

Yeah. And with AI, it should not only identify like, oh, this is Joe from 123 Main Street. You know what? You submit a work order. 2 hours ago, I bet you want to speak to the maintenance department. Uh-huh. That's pretty smart. And push them, push them there. And I think that's why the phone systems that we have right now can't do that. And so communication, whether it's phone, text, or email, for the most part, we spend time redirecting. And I think that's the mental drain that we face in PM is like you have an owner that had a conversation. That's why I'm not in favor of using like subject line or keywords to help get emails to the right people because I've seen it. You're talking about a roof leak with an owner for a couple of weeks, gets resolved, it's done. 4 months later, rather than starting a new email, they use the roof leak email to ask you about, did I get my 1099 yet? So the text says, oh, roof leak, send it to maintenance. Yeah, you can't use the subject line. Definitely not. So I think is going to help with that. But going back to the phones, I think that's the drain is the volume of calls that potentially we can get. The type of calls are so varied that, you know, and then there's this culture— choosing my words carefully here— it's predominantly with tenants where if you don't pick up, they just keep ringing again and again and again and again till somebody picks up. Right. And so you just— there's just a lot. And the more doors you have, that volume just metastasizes. And so For us, we have the mantra in our company that if they have to call, they failed. Total North Star. I don't think we'll ever get there, but that's what we shoot for. You know, trying to allow self-serve options on the website, good communication for like move-in so they don't have to call, like all those, all those pieces. But right now, I don't think there's a great PM solution in regards to phones because then you have to throw in I have people on the field that have their cell phone and it takes too many clicks for them to load up the Zoom app or whatever app to call from that number. So they're calling from their personal cell phone number and now those communications aren't always being captured in our system. Heaven forbid we got subpoenaed. Well, now their whole private phone potentially could get dragged into that. So there's just a lot of friction.

Around phone communication. Got it. I have some follow-up questions about phones and then we're going to get into dashboards. But let's take a minute for those who heard us talk about Crane, but maybe don't really know what Crane is like. They've heard about it. And I've actually run into a bunch of people recently who are like, yeah, what is Crane? I've heard a lot about it. What is Crane? What's this company that we started a year and a half ago? Why are all these people joining up?

What's the big deal? So the long story short is that there are groups out there that are meeting a lot of needs, but with any group, eventually you tend to feel like maybe I outgrew it. You know, I, I've kind of gleaned as much value as I can, still gonna stay with them, but like, I need more 'cause I want to get to the next level. We identified that amongst ourselves, the two of us, and realized that there are other people like that. So what, what are they really doing? And we identified that the issue is there's people making good money, there's this, but they're stuck at their job, they're stuck with their business, they need freedom of time to do their life's passion, whatever that is. And so we developed Crane as a way to get high-performing property managers together and ultimately help them help us allow people to have freedom of time. So our big push is what we call crane breaks. Like you're wearing on your pin, you have the green ring around it, means you've done 4 weeks, like totally away from your company. And all that we do, we do crane unplugged, which are like little mastermind dinners, etc., to help build capacity and confidence for our members to be able to have freedom of time.

Perfect. And, you know, we really— there's a bunch of groups doing some really great things for property managers around helping them grow their businesses and helping them become more profitable. But we identified that there's really no group out there helping property managers get freedom of time. And so we took something that I had started years back, which is taking June off every year, completely disconnected from my business. And we thought, what if we could make that a reality for everyone who wanted to achieve that. And so a lot of what we have as member benefits in Crane is oriented around that freedom of time concept that you talked about. So, you know, everything from low cost or free RTM hires to Crane dinners where you're masterminding with other successful property managers, to the online community that we have, to the My Notion template, which we make available. You have all of your LeadSimple templates in there. Like everything that we've curated for Crane members is around this concept of helping you implement what you need to in your company and in your personal life to set you up for business success and for time freedom. So it's a, it's a premium, you know, paid community mastermind type thing, which, you know, I know there's a lot of those, but I think, if you talk to any member, if you run into a member at an NARPM conference, if you see them wearing their Crane pin, or if you hear people talking about it, just ask their opinion and see what they think about being a member. I think you'll be impressed with what you hear. So we'd love to have you. If you wanna learn more, joincrane.co. You can actually submit your application as of the time of release of this video. Like I said, we only open that up twice a year. So, you know, we don't, we're, Wolf and I are not marketers, right? We just spent half an hour geeking out on AI. So, We don't want to be spitting, talking about this nonstop year round, week after week. So we compress that down to just a week or two. That way it's a little easier for, for you and for us, because we don't have to just talk about it nonstop. So, yep. All right. So, okay. So back to the phones. I, yeah, the idea of like, if someone has to call, there's a problem or like the North Star is, you know, trying to reduce calls by providing everything they would need upfront. Definitely agree with that for residents. For owners, my thinking has shifted a little bit on this, partially from the PM Trends report and partially from visiting. I went and visited the offices of OnQ Property Management in Phoenix earlier this year and was really blown away by that operation. And it helped me get clear that so much just becomes easier when you orient your business around the phone. I had for years thought of property management sort of customer service as like a SaaS company would, you know, with this idea of like support tickets and emails and online chat and maybe some text messages and like the idea of like closing conversations or closing tickets and providing an online self-help, you know, knowledge base, like And that's all because the tools that you and I use every day are SaaS companies and SaaS tools, and that's how they operate. Mm-hmm. What I sort of forgot or never realized is that property management from the owner's perspective, it's like they, they want to use the phone. And we saw that in the trends report. And if you think about, if I think about relationships in my world that are similar to property management, which would be like, my business banker, my lawyer, my financial advisor, my realtor. Like, these are people that I'm getting on the phone with. I'm not using some self-help portal for my financial advisor, and I would be offended if he asked me to do that. And I think that's how our owners think about us. And so I'm trying to lean more into that and stop resenting the idea that an owner wants to get on the phone and find out what's going on with their property. It's been a little bit of a shift for me, but it started to get me thinking about our company. I don't want to use the word call center, but it's like you need to be serious about the phone answer, pickup rate, how many rings, which department. And also tied in with it is this idea of like the owner having a single point of contact, which is something that I've resented and resisted for 12 years now. But I might be coming around on this because it's just so clear that's what they want. No matter how irrational I think it is or how much I don't think they should need it because they can go online and see everything. And wouldn't you want to want to just talk right to the expert? But we're just hearing from our owners. They're like, I don't know who to call, or every time I call, I talk to someone different and I don't really know. So there's a lot that I'm processing still with all of this, but that's some of what I'm thinking about.

No, I do agree with that, especially with this conversation of are you a property manager, asset manager like that? Conversation. And if we want to be seen as more than just the person who fixes tents and toilets, having conversations is part of that. And so one thing that we've implemented this year is that if the repair, because we have our not to exceed, but then there's that gap between not to exceed and where we would really like to not to exceed, but it's an issue, anything at that point and above, you have to do by phone. No email, no text, just pick up the phone, because they're going to have follow-up questions, they're going to whatever, and you just have this ping pong that not only does it delay your speed of repair, it just starts pissing everybody off because everybody's tired of it. So for us, it's $2,000. At $2,000 or more, there is no text or email.

You pick up the phone and just— yeah, do it. Yeah, the, the— and the idea— I've told this story once before, but I have a friend of mine who's a financial advisor, and years ago I was having a problem with customer service at the management company. And I said, what do you do when a client emails you and they're all angry or emails you a question? And he looked at me like I was a first grader and he goes, I call them. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

That's what we do too.

I was just double checking. Exactly. You know, because I was trying to ask him about like how to email and stuff and he's like, I call them. Like he was like, it was really funny. I was like, oh yeah, okay, call, don't email back, just call, you know? But I think the sort of follow-up that takes that to the next level is when every time you get off the phone with an owner, you send them a follow-up email. I'm trying to train our team to do this where it's like every time you get off the phone with an owner, you send a follow-up email and you just say, hey, Mr. Owner, just confirming what we discussed. You're going to have the keys ready on thus and such day. We agreed we would, you know, go there to do photos on this day, you know, whatever it is.

And that's another thing where I think AI could be really helpful is like— I could build you a Zap that does that for you right now.

I'm going to do that as soon as we hang up because like when I hang up the phone, I want a draft email to appear in my drafts that basically is that email. I give it a once review, I tweak a couple things and I hit send.

Yeah. That part's a little bit harder because of call recording laws. You know, we're in California, so it's like hard, but As far as we're a single, single notification state in Ohio. There you go. But as far as like every time a call's done, a new task pops up in that LeadSimple saying send the follow-up email so that they have that. Like, that's, that's totally doable. But no, I agree. So because we have that right now with the video calls, right? Like for me, I have it set up and not just sending like, here's the recording, but mine actually drafts a customized email like it's Wolf.

It's pretty good, you know, why can't I have that for phone? Oh, totally. Yeah. And like, it should be, it should be short. Like, there should be a limit. Like, it's like, you know, listen, 3 paragraphs worth.

Yeah, that's it. It basically comes with a rule, like 1 paragraph per 10 minutes of phone call.

Yeah. And bullet points. Yeah, just real short. You could draw— I can picture the prompt right now. But yeah. And so all of our calls are recorded through RingCentral automatically because we're single-party notification, but we notify anyway. Like, if you call our thing, it says this calls being recorded and all that. So I think— I feel like that should be doable. I don't know if— anyway, so it's right— we're right back to the phone thing where it's like, you know, this should be built into the phone, you know, system tied in with, you know, LeadSimple or whatever our other, you know, softwares are so that we have a record of these conversations. Because that email that I want my team to send after a phone conversation with an owner, that needs to go out through the shared inbox. Yes. So that everyone can see, and it needs to be tagged with the owner. Yep. So that it's tied to that conversation history.

And not only that, it should then give sentiment of call and give you kind of a grade so that you can use it for training purposes to like help improve people's phone skills.

Yeah. And it should like tag a supervisor if the sentiment was below 5 or whatever. Yeah. Just for them to just double check, see what's going on. All right. I think we got that all figured out.

So just somebody build that and, uh, I think we're done. Yeah, it's, to me it really doesn't seem hard, but you know, what do I know?

Mm-hmm. Okay. So anything else on phones?

No, I mean, we could go on and on on it, but I think that the gist of it is right now there, as of March 7th, there's no off-the-shelf great solution for the PM space. I'm sure people can argue that great, let's do it online. That's why people are building custom and the features that we need, I think there are unique features to PM.

And hopefully vendors in our space are hearing this conversation and get to it. Yeah, that's pretty much what I think all day, every day. I hope vendors are hearing this conversation and get to it. I actually made a direct plea to vendors in my email newsletter today. I was like, please, that it actually was all about dashboards and visualization. So that leads right into our next topic. So I just wrote this big email, which I referenced about churn. It went out this morning. And it's like the most detailed analysis I've ever done on our company's churn. And in order to get this data, I can't even describe to you how painful it was. I mean, trying to figure out when owners started with your company and left your company is a pain, is a huge pain. Now the easy part is like current owners, when did they start? Well, that's easy. You just do an export and you have that data. But if you want to talk about past owners who are, who are like inactive in our system in Buildium, you know, getting the start date and then getting the last date, because we're not talking about specific properties, we're talking about the owner. So some owners, you know, they have properties come and go, but their relationship with us may be over 10 years. We had another owner who sold his last property with us, de-managed, and then he bought a new property and started back up with us again. So how does that factor into churn? So Getting all that data into something that I could use to visualize it was hard enough just for the purposes of like taking a snapshot of our current situation and writing a newsletter about it. But now I'm thinking I want this data now to be updated like every week, every month automatically. So, and I want it on a screen where someone can click on it and change the dates and, and that's just churn. I mean, all the other metrics I listed off earlier, When we jumped on, I want the same thing for all that. So gosh, what are we doing here? Because the data is spread out over 5 different systems and I don't know anything about how to make, you know, people are, I'm reading like in, in Crane, people are talking about using like Power BI and Google Data Looker. And I, so I logged into Data Looker today for the first time and I immediately closed it and cried because I don't know how to do any of that stuff. That's beyond me. And actually, you know, a lot of our stuff's in Airtable and Airtable is great for data and I know my way around Airtable really well, but when you start trying to get to like visualizing data that you have in Airtable, that is not easy. And I ran into, once again, I like reached the limit of my skillset. So I just don't know what to do. So what are you doing? What do you recommend?

Where, where are we going here? So. The main problem— well, one of the main problems. So for example, Netfolio, it's a per-door unit charge. So when you offboard a property or an owner, you hide them, right? So that you're not getting billed anymore. Same with— the problem is when you hide them, it gets even harder to get the data because they're hidden, right? It's there, you can get it, but Sometimes you got to like reactivate them and pay their door for a month. Like, it's just like, this is ridiculous. So the first thing I think is getting really crystal clear on what data do we want to track? Because there's no, no end to the list of things you could track. But what do you, you company owner, what do you need to track? What do your team members need to track? And what's a realistic number of items that you can really track? 'Cause I could come up with a scoreboard for my team that's got like 50 things on it. There's no way. So what we've done is we've nailed it down to, I'm looking at right now, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. That's the limit. Except for me, I have a little bit more. 7 per person, 7 or less per person. And we kind of adjust it, you know, tied to our rocks 'cause we do EOS. Because it just, what I was finding is that our team was just, data's not their thing. And so it was very overwhelming. So I just, you know, reduced it. So I think getting crystal clear on what you want to track, how frequently do you want to track it, and then figuring out where is this data. So I've figured that out. I created Loom videos and I pay our remote team member that helps us with like some bookkeeping and that kind of stuff. She likes data. Great. I'm going to teach you how to do it. And on our scorecard, the items that have a little M next to it means that Mylene, she's in charge of tabulating it, doing it, and putting it into the scorecard so we have it by Monday. That, that's the current solution. Because the issue is with Google Data Looker, Power BI, that's great if you're using a tool that's pretty common because they have an integration. Guess what? A lot of the tools we use in the PM space don't have a direct integration with those tools. So doing just a, let me put in my API key and it goes and gets it, doesn't work.

And that's frustrating. That's similar to what we do for like our scorecard. So our L10, you know, scorecard. Yeah. You know, which has, we have a bunch, we have like 12 or so. And yeah, whoever it is, I don't even know who it is anymore, goes in and updates all those numbers and they're logging into 15 different things to do that. And that's fine. I don't mind.

I don't mind that. And what I mean by that then for, for the dashboard. So like we, we started doing a public-facing dashboard on our website. We're on our version 1. I don't like it. We are using Google Data Studio, whatever they call it now. I want to tweak it, but it's still, it's manual. You have to go in and information, put it into a spreadsheet that then feeds the data thing. And somebody's got to manually go and update that because so like unit churn, Revenue per unit, right? Days on market. So we got to go to ShowMojo, pull that crap out, right?

AppFolio. I got to go here. Is this something you could do? Like, is this something you could have like an AI operator do that like on a schedule?

So that's one thing I'm hoping. Yeah. Go in, log in, click, click, click, and then just get it. Because right now I'm paying a remote team member to do it and it's like, yeah.

And what about like, like I know how to get data into a spreadsheet, but how do I get that looking cool on like a dashboard, a real dashboard, not a scorecard?

Yeah. So with like a gauge or a pie or bar chart. Exactly. Yes. Unfortunately, you got to go back to either high school or college math and understand, you know, how does that, that formula work? You know, what should be on the X, what should be on the Y? And understand that because you're going to have to tell whatever tool where the information goes, how do you want your units and, you know, all that stuff. So, and sometimes that can be a challenge for, for people because like for me, math wasn't my thing. But if you go to ChatGPT or Grok and say, hey, I want to know how I want to know my churn rate, explain what churn is, explain, it's going to say, well, you're going to need these pieces of data. Okay, cool. I have that data now. And I'm using Google Studio. Okay, then it'll walk you through it. And so I think that's the best way is use, and I heard that OpenAI now has in their language model, uh, all of Khan Academy, which is, I was a school teacher and that's was what we deferred students to for like math tutoring. Right. So yeah, just ask it like, hey, how do I calculate this? And it will tell you. And then you say, okay, well, let me go find it. Okay, now do I have it? I want to put it in Excel. What's the Excel formula? Oh, here it is. Copy and paste it and just go from there. I think that's the best way to have somebody be taught how to build a dashboard for them. But, um, I, I, the, the Google Studio thing is where I would drive people just because of accessibility, you know, both cost and skillset. You get into Power BI and some of these other tools, yeah, they're way more powerful, but, you know, a little bit more work to get set up.

But again, SaaS providers, you have all our data, visualize it. That's what I said in my email. Yeah.

And it seems, yeah. Like AppFolio, I'm just gonna name drop because they know I love them. Why isn't there a chart on my dashboard that tells me my revenue per unit? And churn. You know how many units I have, you know the GL accounts that are used to pay my company. It's, it's a really easy formula. Yes, you know my churn because you know when I logged them into this system, and you know when I— right, like, why is this so hard? There isn't even a report called the churn report, so it's not even a matter of like dashboard. There isn't even a report.

Why? Yeah, and like the The need for like a cohesive dashboard that has leasing data and churn data and financial data and like sales and marketing data. Oh man, it's frustrating. Like I really want that to exist and I don't know that I'm going to maybe have to just pay someone to make this for us because I mean, I couldn't even figure out, I like, like I said, I got logged into that Google Looker Data Studio thing and I just, almost immediately closed it. It's so complicated and like, how do I get the data? How do I get the data in there? How do I build the things? Now I can build a nice little chart in Google Sheets, but that's such a manual thing and it's never gonna look great. It's just like a, you know, it's just a chart on a spreadsheet.

Yeah. Now I don't think we signed an NDA, but I still won't mention their name just in case I'm not supposed to. There is a, a provider in the PM space that's working on visualizing Operational Performance started doing their thing. Some really good conversations coming from that. But again, it's only tied towards, you know, your operations piece. It's not pulling in like my ShowMojo data, which that's fine, right? But I think until we get crystal clear on, well, what, what should universally be on a PM dashboard?

Because I think that's—

we are clear on that.

We are now. I think you and I will just define, you know, we've got the PM operation standards, right? Plus you and I will just finish out that list.

And yeah, so I think when, when that has been identified, like what really are the metrics that help a company improve, when that gets identified, and maybe that's why SaaS hasn't built anything because everybody's giving them their Christmas list and it's so different, but I think there's just some real core 10 to 20. Yeah. Metrics that everybody needs and let's just get this thing going.

Yeah, I definitely think there's a market for a tiny little SaaS thing that is this and you just plug in all your data sources.

Mm-hmm. I mean, okay, there's only like, what, 4 property management softwares? There's 2 workflow softwares. There's two leasing softwares. So like that's 8 sources that you have to glean together and make a dashboard. Plus QuickBooks and Xero, QuickBooks, which already has open integration.

So like that's, that's done. Okay. Let's, let's finish up with something a little more light. I want to hear about what conferences you're going to this year, like over the next 12 months, and then what conferences, if any, you're sending any of your team members to.

Yeah, so, uh, going to Broker Owner or we just came back from Broker Owner, depending on when you watch this. That's, that's a standard. It's a great place to network and get caught up with people and, you know, have those hallway chats. Going to PropertyMeld's MX Summit, and I am bringing a maintenance tech with me, not coordinator, but one of our techs because that conference is really doubling down on being a maintenance conference and having content for all the different people in, uh, around me. So excited for that. I'll be honest, I don't know yet about NARPM National. I'm still debating that one. PM Systems Conference, yeah, I have to go to that one because I co-own it. That's in January, but really excited about what we're doing there.

That's about it so far. Are you going to the future?

At Folio Future? Yeah. Yes, we are going to Folio Future. That's, uh, How could I forget about that? Yes, we'll be there. I'm actually really excited about that one. Broker-owner, I'm actually on a panel with the Appfolio team talking about AI.

So yeah, it's good. But yeah, that's my list. So I'm a broker-owner, of course. I'm bringing my VP of Ops, Brennan. And then I'm doing this Grand Canyon hike with a bunch of property management folks in June. We, of course, have our Crane retreat in June. Yes. You know, an all-member, 2.5-day crane break basically for our members, part of included in membership. That's in Colorado. And then in the fall I'm doing— I'm also going to be at the PropertyMeld conference, MX Summit, and I'll be at Outfolio Future. And I am not going to NARPM Nationals this year. Be my first time not going in a while. And that's about all I've got right now. You know, there's no, there's that's yeah. And, um, we're going to definitely send some folks to the Systems Conference and we're also, I'm going to send 2 team members to, to the National Conference, even though I'm not going myself. And then we're, I'm bringing our maintenance coordinator and our director of maintenance are both coming to the MX Summit. So got a full roster for team, team members hitting up conferences, which I really like doing that. I think it. It's a shot in the arm for them. You know, they get to, you know, ride the coattails a little bit of people who know me and they get to just feel like see what's going on in the bigger world of property management.

Yeah, I've actually been at an event where you weren't there yet, but some of your team members there and everybody's like, so what's it like working with Peter? And I was like, oh, well, this ought to be good.

I left so that way they could speak freely. Oh, I was hoping you had captured that on your Plaud device so I could hear what they said.

But no. How do you like your Plaud device?

I like it a lot. I've been using it more. I've been remembering to use it.

I'm getting a lot out of it these days. Yeah, I think that actually could be a tool for, you know, going back to the phone conversations to email. Like, that could be a gateway. I'm using Hoop, which I really love because they actually got away from— they no longer use an AI bot to attend your calls. It's now on your computer. And so I was like, wait a second, can I use this for my phone calls? The problem is it only listens for tasks that Wolf needs to do. It doesn't create summaries really. So, okay. We'll play around with that. But yeah, Plod could be the gateway for that.

Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to wrap it here. Go check out joincrane.co. We'd love to see you inside the community. We keep it pretty curated, but if you apply, Wolf and/or I, actually both of us personally review every application. And so we'll take a look and, um, we'd love to see you in there. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.