In this monologue, Peter Lohmann highlights the puzzling lack of reliable data on the number of property‑management firms in the United States, contrasting the fragmented, conflicting figures from census data, software platforms, and NARPM membership. He argues that other industries (e.g., pest control) track such metrics annually, and the absence of a clear count hampers industry insight. To resolve the issue, Lohmann enlisted the AI tool Fable (powered by Claude) and defined strict inclusion criteria—only third‑party, scattered‑site, single‑family‑residential (SFR) managers, excluding large multifamily operators and tiny owner‑operator LLCs. After a few hours of data gathering and analysis, the AI produced an estimate of roughly 31,000 property‑management companies nationwide. Lohmann notes the market is highly fragmented, with no firm holding even a 1 % share, and anticipates future consolidation but no imminent national‑scale competitor. He expresses interest in tracking the count over time, seeking feedback on methodology and ways to monitor industry growth year‑over‑year.
Chapters
How many property management companies do you think there are? The truth is nobody knows. And when you ask people, they give you answers like, well, I looked into the census data one time and I think there's 200,000. But if you look at some of the data that is available through some of the software platforms like AppFolio, Buildium, Rentvine, PropertyWare, RealPage, things like that, you come up with a completely different, much smaller number. Then you get to looking at things like NARPM membership. There's 4,000, 5,000 companies that belong to NARPM. And it seems like something we should know, how many property management How many companies are there? The fact that we have no clue on even a guess as to what that number truly is, or all these numbers that we do have conflict with each other, has really bothered me. How could this possibly be the case that our own industry doesn't even know how many companies there are? If you look at other industries, like I get a pest control magazine, they know like to the number how many pest control companies there are in the United States. They track it year by year. They track, you know, is our industry growing? Is it shrinking? How quickly is it growing? And yet we just have no idea in our space. And that seems bad. And it also just seems ridiculous. So I finally decided to attack the problem. I did what you might expect. I sicced Fable on this issue. So I loaded up Claude, pulled up Fable, got ready to burn some tokens and basically explained everything I just explained to you and said, your job is to figure out how many property management companies there are in the United States. I gave it some specifications like you need to only count companies like mine, meaning third-party scattered site, primarily SFR property management companies. Residential only, don't count big multifamily, don't count owner-operator LLCs where it's just like some guy with 10 properties in an LLC. That's not what we want. And I put it to work. Couple hours later, it came back. And after reviewing all the data, we now know the answer's 31,000. 31,000 property management companies in the US to the best of my knowledge and ability. So I shared all my math and approach in the newsletter that went out on Tuesday this week or last week, depending on when you're watching this. So if you want to figure out like, how did I come to that number? You can pull that up and dig through it and kind of run the math yourself, but the industry remains wildly fragmented. There isn't even a company that has a 1% market share yet, not even these big ones like Pure HRG and things like that. So we have a long way to go as an industry. I think there's going to be some consolidation, which is healthy, but the idea that we need to worry about some big competitor coming in and sweeping the market or a national property management operator, I think most of you know that those have not been successful thus far. Not sure if that's good, bad, or indifferent, but as of right now, 31,000 property management companies in the US. My next thing I want to figure out is like, how can we track that over time? Because I want to know if that number is going up or down like year to year. And right now I don't know how to figure that out other than I guess maybe rerunning the same analysis a year from now. But I don't know that it's accurate enough to be able to tell industry growth on just like a 1-year timeframe. So we'll see. But I would love feedback on that. So check it out. Let me know what you think.
