How PropertyManagement.com Is Ranking the Top 100 PMs - with Matt Speer | Peter Lohmann’s Podcast

If you don't listen to anything else in this podcast, I think there's going to be a lot of great content. We're going to talk about a lot of things, but we have our Top 100 Property Managers campaign going where here in about 2 months we'll be announcing the top 100 property managers in the nation and every major market will have a winner. So you can apply today, you can get verified on propertymanagement.com and you can do that completely for free.

Friends, welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. I'm here with Matt Spear of PropertyManagement.com, and I couldn't be more excited to get into conversation with Matt and hear what he's been up to. Matt, how you doing?

Yeah, doing, doing well. I just told you starting off my Monday, I got rained on, didn't check the radar, but other than that, I'm doing pretty well.

Yeah. And from what I understand, you guys have a pretty big announcement, so let's just jump right into it.

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So if you don't listen to anything else in this podcast, I think there's going to be a lot of great content. We're going to talk about a lot of things, but we have our Top 100 Property Managers campaign going where here in about 2 months we'll be announcing the top 100 property managers in the nation and every major market will have a winner. So you can apply today, you can get verified on propertymanagement.com and you can do that completely for free. And so I'm just too excited not to share that right out of the gate.

All right. So first thing I gotta ask is what is PropertyManagement.com? That's a pretty killer domain name. And I'm just really curious to hear more about what is this, what's the top 100? Because you guys have been, I've been having friends texting me like, hey, did you hear what's going on with PropertyManagement.com? And I'm like, no, I haven't. Like, what's, what's happening? 3 different people texted me that, and I'd love to hear sort of what you guys have been up to behind the scenes for a while.

Yeah, I mean, I think a good way to explain what we're up to is really starting off with like, why is it free to get verified and why is it free to get, you know, to enter in this top 100 campaign? And I think that, you know, if we look ourselves in the mirror as a property manager, we realize that, you know, there's a lot of services out there like Yelp, Better Business Bureau, you know, really even Reddit, Google Reviews that we just as property managers, we have to sort of play that game to control our reputation and our credibility. In our markets online.

It's a game where somebody else sets the rules.

That's right.

That's how I've always thought about it. And you can agree or disagree on whether those rules are fair or whether we should play by them or whether they even play by their own rules, but we are not, we're basically at their mercy.

That's right. Yeah. And, and I think we're so used to being at their mercy, like we're, it's just become so common over the last, you know, 5 to 10 years and, and it's kind of getting more intense here in the next, you know, in the last, you know, really few months and year or so with kind of AI search taking off. But, you know, sort of to get back to the question of like, why is it free? So what we're really trying to be is our vision is being the Carfax of property management. And so, you know, you think about this industry, it's an industry built on trust. It's an industry built on reputation. Like when a homeowner, when an investor chooses a property manager, a lot of that decision is based on, kind of the soft things like trust, credibility, like they want peace of mind and know that their asset is taken care of. And we live in this industry where there isn't a trust layer. There's nowhere someone can go, a homeowner can go to truly verify that, hey, this property manager is the best property manager for my asset. Right now they have to go to Yelp, they have to go to Better Business Bureau, you know, look at Google reviews. And we just don't have You know, those are imperfect systems. And so kind of getting back to the free part, like, why is this free? Well, it's free because if we aren't free, then we're just going to be perceived as another pay-to-play wrap, you know, a wolf in a sheep's clothing. We're just going to be perceived as just another clever way to kind of position pay-per-lead. And so we are not a lead generation company. Our slogan is, you know, credibility is our currency. You know, we feel that credibility is the new currency of industry., and we think leads and growth will be the outcome, but I think credibility is really where the foundation starts. Okay.

So you guys are building a directory of property managers in the US at propertymanagement.com. It sounds like, is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, it's free to create a profile. It's free to get verified, and I want to hear more about what that means. And What is the goal? Like, what is the purpose of this new directory of property managers that you're creating with an awesome domain?

Yeah, with the awesome domain. Yeah. So the goal is to be the trust layer. It's to be the sort of have that Carfax moment for a consumer. And our, you know, our customer is the property manager. We're here to serve the property manager. And really what that means is helping connect investors, homeowners with the best property manager. And so if you can sort of establish, all right, who, who are the best property managers, that starts with our True Match score. And so True Match is the industry's first objective third-party verified performance operational data-driven score. And so we're, you know, we're looking under the hood and we're scoring the property manager based on 4 categories. And really those categories are driven by ROI and, and really what breaks down to like peace of mind. You know, you're looking at cost and performance and then trust and experience. And so cost and performance is ROI. Trust and experience is that like, so like, you know, somebody comes up to a sales call with a property manager, they like maybe they're like researching on BiggerPockets or something. They have their 50 questions prepared. A lot of that's driven by like they sort of have this anxiety of like, is this a good property manager? Like, can I trust them? And so really that's how our scores break down and by establishing that trust layer, by saying like, hey, these are the best property managers in a particular market, it's going to allow this frictionless sort of elevated experience start to finish for someone to find a really good property manager, which for the good property managers and really even just the property managers that want to get better, it's going to allow them to really stand out and succeed.

Okay. So if I pay you guys, can I get a better score?

No, never.

Oh, interesting.

You could, you could. I mean, I think it would be easy for us, actually, the far easier path for us would be to just be all property management without the all and just generate leads. And so we'd make more money faster. It'd be simpler. But when I started this business, I had this opportunity to buy this domain and kick this off. I think with that big domain, it's like, what's this Peter Parker thing?

You know, with something, great responsibility, you know, that slogan is, yeah, with great power comes great responsibility.

There you go. See, that's why you're, you know, you're running the podcast. You've got, you got the quote, the Spider-Man quotes memorized. But no, I mean, seriously though, when, when we got the domain, I knew we needed to do something that would actually elevate the industry as a whole. And if at a baseline, Everyone can, can be on the platform, reap the benefits of the SEO, the AI search, the visibility that comes with that big domain, be able to actually get leads and not have to pay for them if you've earned them with that score. That alone, I feel like, is going to help every property manager that gets on the platform, every property manager in the industry. Of course, we still make money, like we have a paid package, but At a baseline, it will always be free. That will never change. And that'll be really core to what we do.

Okay. So yeah, I, I've got some follow-up questions. I want to find out how you make money. I want to find out what goes into the score. But before we jump to those, I'm really interested in your strategy for being found. So in order for your business to be successful, property owners need to find propertymanagement.com and then on there, they will find the profiles of property managers. But that first part is obviously a big challenge. I mean, if it was easy to be found on the internet, then you guys wouldn't even have a business. So tell me a little bit about what your plan is for how to actually get ranked in Google or what your other strategies are for competing against All Property Management and every other local Tom, Dick, and Harry with, you know, an SEO strategy.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what's happened in the last, I've got like a book, couple books back here about like link building and the art of SEO. It's this big textbook. I think it's maybe the best book ever created for SEO, but it's called The Art of SEO. It's not The Science of SEO. And I think that when people, I say AI search because to me that's just like the layman's terms for You know, people using ChatGPT instead of Google, to me it's AI search. And so I feel that this new AI search era is really a new frontier of SEO. And so maybe, maybe I'll flip the script here a little bit. With your business, with RL Property Management, have you noticed over the last 4 or 5 months, like a dip in organic traffic, organic leads? Yes. And I've heard that, I mean, we're talking to 15 to 20 property managers a week, 200 doors to 2,000 doors. Everyone's saying they're seeing a dip, but they don't know why. And so what we're, what we think is driving that is AI search. And really what's happening is people, you know, they get answers easier. So if before you do a Google search, you get 10 links that show up, you do your research and you're sort of like, you know, you land on a website, you need a little bit more info. So you just fill the lead form out. What's happening now is there's these, or people are kind of tabbing zero-click searches where you do a search and you get the AI overview, you got your, your question answered. So you don't end up landing on the property management site becoming a lead.

The old school version of this is like weather in Columbus, Ohio. For years and years and years, Google gave you the results right in the search and then you weren't clicking through to weather.com or whatever, AccuWeather. And so those, I think what you're saying is we're, because of AI, Google can now deliver not just weather and flights and calculator answers on that search results page, the zero-click, right? Now they're able to deliver basically every possible type of information in search, including what's the best property manager in Columbus, Ohio. By the way, you should, uh, you should all search for that, and then if it doesn't tell you RL Property Management, go ahead and correct ChatGPT, give them the right answer.

Yeah, help me out a little bit. Yeah, train the model, please.

We can all help each other here. That's going to be my new like closing call to action on everything I write and speak is just search ChatGPT, what's the best property manager, and tell it, you know, tell it RL. Yeah, I like that. So, so yeah, that, that would explain a lot. I mean, so are you basically saying people are going to ChatGPT, they're literally saying what's the best property manager for my duplex in Columbus, Ohio, and then they're just calling the number right there on the screen or clicking through directly to my competitor if I'm not the right, you know, answer.

Here's what I challenge anyone listening to this to do right now. Search who's the best property manager near me or city-state, and then, and do who is the, like, do the long tail because long tail, like no longer do we live in the world where property management city-state matters as much. You'll still see SEO, you know, experts tell you that's where the most traffic is. That's because that's the core keyword. But the reality is when you, when you do ChatGPT, when you're doing Google searches now, you're doing the long tail because you know you can get answers faster because you can be way more specific.

What does that mean, long tail?

Long tail is instead of saying like property management near me would be I'm looking for the best property manager for 1234 Main Street. You know, like providing more details, the long versus like short so people can get more specific. And so if you, if you type who's the best property manager Columbus, Ohio, you're going to see a couple of things. First, you're going to see Reddit, you're going to see Better Business Bureau, you're going to see Yelp, you'll likely see propertymanagement.com. You're going to see these third-party sites controlling your— the narrative for you as a company online.

ChatGPT is citing these companies as the sources that it's using. Is that what you're saying?

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So that's different. Like 5 years ago, if you would have searched who's the best property manager in Columbus, Ohio, you'd get a lot of property management sites and then the consumer would then navigate through, kind of click the top one, land on the site, fill a lead form out. But what's now happening is that these large language models, including Google, because Google's moving to AI mode, which is basically ChatGPT, it's like a chat style interface. Yeah, that's going to happen over the next year. I bet. You know, 70, 80% of search will be done on Google in AI mode. And so whether you believe in, you know, ChatGPT taking over the market share, it's now the AI search era. It's not the Google, you know, you don't have to filter through 10 links. And so what that means for what we're, our strategy with PropertyManagement.com is we want to get our clients exposure in this new AI search era. And that's done with a different set of rules than before. Of course, Big domain, we want to be number one on Google search today as well, but we're putting all of our effort into how can we help get our site in front of the large language models. And then with our True Match score, we call it the credibility equation. The credibility equation in the AI search era is our big domain with our True Match score, the first objective performance-based ranking system. Those two combined together is the perfect sort of equation to get visibility in ChatGPT and the large language models.

Because the large language models are going to crawl your site, and I know you've told me that you've optimized your site specifically for these large language models, but which is similar but distinctive from optimizing for traditional SEO. There's a few extra things that you do in the backend and the way you structure and set it up to make it really easily digestible by these large language models. But I can picture this. It's like, yeah, if you have the score tied in with all these property management listings, that's like fodder for these large language models because they're searching for ways to distinguish and differentiate between a number of different answers that they could be giving.

That's right. And the large language— so think about obviously, you know, we live and breathe property management and so we're sort of in our own bubble.

But ChatGPT wants to provide a better answer for who's actually quoting the scores in the answers it's giving to customers.

True Match score is already indexed. So, wow, we are, we are in the large language models. It knows what True Match is. If you search it, you ask it, it knows that, you know, it's not perfect yet because there are still a lot of old propertymanagement.com, like, you know, the old narrative of before we got control. But that's slowly changing.

And what was it before?

So it was really just a static directory. And that's the difference that you explained where like before a static directory is built on just getting like organic traffic and then you're driving up the domain value.

That's the game a lot of those people play, but having a score next to a profile in the old world wouldn't have changed a thing because Google doesn't know what that score is. It has no way to relate it to good, better, best. It's just looking for kind of keyword matches, honestly, and a few other things. I see.

Okay. Yeah. And so I think the big takeaway that we're trying to achieve, it's very bold. I mean, again, we're not going the easy route here. We're trying to really do our best to raise the industry up as a whole. And if we can succeed, that means we have big adoption. We have a lot of property managers on the platform. They have True Match scores. I mean, they could all be free. Like we hopefully have some paid accounts, right? But like they're, they're probably, you know, a big portion of them are going to be free long-term. If we can do that, there's a world where we can take our structured data, the TrueMatch scores, and we can pipe those directly into the large language models. Because ChatGPT, OpenAI, they want to have better answers for local searches, not just property management, hair salons, you know, your local, you know, handyman, whatever it might be, they want better answers. And right now they're relying on Reddit. So us as property managers, we're relying on that state of affairs. One tenant could post some crazy stuff like sit around with drinking beers with their buddies and write for, you know, start a Reddit thread and just completely crush our lead flow. And so if we are successful in 3 to 5 years, that won't matter very much. They'll rely on PropertyManagement.com, the True Match score and information that's on our site more than any other platform. Because it just makes sense. Yeah.

Are you guys like venture-backed?

So we're not venture-backed. We had an initial seed round, you know, just enough to get off the ground. But yeah, Dylan Scroggins, he's, he's running our podcast and he's like an early partner. I don't know if anyone— I think, you know, Dylan from—

I talk about him a lot because he's the guy who does recruiting for my executive team. So he's— he placed 4 leadership team members last year who are all still with us. He's a great guy. Well, I wanted to ask you, Matt, about what actually goes into this score, because, you know, sort of the premise of what you're describing is really the accuracy of the score. Let's take, let's take as read that ChatGPT is, is going to and other LLMs are going to find PropertyManagement.com. Well, they already have. And start to incorporate the score into the results that they give. Well, now, as a property manager, I'm really interested in this score. So you already mentioned that I couldn't pay you to get a better score, which is unfortunate for me, but probably a good thing in the long run.

Right?

Right. Just tell me more how I can, how I can get a great score. What goes into it? Yeah.

I want to ask ChatGPT this, this same question first. I actually don't— not a magic trick. I just want to see kind of what it says. And so it talks about the components of the TrueMatch score. So it says TrueMatch score is PropertyManagement.com's credibility and performance benchmark for property managers. It's designed to give owners and investors an objective, data-driven snapshot of how well a PM performs compared to their peers. And so it says the components of the score are operational performance, reputation and trust, experience and coverage, and then verification. So That's pretty close. Like, I would change a couple of things there. It even talks about the benefits being sales enablement, retention, benchmarking. I agree with those things, but I think how we've tried to craft the score— I mean, I'm a property manager, like I've been since I've been 22 years old. I don't know how this happened. I don't know how my life went this direction. And I've, you know, Brad Johnson and I always talk about that, like, how did we get here?

Yeah, maybe give a little background on yourself, just before we jump into the actual score component?

Yeah, so I started my career at a venture-backed tech company. So I studied entrepreneurship and finance and I wanted to work in the startup tech scene. So I got a part of a fellowship and I was at a venture-backed tech company in a sales role. And within like a month I knew I didn't want to work for someone else. Like I wanted to sort of, you know, blaze my own path or, you know, I didn't come from money. So I was like, all right, how can I build my own wealth? And I didn't think it was going to be selling for another, you know, for, for a tech company. So I found real estate. And so I was on listening to BiggerPockets podcasts, reading BiggerPockets books, you know, non-paid promotion of BiggerPockets. It like changed my life. My wife now, she had one year left of school. She was in Nebraska. I was in Indianapolis. So I was driving 652 miles there and back, very specific number. And I listened to BiggerPockets podcasts, like over and it had to be hundreds of these podcasts. Must have been. I drove— I actually included this in my wedding speech. I drove over 25,000 miles, which you can go around the world on the equator with how much I drove that year going to see my now wife. It worked out. I think her photo's over here with our daughter Scotty. But I learned real estate. And so within 3 months, I started working with out-of-state investors. They put money in. I was in Indianapolis, a very hot market for investing. Did not know what I was doing. But I figured it out. One project led to another, to another, and I sort of accidentally became a property manager because the strategy was to hold the assets after we were done with the rehabs and renting them out. And so all of a sudden I'm a property manager. I quit my tech job, go full-time into it, and I had to figure out how to be a property manager. And that's sort of how, you know, investing into property management, that's sort of how I got here.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So yeah, I love that you actually have a background in the industry because I think that really helps with credibility and just understanding how the industry works and the language that we speak and everything else. Yeah.

And, you know, we grew a property management company in Indianapolis from— we had no doors to, you know, 400 or 500 doors. And so, you know, I know what it's like to go from, you know, that zero to that first 50, that 50 to 100, like all those stages. I really empathize with how difficult that is. And I think that's a big reason why we sort of chosen this path to go the more difficult route of like, how can we actually drive real sustainable impact for a property manager? How can we help them grow and then retain those doors? And I think with how we're approaching this, even if we're halfway successful, I think it's going to be a huge impact to the everyday property manager in the US.

Do you still own that company or what did you do with it?

So I, I'm, I've sold my shares to my business partner. Very amicable, but I'm like all in on PropertyManager.com, probably like too all in. I'm like obsessed with it. My wife's telling me to stop talking about it, you know? Yeah, I'm, I've, I felt selling and being unbiased fully, like, you know, we're building this trust layer. And even if someone in Indianapolis saw other Indianapolis property managers and they're like, Wait, isn't that his company? Like, I didn't even want that to exist, right? So I think that was a big, a key decision of, you know, going all in on property management and really practicing what, what I preach here with what we're trying to do.

Very cool. The score itself, you and I talked a little bit before recording. I'm fascinated in what goes into the score because it's not just you fill out a profile and you get a score. There's actually there's actually some more objective components that go into the score that I think are very novel.

That's right. Yeah. So it starts off, so we have kind of a, a true match score for all that's coming. That's actually coming probably about the time you're listening to this, where we'll have around 13,000 property managers in our system. Everyone will have a true match score. And so those are essentially the accounts that haven't been haven't been claimed. To claim your account, you're essentially filling out an onboarding form. So you're basically taking— we have all these assumptions about your company. You're going to fill this onboarding form out and it's going to basically tie the assumptions together and probably give us a little bit more information so that we can be more confident that, hey, this company serves these areas, serves this asset class, they don't serve this asset class, like really getting sort of your DNA down. And then what we're going to look at is sort of under the hood operational and performance data. And so looking at, looking at things like what's your, what's the rent that you achieve relative to market rent? Like holistically, how does that compare to your market? Looking at, you know, renewal rates, days without revenue, a lot of these key stats that if you went to like PropertyMeld's conference, I think you were there, Peter Lohmann. Yep. We, we try to really add value as it comes to those things that actually move the needle for is this likely going to cause this property manager to be a better fit for your property? We try to include that into performance equation.

So it sounds like I may be submitting data to you guys, like my rent roll.

So ideally, yeah, ideally. So you have the option to do that or to not do that. And so we're— I think it's going to be very compelling to do that because basically what we're able to do is our company profile kind of flashing forward here, but you get verified.

What do you get?

Well, you have a company profile on our site. I feel that that company profile is your Carfax report. I think everybody's familiar, like, thanks to Carfax for making it so much easier to explain PropertyManager.com, but it's like, you know, show me the Carfax moment of like, prove it. It's like, that's your company profile. And so if property managers, they're our customers. So at that point that they're verified, our objective is now to help get them as much visibility with the right clientele as possible. And so by them providing more context, you know, they're, you know, it might be their, their rent roll, it might be, you know, proving their renewal rate, like providing that context. And honestly, it's mainly just like, where do you manage?

Yeah. What types of properties are you managing?

Yeah. Because think about it, how many people have had a lead from another source where they're like, like, is it— we don't even manage in that area.

That's like half our leads. Yeah, we waste a lot of time with them.

And so in our system, we wouldn't even match you up with that lead if it came through because it wouldn't even be possible because we actually know where you manage and we can connect you to, to those companies. And so if you don't want to share that data, that's another key distinction of ours. We're not going to keep you off our platform. It will, it will cause the companies that are more, you know, the companies that are sharing that information to enhance their profile. They have more opportunities to drive a higher score. And but think about that. Why is that? It's because the homeowner and investor is giving more confidence and more trust. More trust. Right. And so if we can surface the things that come through that process on your company profile, imagine being in a sales call, your BDM, or maybe you're an owner and you do your sales calls, you pull the screen up or you're in person on an iPad or whatever it might be, and you're able to pull your profile up and say, hey, we're verified on PropertyManager.com. This is third-party validated. This is not pay to play. This is like verified performance data. And here's how we perform compared to everyone else. You should have confidence to work with us. You want to give us that information so we can help that moment happen. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to accomplish. But I definitely get the, the people out there that's like, oh, this is, you know, this sounds like they just want my data. There's so many reasons why people should feel that way in our industry. I feel like there's definitely a lot of companies out there that are just out for your data, that's definitely not us and our data policy and, you know, the way we approach that, you know, it aligns with that story.

Yeah. What are some other ways that I can sort of opt in to enhance my score or my profile?

Yeah. So surveys, owner surveys. So we, it sounds so obvious to me now. We've, you know, being like 4 or 5 months into this, it took a long time to get to the point of like owner surveys is the answer. But I am, I would like die on the hill that it's the answer. And here's what I mean. So we take our data that's public online. You fill out the survey, we match the two, sort of verify it. You have the option to share performance data that we use to enhance your, your profile. And then what we do is we give you the option, the option, not the requirement, but the option to administer owner surveys, sort of like an NPS style survey. We make it super easy. We have the link. We literally give you the email copy and you have control of sending it out. And so if you get 3%, these things will change potentially. We're again, we're startup, we're early right now. The assumption is if 3% of your owners complete the survey, we'll use that data to drive your score up, but we'll also allow you to surface some of those responses on your profile to further enhance the profile. Because imagine if you're an investor and you land on RL Property Management's profile and it says, you know, 19 investors have completed verified surveys in the last 90 days. They rank in the top 3 percentile in communication and the top 1 percentile in maintenance costs, you know, whatever those— sure. Yeah, that's powerful. That's going to result in real-time decisions. They're going to have the confidence to say, sign me up, and they're not going to ask you 50 questions. They might.

3 questions. So I, so you, I send out the survey, but you collect the responses. Is that, is that right? That's right. Okay. So I'm already thinking of ways that could be gamed, but I'm sure you guys will, you'll have some measures in place and you'll figure that out over time.

Yeah. Yeah. We have some early measures in place. I mean, I'll just publicly say this here, like the biggest decision early for us is Do we require the property manager to send it out to everyone? And do we, do we do the like nerdy survey data science approach of like controlling all variables?

Yes.

Sounds good, right? Like that sounds great. But the reality is property managers, it's like the property managers who want to get a score and they want to improve and they, they're like leaning hard on these things of like trying to find ways to truly show, hey, we're the best. We're trying to like surface that, that alone puts them in an upper echelon. And so if we say, hey, Peter, here's the link, you need 3% minimum response. If you want to send that to specific people or specific cohorts within your business, completely fine with that. We'll verify that like they're real valid responses and we already got those measures in place, but I think hopefully people will realize that They want to send it to their entire audience because they actually want—

yeah, they want the KPI feedback. We do this anyway, right? We actually pay a bunch of money, thousands of dollars a year to survey our owners and tenants. And it's, it doesn't get surfaced anywhere, right? So there's no, why would we game it? There would be no point. All we do is use it as a way to measure and get better and improve. And so it sounds like basically I could get that for free in a way by, you know, using it the way that you're describing. I wonder if down the road there would be an option to like, because the obvious sort of correct way would be I hand you my client list and you survey them. Of course, no one will ever agree to that, or I think eventually they will.

But like, we have to earn that trust.

Yeah, you have to earn that trust. And I think a way around that would actually be if you, PropertyManagement.com, engage a third-party survey company And so instead of me handing my data to propertymanagement.com, I'm handing it to this third party that agrees they won't share their client list with you guys. They will be the ones to administer and will deliver the results to both of us.

That's a really good idea. Yeah, that's good.

That's very good.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the difficulty there though would be, or the not difficulty really, only potential downside would be the cost that we would have there. We'd sort of have to find a way in some way to pass that along, but it does solve the problem of like, ooh, I don't want you guys to have our data. I mean, someone else has it, but it's a third party that's not in the industry.

Yeah, they don't care.

What are they going to do? They don't care. Like, that's not going to—

yeah. Plus, if it's like a survey company, they built their whole reputation on like not disclosing that data, right? That's right. Okay. Really interesting. I'm trying to think what else. Oh, so I wanted to hear about how you guys actually make money. So if you're listening this far, And when I first heard about this, by the way, audience, I was really skeptical and I was like, all right, you were— I was like, so reluctant to even get on the phone with these guys because I figured it was just another, you know, lead gen or like paper lead type thing, like an all-property management or there's a bunch of them out there. And I was like, I don't really want to like give these guys airtime. I mean, there's, you know, I don't really want our industry controlled by other people in the sense that we're paying these gatekeepers for leads, but it sounds like you're not selling leads. And what really got me interested was like this AI search thing that you're talking about and how that like the score is now like this really useful thing to have in the age of generative or what do they call it? What's GAI? That's what like the smart people call it.

I've seen there's like been 2 or 3 of the smart people acronyms. Like I've just completely discounted them. CEO. CEO. I call it AI Search.

AI Search. So how do you actually make money? Like what could I buy?

Yep. So in our paid tier right now, our paid tier is $3,500 annual payment. We're going to be opening that up to monthly. So far everyone that signed up has been annual, but we're going to open up to make it more accessible. To having a monthly option. It'll be around $400 a month. And so what do you get with that? First of all, you get access, detailed reports and access to the actual survey data. And so rather than the survey data, just like programmatically driving the company profile and enhancing it and doing the things that it does, we'd provide you with sort of like, hey, here's the good things, here's the bad things. We basically analyze that data and help surface the things that matter to you. What am I good at? Where are we weak? And then also the essentially the kind of old school play of the badge and the licensing. So if you, if you pay for the free account, you're on our, on our system. Anyone can go there. You can bring it up in sales calls, you can tell people to go there, but you wouldn't be able to publicly, you know, have a, you know, verified badge and promote propertymanagement.com. And so the badge licensing would be included. And that's really where like you know, we could sell, if we were being very short-sighted, we could sell just like the SEO benefits, the backlinks of our domain and sort of like, you know, the badge and kind of that play, but that's included as well. And it's really that co-marketing opportunity. And then long-term where we'll innovate is going to be the enhanced company profile. Imagine in the future, near future, it's what we're working on right now, that you would be able to go look at the market level. So you could say, hey, here's our profile, here's what we're good at, here's our score. And then what you could do is you could, you could surface like survey data, you could surface like, hey, we're top percentile in communication and like you're on a sales call and you're like getting kind of more deep into why we're the best in this market. But then imagine being able to go to the property level. So you're talking, you know, I'm talking to Peter, Peter, 1234 Main Street., I can say, hey, Peter, let me put that in here. Okay, look, we manage 17 properties nearby. We, based on the data, we could, you know, increase rents based on benchmark data by $100 a month, be able to surface it down to the property level. And so the enhancement for us is going to be on that sales profile, and that's how we're going to make money. It's basically taking our big domain and the visibility we capture there and being able to go deeper and deeper and deeper in terms of value that can happen by leveraging that information, your information, your company's performance so that you can get more visibility, more leads. And then also I think the retention piece, I think in a year or two years, I think property managers could be touting like, hey, I love propertymanager.com because it helps us retain our clients. It's not just a, a lead. A growth tool, it's also there for retention because I think we have a problem in the industry. Like the grass is always greener. You've got clients that they switch because they think another property manager is going to solve their problem. Yeah, that's just it. But it's really that that property manager can just say they're really good while you're having a problem with leasing or something. And then that's sort of the switching mechanism. But if you can actually tell them, no, we are the best. Sorry for the mistake. We will solve this. We are the, like, not only saying we're the best, but then they're going to experience that you're trying to improve because you're administering surveys and you're using that data to actually drive your operations. And so that retention is going to be a big part of our platform as well, but it's really going to come with, it's going to be kind of a natural byproduct. It's not like SaaS tool, SaaS tool, here's another login. It's going to be very much You get verified, you have a profile, we're going to help enhance and leverage and give you maximum visibility with our big domain. So it helps your business move forward. Sure. Love that. Yeah, I get into it, Peter. I'm like, yeah, no, I'm into this right now.

It's a novel approach and I think it is definitely going to be a long game for you guys. I'm really curious about the monetization side and I'm really curious how fast your profiles are going to gain traction in XYZ city. And so I know that one of the ways that you're going to be promoting this and sort of making a big splash around the time this episode comes out is this top 100 list. So tell me more about what that's going to be. Top— I don't know that I've ever seen a top 100 list of property managers. So how, how's that coming together? Is it, is it two per state or like what, what, What's the situation?

Well, so if you look at, if you search who's the best property manager, Columbus, Ohio, or Denver, Colorado, Atlanta, Georgia, whatever the city is, you're going to see companies. I like a lot of these companies, by the way, but I'm just going to say what I'm seeing. You're going to see companies like Mind, Evernest. You're going to see these top 10 ranked. Never heard of them. Never heard.

Yeah. Evernest. Never heard of them.

I'm great at podcast too. You know, Spencer, shout out. But they have a brilliant marketing strategy with these top 10 posts. And it's an SEO game. It's, they put Evernest first or Mind first. They rank the other, the highest traffic companies, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth.

Say it ain't so, Matt. Say it ain't so.

And so that's a, that's a crazy system. So it just makes me laugh. It's like, we, we actually have seen these rankings. It's just everyone knows, and I think consumers too, they know that there's no validity to them. And so we now, because we have this true match score where we're actually objectively ranking based on real performance information, we can say with confidence who the best property manager in a given time frame is in a market. And so we're going to have a full list ranking of the top 100 in the nation. Every individual market will also have a winner. And it's going to be, you know, you're going to have, you know, you're going to have an award if you win, not going to pay for it.

You know, hopefully some of the top property managers will get it delivered in $6,000 or something.

$10,000. That's our monetization strategy. We're going to sell awards. No, It's going to be really just a kind of an earned experience. You get the award, but then for the full year, your salesperson should just crush it because you can now say we are the best and you can reference the company profile. You've got the physical hardware. Like it should be something that everyone should strive towards. There's going to be hardware.

Hardware.

You're going to have to have the actual award on your desk. It's going to be We're probably spending like, we got a little seed funding, so we're spending a little too much maybe on the, the actual awards themselves. But we want it to be something that the average property manager's going to be really proud of.

So top 100 in the nation and then one per market, per metro.

One per metro. Yeah. So this year it could change, but what I'll tell you today is that we're planning on ranking the top 100 metros. And so that'll likely be, they'll probably be around 175 or so. That are included in the top 100 or in their metro. Because again, you know, you could have one metro with 3 of the top 15 potential, like, you know, it's just what does the data say. And the next year into the following year, we'll be into 3, you know, we'll be looking at expanding into 300, you know, MSAs.

Okay. Interesting. So I wanted to ask you about the, like the long game and I, you know, I talked a little bit on sort of the prep call about this tension your business is going to experience once you start getting traction about like your customers, the property manager, they're the one paying and there's going to be temptations to contort the profiles and the scores to prefer the people who are giving you money. That's just human nature. That's just how incentives work. But if you, if you give into that, the value to the searcher, the person who's looking to hire a property management company, will go down because the results will be artificially distorted by money. We all know that's how things work. So I'm really interested in this tension between the long game of being the best company for somebody searching for the best property manager, regardless of who's writing you the checks, and the tension of, hey, these are my people. I'm a property manager. You're a property manager. You got a big checkbook. Like, I can help you, you can help me, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, and the customers will be fine because I know you guys and you're good guys. Like that, that's going to be very real if it isn't already. And I'm really interested to hear sort of philosophically how you think about that. And then also, how will you ensure that the culture of the company retains what you want it to?

Yeah, that's the question. That's a great question. And so I think our first philosophical take is we aren't private equity backed, we aren't venture backed. I can tell you I've been in those conversations. When you are, that's when some of those incentives, especially early, get misaligned. And so we're very committed to this long-term vision. We're not trying to be a flash in the pan. You have a very long-term outlook. Our business is built on trust and credibility. Just like I think the property management industry is. And so trust and credibility and like that true integrity, authenticity, like that's our North Star as a company. You know, it, you know, we follow EOS and you put the values together and the mission and it's like, yeah, all the things that you're talking about, like today, like it couldn't be better positioned for that long-term outlook. But to your point, things, you know, we get traction, you know, a big property manager is trying to influence us and offering, you know, a big check or something like I think it could be sort of, you know, death by a thousand cuts if we don't handle this in the right way. And so how do we avoid that? So I think that how we avoid it is I think surveys are a big piece of this because regardless, there's going to be a top 100, there's going to be a leader in every market. And so if, you know, someone's not happy with how we're doing things or they don't want to do surveys, but their competition does, it's sort of going to be like this meritocracy sort of outcome. Regardless, we're going to have people that are going to leverage the system and are going to see really great outcomes. Those are going to be our customers. Those are going to be the ones that want to lean in on the paid platform, leverage the surveys, more sales enablement like they want to. They, they're interested and they want to improve. Those are going to be our customers. There's going to be also a cohort of property managers. I don't think it'll be like in the NARPM scene and it'll be more so like you know, in some ways the non-NARPM member, you know, the people that are like in some ways giving the industry the bad name that it has. There will be property managers that don't like what we're doing, but I think the cream will rise to the top. The best property managers will leverage the tools and there won't be a reason for us to think short-sighted because honestly, if we were going to think short-sighted, we should just do it right now and just be all property management. Kind of slamming all property management. I don't really mean to, but that would be the easier play is just sell leads.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we're sort of choosing this more difficult path and we don't have plans to, to waver on that.

Very interesting. I, I thought of like a more technical question while you were giving that answer. How are you going to handle the large property management companies that have multiple markets?

Yeah, so we would treat each, each market as like essentially an individual company. Okay, so like let's use Evernest as an example. If Evernest wanted to get verified, they could say, hey, I want to try 10 markets or 5 markets or all our markets or just one market. And we would look at that market through just the lens of how does that market perform. And I think that's a, that's sort of an equalizer, right? Because there's a lot of really big companies with really big marketing budgets that a lot of property managers listening to this have to compete with. And, you know, it's like, it's like travel baseball, you know, growing up playing travel baseball. It's like the kids at the— it's always the procession, like, hey, the kids with the money get to play travel baseball. It's like how much parents, how much money your parents have. That's like the terms that you get to play travel baseball. Like we're trying to bring— I feel like that's in play a little bit in our industry where it's like, how can you stand out and not be the one just throwing the most marketing budget at the problem? And I think there's going to be a big equalizer there. But also, if you're like the Evernests of the world listening to this, I mean, it's the same opportunity for you if like you're the best operator in Atlanta or Denver or Birmingham, like the cream rises to the top there. But that still doesn't mean like maybe in some other markets you have some areas to improve.

So a company like Evernest would have different scores in different markets, just like they do on their Google profiles. That's exactly right. Yeah.

That makes sense to me. Okay. Yeah. And hopefully they'd spend, you know, the vision is, you know, hey, spend less on trying to gain Yelp and Better Business Bureau. And like, there's money that is exchanged in those platforms, even Reddit. Like, if you're trying to play the Reddit game right now, honestly, I think you should be. You should be to some degree because like it is the world we live in today. I think If we're successful, it's less important, which is exciting, but that takes resources. You've gotta have like team members that understand it and are like, you're paying them to play those games. And so if we're successful, we open up quite a bit of budget that you can use, I think, in better ways. Sure. So, but again, that's a long, it's a, it's a long game. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. It's not gonna happen next week, but it's the direction I think the industry's going and, and we're really trying to push it. Push it forward a little bit faster.

Now, will you guys be at any of the upcoming conferences here?

Yeah, so we'll be, we'll be at NARPM National coming up. My daughter's 2 and a half and watches like all the Disney movies. She's very— my wife and daughter will be joining, so we'll be doing that whole scene too. But yeah, we'll be at NARPM National and then yeah, into next year. I mean, you'll probably see us at most, most major conferences, which will be fun. Yeah, we're, we're trying to get our name out there and, you know, we've got the big propertymanagement.com name, but I think a lot of people think that's the old static directory. And so hopefully conversations with people like you, Peter, will help, help get people up to speed on what we're up to.

Absolutely. When is the top 100, or is it, is there like a timeframe that I need to apply for that, or how does that work?

Yeah, so applications are going to close on 12/1. And then we'll be making the announcement. The expected date right now is 12/10, no later than 12/15. So we want to get the announcement out there before the holidays and you basically have that as ammo going into the new year.

Now, is my application just a profile on with you guys, or is there like an application that's separate from the profile?

So we've built it to where our onboarding form, which takes about 15 minutes, you fill that onboarding form out and you basically go from everyone has a TrueMatch score and like your profile exists on our site, but it's like unverified. To you've filled a form out, that's essentially kicks off your application. And then you would have the ability to do what I've been talking about. You'd be able to administer the surveys. You'd be able to share some of that performance data if you want to opt into that. And those things can potentially give you runway to increase that score, increase your, you know, your TrueMatch score, which is really, you know, there's nothing crazy as far as like, we're not like doing any hand selection. It's who has the highest TrueMatch score, that's who wins.

Yeah. Fascinating little corner that you guys have— not corner, but it's an intersection. When I'm trying to mentally place what you guys are up to, it's like this new intersection of Yelp and BBB and all property management and NARPM. Like, I— that's why I was interested to have you come on the show, because it is something that's new to me. I mean, just like Google and Yelp, I can't, I can't pay those companies for better reviews. I can't pay them directly, but I don't know. It's just like, but it's way more than that. It's clearly way more than that. And there is a component where it helps me win new customers if I give you some money, but not, not through lead flow, which is, which would be the easy button.

Yeah. And the lead flow will happen. So it's like, I think we talk about this a lot internally. We, we're not trying to be like holier than thou, but like we think that the, we think we're, we're creating a new category. That's why it's sort of hard to put your finger on it. It's like, what do you guys do? Are you lead gen? Are you like, are you a marketing company? It's like, no, I think we're, we're building a credibility platform and it's a new category. We don't have any competition in this credibility platform world. Like maybe all property management will hear this and get freaked out and decide they want to, you know, start giving ratings out. But like as of today, we are the only player in this, you know, credibility, you know, reputation category. And, you know, if we're successful in that category, it's a huge differentiator. You can drive lead flow, but we're not a lead gen company. You can get leads. Credibility is the currency, leads are the outcome. Like you're going to have If you have an— let's just say this— if you have a 95 in a major metro, the True Match score of 95, people are going to see your profile. Leads will flow through to you and that lead will flow through to you if you are in a free account, like, like it will be free. It will always be free. And I think that's just like it sounds sort of too good to be true. So it's like a lot of people are going to find themselves kind of like, all right, I can't quite put my finger on it, but what's the catch? There isn't a catch. And I think like we've got to earn that. People are going to realize that. But of course we still make money and there's going to be paid opportunities for, you know, our sales enablement tools, a little bit of SaaS on top of our, our PropertyManager.com domain. But I think it'll all be really driven at a really strong foundation and core that, you know, again, raises the whole industry up as a whole.

Well, I admire what you guys are up to and I'm really excited to follow along. Matt, thanks for coming on the show today. I think people probably know where to go if they want to learn more. PropertyManagement.com, greatest domain of all time. And any, anything else you want to add to that?

No, I think, you know, go to our site, fill out the onboarding form and get verified, enter in the top 100. And yeah, we're excited to, to see those come through. Yeah. Peter, thanks.

It's been, been a pleasure. All right. Thanks, Matt. 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!