Peter Lohmann hired a pest control technician as director of maintenance instead of candidates with multifamily experience. He argues managing single-family homes is closer to pest control operations than multifamily complexes, making prior property management experience a disadvantage for his company's model.
I find that multifamily experience in our world is sometimes a disadvantage because it's so different in fundamental ways. So for example, we brought on a new director of maintenance about a year and a half ago. He's worked out fantastically. He had no experience in property management, and I was much more interested in hiring him because of his experience in the pest control industry than several other candidates I interviewed who had been directors of maintenance for larger multifamily properties. Because I think that larger multifamily maintenance experience is so fundamentally different from what's required to manage single-family homes that it's actually a disadvantage. And what we do is closer to like a pest control driving house-to-house type of operation than multifamily.
