Inside Rentvine's Bet on Open Data with CEO, Dave Borden

If AI was the internet, then we'd probably all be on AOL right now. We don't know what AI's going to look like in 1, 5, 10, 20 years from now. We just don't. And I think it's going to be as powerful as everyone says it's going to be. And so we're digging in hard that AI is going to replace a lot of things. And, but I'm very confident it's not going to replace property managers, but property managers that use AI are going to outcompete those that don't. And that's a fact.

Friends, welcome back to the Peter Lohmann Podcast. I have a very special guest with me in the virtual studio, Dave Borden, CEO of Rentvine. How are you doing this morning, Dave?

I'm doing great, Peter. Very excited to be on another version of your podcast.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to have you. So there's been a lot going on in the world of property management software, and I want to thank Rentvine. You don't say.

You don't say.

I want to thank Rentvine for being a title sponsor of the PM Trends Report. That's something that Jordan Moela and I put together and we introduced this year. It's been awesome working with you guys, and we hope that the report has been, you know, very useful for property management operators. But Dave, let's dive right into it. We'll skip all the boring background stuff. Not that your background is boring, but we talked about it on the last show and I wanted to get right into conversation. So first, if you're able to say how many doors are on Rentvine's platform right now, because I know you guys have been growing.

You know what? I'm actually not allowed to say that.

Oh, not allowed. All right.

But It's a lot more than you would think. I hope.

Okay. I believe you guys. Yeah.

I just, you know what?

Yeah.

I hate saying stuff like that because it's like, you know, it's too much of an indicator. Well, zero. We started at zero.

Well, sure. But I think last time you were able to share a number. I forget the number.

Okay. Let's just say we're ahead of plan.

Ahead of plan. Okay.

Got it. Yes. So we have a, projection of units where we want to be, and we're ahead of that by a fairly significant margin. And the vast majority of our unit makeup is kind of the narcom property manager. Yeah. The guy or gal who does mostly single-family homes, some duplexes, fourplexes, small apartments, a little bit of commercial here and there. Obviously our strong suit is single-family. It's each one, Each property's extremely custom and I believe we're the most customizable platform, which helps that type of manager be most successful. Sure. Although we are very, the platform is very useful and ready to handle pretty much all property types, but we do definitely excel in single family.

Yeah. And I can get a taste of your growth. We do intake surveys on Crane Applications and then I also do my largest PM company list. We just released the 2026 update for that. And as a part of that survey, we ask what software people are using. And you guys have like, you're kind of dominating your slot. Like when I look at the growth, I don't think any other company, software company is growing more quickly than Rentvine and taking on more and more and more doors every year. So it's been really fun to see that. Like for a long time, I always, You, you were kind of neck and neck with Billium, but I think you're leaving them way in the dust from the numbers I'm seeing anyway. Yeah.

Well, I, I, I'm assuming you've heard of AI, right?

Yeah. Looking into that. Yeah.

Well, you know, I'm not being hyperbolic here, but our open API is the best way to deploy AI inside or outside of, of your software. And that's resonated. I look at it as You know, our competitors had an internet moment where everyone moved off of them, off of, you know, some of the other legacy systems, prem softwares, and they moved to the cloud. I feel like our product is built most especially for AI, and we're experiencing that moment. So you talk about a unit count and us being ahead of plan. People hate to switch software unless they can do something better after the switch. And we feel like Redline customers are leaving people on other platforms in the dust.

Yeah.

They're building the tools they need. And if, and we've always had a philosophy from the beginning that, hey, if we build the best product, software screening, maintenance, whatever it is, then people will use ours. And if not, we should facilitate them using something better. And there's a world now where a property manager can build an exactly custom thing exactly for their business with an API MCP connection and run it that way. And we don't have to build it for 'em in order for them to have it.

Yeah.

We'd love to, we'd love to build everything, charge for everything, but just the The open nature of our platform makes deploying AI significantly easier than our competitors.

There's a couple interesting things about that because you guys were touting your API long before AI rolled onto the scene. I mean, that was like a cornerstone principle from what I've seen of your software is, hey, free and open API, build your own stuff, bring your own solutions. You want to use our built-in stuff? Great. You want to tie into our API? Great. You want to use a vendor or a point solution that ties into our API? Great. That was like, you guys, I mean, I remember talking with you and someone from AppFolio on stage at a LeadSimple conference years ago, long before ChatGPT was out. And, you know, you were, you were hammering on that point. So it's been awesome that the AI era has like massively given a tailwind to something you were already doing. Like, it's supercharging the advantage that you had with the free and open API. And so it's been really fun to watch, honestly. I mean, it's, it's—

It'd be even more fun, Peter, if you were watching it on Redfin. That would be really cool.

It would be, I'm sure.

Yeah. You know, and, and listen, I would love to sit in front of you and tell everyone that I was just so visionary back in 2017 that I knew AI was coming and, but I didn't. I knew, I mean, I knew, I knew as much as you did. And, but the decision to build the open API and allow, I mean, it came from a decision of this is your data, you're paying us to use it. And we didn't feel that it's right to keep that hostage. And that decision, although it wasn't directed toward AI, also happens to be the best decision for AI.

Cool.

So sometimes when you do the right thing, it works out for you. And we believe that now, even with AI, that we would love to build all the perfect tools and charge our customers for it. But if we can't build it and there's, if you can build something better or if somebody else can build something better, Then as your partner, we owe you the right to be able to do that. And that's company-wide and that's our PE firm shares that. It's just something that we do differently and it's served us very, and frankly, it's served our customers very well as well.

Yeah. So speaking of your AI advantage that stems from way back, an early commitment to an open API, Tell me about the newest and greatest AI or agentic or MCP-type releases on the product.

By the time this comes out, we will have released our maintenance management agent, which is a— we have 2 maintenance agents right now. We have what's called Fixie, which is a triage, tenant triage system. We're coupling that with, we haven't officially determined the branding yet, but we'll call it a Redvine Pro. And that Pro is going to handle about 80% of a maintenance coordinator's job.

Nice.

And that's, I believe it's going to be the first just really useful labor replacing agent, whether that's— and then I don't like to talk about cutting people's jobs, but what I tell people is if your maintenance people are 50% more efficient, then you can manage twice as many units without having to hire more people.

Sure.

And if you are a smaller operation, then you may not need a maintenance coordinator. So like I said, we're not trying to take away anyone's job. We're not trying to facilitate that, but We don't have typists anymore either. So, you know, sometimes people have to relearn skills in a new world. I think AI is going to probably create more jobs than it replaces, but this agent is revolutionary.

Okay. Yeah, that's really exciting. And what do you, do you guys, I think you have an MCP, is that right?

We do have an MCP, which, you know, a lot of people use the API without the MCP. MCP enables you to talk, basically talk directly to the software because we've defined all the endpoints through the MCP. We are in beta with that. And the reason we haven't released it to everybody is because there are risks involved with having an open API, having MCP, that our customers, that we need to protect our customers from because they're going to go make stuff.

Sure.

And I got some news for everyone that likes to make stuff with APIs and MCPs. Your software company does not support those. So if you build a side channel or a trail off, or a, you know, a branch off of your software, that's, we don't know how to support it because we didn't build it. And it's all, we're also trying to make sure that nobody builds in any vulnerabilities.

Yeah.

And we have certain, certain parts of the API are are locked down and we can't do payment information, can't do a lot of accounting on it yet, but we need to, we're just dialing it in. We do have about 80 people on the beta and people are building just absolutely incredible stuff, dashboards and their own agents. And it really is what a lot of people are doing, but we need to make sure that they're not opening. Remember, your software is where you hold all of your banking information, all of your owner's banking information, all of your tenants' banking information. Transactions are flying, money's transferring.

Yeah.

That's not something where you can make even one mistake.

That's right.

And so we need to make sure that while this brave new world that we're experiencing is fun and exciting, it also has to be safe and secure. And so we're not willing to put our customers at risk, even if they are willing to put themselves at risk. Yeah. And because, because If their bank account gets cleaned out, they're not going to yell at Quad. They're going to come to us.

Sure.

And we need to make sure that we've done everything in our power to prevent any kind of catastrophe from happening. And that's kind of, that's kind of why people pay us, is to make sure that what they're doing is safe and secure and that we've, we've thought of those things that they may not think of. So yeah, that is in a beta and it's going incredibly well. And it's, you know, frankly, it's winning us a lot of, we're still able to demo it. It's winning us a lot of deals that, that along with, with the agent and, and the, the maintenance agents and just the, you know, some of the stuff we've been able to show that other people have built. It's pretty impressive.

How does pricing work for the AI agents or the MCP?

It's a good question, Peter. I'd love to invite you down and you can be involved in that discussion. Okay. Let me back up a little bit. I'm going to give you our philosophy. I'll give you another Rentvine philosophy that we shared at the user conference, but I haven't shared this publicly, is our goal is to make as much money as we possibly can, just like any other business, but we want to charge other than our customer. So, you know, just every time we need an increase in revenue, I don't want to do a price increase or, make up some new plan to charge you for, or, you know, I want to add, if we're going to charge you for something, we're going to, it's got to add a ton of value. These agents add a ton of value. We're most likely going to charge for them. The MCP, we don't know if that's a chargeable item. We think it does add a ton of value, but it also is kind of something that we think should be available.

Okay.

To the customer base. So there's just a couple things that go into pricing. I know that you guys are all hot on pricing and per unit seems arbitrary. We really do evaluate what do our competitors do? What do we think the value of whatever it is we've just built? And then we decide whether that's a charge or not. Now, again, our business philosophy is we want to make as much money as we possibly can on Things that you don't pay for. Yeah.

Let me ask you about that. So, 'cause, you know, property management software, all of 'em pretty much famously make a huge chunk of their money, not from the monthly subscription fees, but from the transactional revenue around things like rental applications or background, you know, tenant screening, various insurance programs. And, you know, like just looking at—

Portfolio payment processing.

Payment processing, EFTs and things like that. So is that part of what you're talking about here? Or like, I mean, AppFolio famously disallows a point solution integration if they're taking up too much of that revenue, 'cause AppFolio wants to protect that. What is your approach here and is it evolving? Because I think I see this as a very fluid and active part of the space.

Well, again, our philosophy is to try to make as much money as we can, not from our customers. So your customers do billions of dollars of transactions that you and we are not privy to. Insurance, debt, credit reporting, resident benefit packages, all kinds of stuff people are transacting on that you're not involved in. So, oh, neither are we. And our mission, what we want to end up doing someday is we want to bring as much of that into the platform as possible. We monetize it, we rev-share with you so you can monetize it. And, you know, there's, that's selfishly, we want it adopted. If we say, hey, we just came up with this great insurance product, go sell it to all your customers, but you don't get anything from it, you're not going to be super excited to help us adopt that amongst your customer base. But if we can make it worth your while and help you monetize better, then you're going to be excited to help us adopt that. And ultimately, I'd love Red Vine to go to a place where switching to Red Vine makes you so much money that it's the world's biggest no-brainer to switch.

Sure.

And obviously there's all kinds of There's all kinds of areas there that we're looking at and that we're looking to expand into where we and our customers make more money without billing our customers more money. So we have to keep the lights on just like everyone else does, and we have to pay our people, and we have a lot of software and technology that we employ into our system. We're using a ton of AI, not only in the platform, but our employees are using a ton of AI. Our AI bill is going through the roof. I'm sure, you know, you probably experienced that on a smaller level for 2 or 3 people. Well, we have 200, we have 300 people.

Yeah.

And they're all using AI on a daily basis and are, you know, that's why this, this is a real technology that's going to last and we have to make sure that we're charging enough to be a profitable business or that doesn't do anyone any good. So it's balancing that. But I want, you know, I want the world to know that our number one priority is like, we'd rather get our revenue from not you.

Yeah.

And if we have to take it from you and it provides great value, I'm okay with that. But I would like to default to, can we make this up through selling insurance or helping people place debt or whatever that other product might be? And I think that's a good philosophy. I think that's better for you and it's better for us. So, and I don't see our competitors doing anything like that. So And I don't think they will after they hear this podcast either. So, but it's one of the reasons we're doing very well. It's one of several reasons, you know, the AI stuff, the mentality that, you know, you're not our indentured servants that we just continue to collect money from. It's resonating.

So, yeah, love that. In the PM Trends report, communication was a huge theme. And we're seeing that property owners are expecting faster response times across all communication channels, whether that's email, text, and phone. What do you think is like the optimal setup for property managers when it comes to email, text, and phone? And how does Rentvine, like, how, how does the philosophy, how does your philosophy about that communication show up in the product?

Well, you definitely hit us with something we're not as, you know, that's definitely one of our weaknesses today. We are addressing it now inside of the platform. But the, and by the way, I think us and all of our competitors are pretty weak on universal communication.

I can only speak to Buildium as a Buildium customer, and they're definitely weak in that area.

Yeah, we call it the unified inbox. You know, some people that do do it well are You know, aptly in LeadSimple, and they have a unified inbox communication tool within their platform that has, that people seem to like. We are addressing that and building it within our platform. Should be, I don't have a date on when that's coming, but that is a universal problem. You know, you get a chat, you get an email, you do a phone call.

Yeah.

It's pretty hard to assemble all of that into one really easy place. But that's also a great use of an agent. And that's, so that's one of the, you know, unified inbox with some agent assist is I think the way to answer that. And that's what, that's what one of our pods is working on right now.

It's a tricky problem because even if I had an unlimited software budget and instantaneous AI agents to build whatever I imagined, I'm not even sure that I could articulate or draw what it should look like and how it should function? Like, you know, we have all these channels and they're very different. You have audio, you have email, you have text, you have online chats, you have notes, you have maintenance requests. And like, what is actually the right way to display all that information in a way that's not overwhelming? Should it be on different screens? Should it be on one screen? Should it be tied to the unit? Should it be tied to a person? Should it be tied to the lease? Should it be tied to the owner? Like, it's actually not, it's not clear to me. It's not as if like, oh, I know exactly how this should work. Why don't they just build it? Right. I don't even know how it should work.

So, I mean, typically the way most, the way we solve for that is we have to go out and purchase another piece of software. I mean, we use, you know, we use HubSpot as like our CRM and that way if a salesperson's called someone, And they leave the company, get fired, whatever. A new salesperson comes in, they can see the communication that's happening. They can see our customer support notes. They can see everything about that particular customer. And our goal is to expose that within the software easily and connect it to AI in order to make sure that everyone's getting all of the data. So I think between the user, you know, UI and AI, are the answer to that. And our teams are working on that. And typically when we do a project like that, we call 100 of our customers and get them involved and try to get their thoughts and opinions on how it should look. And that's what guides us in doing that. We also have some customers on the payroll and they're like, this has, this, they're probably our best, they're our best, I guess, detractors too. They said, listen, you can't, You can't do this. You got to change this. You got to change this. And that's where I first started. I used to be a property manager. I wanted to build that advertising product called RentClicks, and I just wanted to advertise somewhere else, but it wasn't available. So using my industry and my knowledge of the industry, I built it.

And that's where I started. Bring it back. Take down Zillow. It's time.

Hey, you guys had your chance. I sold that company too soon. I should have kept it, but that's okay. I like where I am right now. So back to your inbox, we're working on it. I think we're going to come out with an incredible, elegant solution that involves great UI within the system and a great hookup to your favorite AI in order to help you sort through all those conversations and make sure that everyone's on— I mean, the main thing is make sure everyone's on the same page and that everything's getting responded to.

Yeah.

And so if you can accomplish that goal, Then you're in pretty good shape. I don't think you need to make it overly complicated, but everybody who logs in that you want to have access to customer notes needs to know what the last person said to that customer and what's been promised to that customer. And I think, I think AI and a combination of our UI plus our AI is, is the way to answer that.

Yeah.

And that's, that, that's coming soon. Let's put it that way. It's not, I don't have a release date, but I think we'll handle it elegantly.

Okay. Let's move to another part of the product, which is accounting. I was just clicking through some of your release notes. Looks like you've made some updates to like reconcili— auto reconciliation and, and some bank rules and things like that. I would love to hear your take on when is my property accounting software going to do my accounting? And it sounds like a ridiculous question, but I pay 2 different accounting groups to do my accounting, one for my corporate accounting and one for my trust accounting. Now, the corporate accounting doesn't really have anything to do with you, but I pay a group quite a bit of money every month to do my trust accounting. And, you know, I would love to give, you know, if I was a Rentvine customer, I would love to give that money to you. I would love to give that money to Buildium rather than having some other company handling it. Do you see AI unlocking this? Is this an area of interest? Because to me it's like a huge opportunity for revenue growth is like whatever we're paying all these third-party accountants, I'd be happy to pay you half of that or whatever, or 90% of it. I mean, it's just—

We'd be more than happy to take it, Peter.

Yeah.

And, you know, I will tell you that our roadmap does include accounting agents. That's a very sensitive part of the platform, obviously. Because that's the whole reason we even exist is you guys have to pass an audit and you're, you guys are subject to trust accounting rules in all 50 states. Like I said, that's our reason for being and the, whatever we can do to make you more efficient is how we become more useful to you. We'll tell you that that's our next set of agents is going to be all the accounting stuff. We do have an in-house accounting. We do those types of services for our customers.

Oh, you do? Oh, that's good to know.

Yeah. So we acquired a company called Bind. About a year and a half ago that is Kristen Johnson's company. We bought that from her. Yeah. Okay. I've heard about it. It's been a great tool for our customers that do what you do. And we believe that there's a ton of value to be had in creating a bunch, it's probably 2 to 3 accounting agents and not only using them for our accounting as a service platform, but if we can drive the cost of that down enough, We want to include it with everything. I know personally the scourge of my existence when I did property management was accounting. I'd be all motivated, ready to go out and make some money, and I have a stack of invoices, this, and this is back in 2002, almost last century for you kids out there. And I was using QuickBooks Classes as my accounting software, and it took hours to enter in all those invoices and then pay 'em. And sometimes I picked the wrong bank account and had to go back and undo everything. So we feel like that is not only the maintenance, the accounting, leasing, the future is the agentic stuff. We're very good at it. And I mean, we think if we can help you guys reduce your labor costs as much as possible and be accurate, at least as accurate and efficient as a human being, then we're going to win. And I think we have a—

Absolutely.

I think we have a great head start there. And by the end of the year, we'll have Multiple agents.

I mean, the ability to have, I mean, not only cheaper, but faster accounting and more accurate.

Hopefully more accurate.

More accurate for sure.

So that's the standard. You're paying humans to do it now. And people say, well, I don't trust AI. Well, you know what? Got some news for you. Humans make mistakes too, and sometimes catastrophic ones. And now the difference is when that person makes a mistake, you have a neck to choke. Versus AI, you know, if you, if you, if AI messes it up, then you gotta, if it's something you built, then you gotta choke your own neck. And it's not as fun that way. But I think AI's pretty close to being at least as accurate as humans. And it's on certain tasks, counting being one of them. And we think there's a lot of room to create a ton of efficiency there.

Sure.

So that's our next set.

Okay. So love it. You mentioned the acquisition that you made, Kristen's accounting firm. Any other acquisition, strategic acquisitions that you're thinking of? Obviously I'm not expecting you to name a specific company, but yeah, any category that would make sense for Rentvine to bring onto the platform in-house?

Yeah, so we did buy Rentfinder. I think you knew that. And that's been, that's been very useful for our customers. We can, you know, they need to do all that CMA stuff. This is a click of a button. It's very, very, very accurate, very, very fast. So that's, that's been a good, and there are a few others that we're looking at. I can tell you that we have, we have several things that we focus on here. One of 'em is growth. Like we like to help our customers grow. So PMW is far and away the best source of growth for property managers in this level of market. I mean, our, we can see it on Redvine alone. Our Redvine customers that don't use PMW literally are kind of breaking even if they're lucky, maybe adding a unit a month. The people that use PMW are adding 4 to 10 units a month outside of their churn. It's a no-brainer. It's It's a no-brainer. And so we, there's many, many ways that we can grow our business and helping you grow is one.

Totally.

Helping you retain is another one. So every month we have a pretty nice number of organic units that are added to Red Vine through PMW leads. And by the way, our customers are not very good at responding to those leads. So we're working on a couple things that can help them increase their conversion rate, add more units, because more units for them is more units for us.

Yep.

So we are working. So anything that hits customer growth, retention, efficiency is something that we're potentially looking at. And we do have a few that we're looking at right now.

So. Speaking of growth, what marketing channels are working for you all in 2026, meaning the growth of Rentvine? So you mentioned one channel, which is existing customers growing their doors. What other channels are being, are you seeing as really effective for reaching property managers and being able to talk to them about what you do?

You're asking me to give away our top secret playbook here.

I mean, you could give a wrong answer to throw me off track.

By the way, by the way, I think all of our competitors are using a similar playbook, so it's nothing. But yeah, so obviously we do a lot of trade shows. Those are very valuable for us. I think showing off the Red Vine culture, which is very good. Our employees have a heck of a lot of fun at trade shows.

I heard good things about your user conference.

Our customers have a lot of fun hanging out with us. You know, we hire good people that are fun to hang out with and they're also very competent at their jobs. And The user conference is great for exposing our customers and prospects to our culture, and so are trade shows. So I would say we probably get the vast majority, we get a lot of our leads from trade shows. We're also very good at SEO and now AIO. You know, if you're a PMW client, you didn't have to worry about AI because we took care of that for you. You know, you went straight from dominating search to now dominating AI. And it's funny because Marcus Sheridan, is that his name? Marcus?

Yeah.

He did that. Hey, do your QR code and you're going to be very disappointed when you see it. PMW customers were very pleased when they did that because they were, they appeared in all the searches.

Love that.

So we've actually, we've actually been able to do the same thing for Redfin is we're appearing outsized on AI results for property management software terms because we've gone after that very hard. So we do get a lot there. Obviously there's some other lead generation channels that we use. We have a very, very good go-to-market team. I mean, our marketing, our leader there is Chris Brazier, who used to be at Entrada. He's awesome. Beau Brooks is our sales leader. He's going to be a CEO of a big company someday. He's fantastic. And the motion there is really good, but part of it is also the message. I mean, like I said, we have an AI moment where we are going to take our competitors' business because they're not going to be able to keep up with us on AI. And it's really going to hit when Rentvine customers start crushing all of their competitors because of what they're able to do, because they're going to be able to do it faster, better for less money, and they're going to be able to charge lower fees, get more work done, have larger portfolios. That's when the motion's really going to start taking place. That'll probably happen in a year or two. We're already seeing it. We're already seeing it today. Some of our, some of our customers are just dominating their markets. So if we can help continue to help people do that, that's, that's the conversation right now is that I want to do AI really well. I need to be on Revvine. And, you know, there is a certain amount of truth to that. There is, it's, it's so much easier with an open API to do AI. I'm not saying you can't do it on other platforms. There's just other workarounds and things you have to do to make it as easy as it is with Revvine. So yeah.

And the key I think though is the affordability. Like Buildium has a great API, but it's only available on their most expensive plan, which is ridiculously expensive. And Appfolio, I think also has their API pretty high up in the tiers if you want to get access to it. I don't know. I can't speak to the quality of their API because I haven't used it. But I think, you know, there's one, there's 2 angles here. One is like technological superiority. How good is the API? How responsive, how well documented, et cetera. But there's also just the, the posture of the software company. You guys are embracing with open arms. Others, it's kind of, kind of like they're being dragged kicking and screaming and they would prefer to not, you know what I mean? And, and I think, you know, that to a small business owner operator who is interested in those things, that makes as much of a difference as even the technical or the economic part is like, is my platform going to be happy I'm doing this or are they going to begrudge me? For leveraging these tools and getting access to my own data, you know?

Again, philosophy. Yeah. We feel like if we don't build the best version of it, you should be allowed to go shop for something else. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we should either A, clean up our product and make it one you want to buy better, or, but we definitely shouldn't put a hurdle in the way of you buying it. So I know that, you know, we don't restrict like screening on our API and we have competitors, people we compete with that are using an API to our API. To compete with us. I, that's probably not the best decision on our part, but it's also, it's if a customer wants to use a different product because it's better than ours, then that's something that we need to fix, not something that we need to put a fence around you and say, sorry, you're stuck with our solution. That goes along with price. There's certain things that we feel like you should have access to as table stakes that our competitors don't agree with. And again, we want to, we think we can monetize the platform in many, many ways other than charging you more money. And again, if we add incredible value to something like an agent, we're going to charge you for it because it's worth it. But we're not going to cobble together a bunch of worthless stuff and call it valuable and charge you more money for it. Like answering them, like, hey, you get customer service if you upgrade. You should get that if you don't upgrade. You should get that anyway. So it's just, it's a philosophy. I think we have the right philosophy and, and so do all the people that are switching to us. So—

I wanted to ask you about customer service. I'm glad you mentioned it because Rentvine is kind of famous for their customer service, especially I think early on you would see people posting all the time on the Facebook groups about Rentvine. Their service is amazing, their customer support. You're clearly experiencing a lot of growth and I want to hear how are you scaling customer service? along with that? Because I think a lot of people, the pushback there is like, well, of course they're good at customer support. They have like 29 customers, but once they're big, then that's gonna fall off and they're gonna be like everybody else. Now, I haven't heard anyone complaining about that, so I'm just curious, like how, what's it been like to stand up a huge, I'm assuming pretty significant customer support motion at this point?

It is a challenge again. We're confronting a lot of it with AI. We are building our business for the future. In other words, we're assuming a certain amount of growth that we're going to hit based on the way we're growing now and the way we've grown in the past. And I challenge all of the leadership here to be at least double ahead of where we are as a business to where we're going to be. And I do it that way because I want us ready in case a huge customer wants to switch over, or in case everyone says, I've had enough of so-and-so and they want to move over to us. Or if somebody does something stupid on their platform and pushes a bunch of people our way, which we typically get on a monthly basis from one of our competitors. So we appreciate all of those fumbles and, and toe stubs, and we're mainly Making sure we don't do the same thing. And one of those, and you know what, we have had customer service blips where, you know, we used to have 2 people and then we're growing really nice. We have to add 6 and it's like you're trying to train 6 people and do, and do service. And then now, then you, I mean, customer support is a huge department at Red Vine and we deflect with AI. But a lot of stuff that you guys have is just has to be handled by a human being that understands property management in the business. Sometimes we do have blips when we're bringing a bunch of new people on that have never done it before, just like you do when you hire new people. They go out and probably make a mistake, say something stupid to a tenant or owner that you haven't fully trained them on yet. And we experience that too, except we experience it on a larger scale because we're dealing with Thousands of customers without giving you an exact number, and we got to be ready for it. And just because we're the new guy, people expect us to act like the big guys, and you're not going to be patient with us screwing up while we grow. So we try to stay ahead of it by, frankly, our organization is bigger than our organization, or the personnel level at our organization is bigger than the organization would dictate if we were on kind of a normal 8 to 10% growth plane, but we're not. We're growing, you know, still over, well over 50% year over year. Nice. And we have to, we have to, I just try, I basically just try to forecast a couple years in advance and that's what we staff for because we think we're going to get there based on what we're seeing so far.

What are the metrics that you need to know on a daily, weekly basis to make sure that things are afloat?

There's a bunch. Obviously, I like to know our unit count. I like to know our pipeline, our sales pipeline. We have a certain close rate with our pipeline, and that lets us forecast how many units we think are coming on, how many units are in the queue, which is big. I know that, you know, they may not be live yet, but I know they're going live. And so it just helps us for it. And again, it answers questions like you're talking about, like how many salespeople do we hire? How many support people do we hire? Onboarding, engineering, those decisions a lot are guided by those KPIs. A lot of it revolves around units. We also like to see how much revenue we generate per unit. And that's big for us. We have an ENPS score, which is our, you know, our employees grade us. We feel like our culture is a really huge competitive advantage for us. I'm not going to throw out any names, but almost all of our competitors, we have people working here from all of them and, you know, they don't have a lot of great things to say about the culture. So we feel like that's an intangible competitive advantage that we really don't know how good it is, but I think it's pretty damn good. And I see it at, like I said, I go to trade shows and I see it and people just want to hang out with us and go to our parties and because we have good people and they're fun to hang out with.

Your HQ's in Florida, right?

It is, yes. And we're actually moving, we're moving to Bonita Springs from Estero, which is the town just north of Naples is where Bonita is. And yeah, we're, our office is about 4 times bigger than the one we're in now. You know, half of our people are in Florida, the other half are remote.

Okay.

So we need a much bigger space. Like this week we have a bunch of people in town. I tried to go out and do this podcast. All the booths were full. All the offices were full. There's a meeting going on. We have 2 other satellite offices and there's meetings going on.

Man, the CEO gets relegated to whatever's left.

Well, there's construction outside my window, so yeah. Yeah. No, it's definitely It's definitely a, it's an exciting place. It's exciting right now. It's really, it's chaotic and it's a lot of change, but it's pretty fun.

I want to ask about banking for a moment. It feels like banking is having a moment right now. We have Column who's come into the space with a big splash. You know, frankly, they've spent a good amount of money with me on media stuff. They're at the trade shows now. George, nice guy. He's running around meeting with people. He's met with me several times. It's been interesting because of course Enterprise has been around a long time. Allison is awesome, friends with everybody. They've done amazing things for our industry. They're a partner at Crane, very important relationship for us. What's, what's, what do you think's happening with banking? Column talks a lot about their API, you know, to property managers. Banking is of course extremely important because of The trust account factor compliance, as well as the earnings credits. So how do you think about your banking partners or the partners of your customers? And is banking— is the relationship between software and banks and property managers going to change in the near future? Or do you think this is just kind of a lot of sizzle and not much steak?

That's a very tough question. We try to stay, I mean, we have to support every bank, obviously. We can't dictate which banks our customers use. I mean, we've always recommended that they use Enterprise just because we know, we, you know, like you mentioned Allison, she's about as rockstar in this space as possible. I don't think she's ever done or said anything to, you know, wrong or to upset anyone. Her and her company have an incredible reputation and that's something you can't buy, whether you're a new guy or whatever. Technology's changed. I mean, Peter, 3 months ago we had certain things we're doing that are slightly different today because of AI. And we approved a budget back in December that we're completely redoing because things have changed so much. And that's okay. Again, I love the AI moment. That's how we're We're becoming a prominent player because of AI. On the banking side, that is such a trust relationship that people have that I think it's really difficult to trust someone new, but banking, like every other industry, is going to experience radical change with AI. And I think the customer just wants it to be easy. And they want the banks, they want the software to talk to their bank. And so what we have to do, that's table stakes. But I think banking is a trust business and so is software. So I mean, if you can find a way to get people to trust you instead of the other guy, then that's great. Whether it's through a relationship or pricing or technology, I would just point at banking the same way I would any other industry is AI's going to change things significantly and we don't know how. So I'm, you know, like I said, I want everyone to think I'm this visionary AI guy, but you know what? We're all in the middle of it. We're in the clunky, honestly, we're probably in the clunky beginning. And I use the analogy that, If AI was the internet, then we'd probably all be on AOL right now. And that changed very, you know, changed from AOL to DSL to cable to Starlink. And, you know, but the internet's pretty much figured out now, like if I want to go open a website or get an online presence, I know what to do.

Yep.

I don't know. Nobody knows. We don't know what AI's going to look like in 1, 5, 10, 20 years from now. We just don't. And I think it's going to be as powerful as everyone says it's going to be. And so we're digging in hard that AI is going to replace a lot of things. And, but I'm very confident it's not going to replace property managers, but property managers that use AI are going to outcompete those that don't. And that's a fact. And so same thing applies to banking. If they can figure out a new, better, easier, stronger way to make things, you know, a lot of people complain about wait times and payout times and it takes too long to pay my owners and, you know, my tenant funds aren't settling. That's where bank could really help. Instant funding, instant verification. That's the kind of stuff banks really need to dig into. To answer your question, banking's relationship-based. It's going to be tough to unseat someone who's done a really excellent job for 15, 20 years. And, you know, doesn't mean it can't happen, but I just, again, it's a relationship business.

Yeah. Speaking of replacing property managers, you mentioned that AI would never do that. I wanted to get your take on TurboTenant and their acquisition of TenantCloud. So I just had Seamus on the podcast, CEO of TurboTenant. His episode's actually about to air. He told me they have over a million landlords on that platform. Now that product is built for self-managing landlords, so it's a completely different— they don't—

Yeah.

They're not built for property managers at all. They're built for some guy who owns a duplex or whatever. With the acquisition of TenantCloud though, maybe that changes, maybe it doesn't, but I'm fascinated by TurboTenant's move into what they're calling, calling Autopilot, where they bring in services to support self-managing landlords and directly position it as an alternative to hiring a professional property manager. What's going on over there? Is this something we need to be keeping an eye on? Is it something that you're keeping an eye on?

Well, there's about 5 or 6 companies that are in that lower market. There's the entry-level market, which deals mostly with landlords. And let's face it, landlords manage more properties than property managers do in our space by more than double. So single-family homes are 2 to 1 managed by, I call it the dude who owns it.

Yep.

Versus a property manager. And there's multiple reasons they don't hire property managers. Too expensive, bad reputation, they don't know about them, whatever. There's a lot of reasons that could happen. That lower market, you're talking companies like TurboTenant, TenantCloud, RentReady, Doorloop, some of these, they struggle with the trust accounting side of them. A lot of times when people decide to actually go into property management, they abandon those platforms for us or AppFolio or whoever. There's other good players in that area. And then you kind of move up to us, which is professional property managers who manage single-family homes, a few apartments, and you kind of go upstream to the multifamily and commercial and vacation rentals, and it's all a little bit different. That's a very viable market. Obviously there's 4 or 5 softwares that are addressing that. When they say a million landlords, that's That's, I'm not doubting that's accurate, but they might have, you know, 1 unit each or 3 units, or they used, they also have, there's also a lot of churn on those platforms. They'll use it for a while, get a tenant, and then they'll take it all offline. It's almost like the, you know, Uber is great because you, you know, you can't go off platform, but if, you know, some of those dog walking apps, people, they hire someone on the app and then they just go direct with them and then the app gets cut out. So you see a lot of that happening with those types of platforms. Like, hey, instead of paying your rent online and paying $3, you know, just Venmo me or whatever, which is easy to do if you have 1 or 2 tenants.

Sure.

It's not easy to do if you have 50 or more. And we actually recently stopped servicing 30-unit and below customers because they're not there yet. They're an inordinate amount of our support and onboarding. They don't understand the business as well as the more seasoned property managers. And we do make exceptions to that. If somebody's like leaving a 1,000-unit company and they know what they're doing, we'll let 'em get started with us and grow with us. But as a general rule, we don't want that customer because they're just, it's a lot of management for not as much money. And that's where people churn out of. They go out of business or they get, usually they go out of business and that's—

Yeah. So 30 doors, meaning like a self-managing owner under 30 doors, or even like a third-party manager, like until they hit 30 doors?

I would say a very small percent. There's, we have some of both. The vast majority of our clients are property managers. We do have, I would say less than 1% of our customers do manage their own portfolios, and some of them are big. They just, they own and manage their own Hundreds of properties. I think our biggest has more than 1,000 units and they own all of them. So it's mostly property on our platform. It's mostly property managers.

Got it.

But I actually think that the self-managed landlord is either going to sell the property or move to a property manager. And it's a lot of it's bureaucracy. I mean, there's certain states out there, and I'm not going to get political, where they're in love with tenants and they make your life miserable. There's other states where they're very landlord-friendly or property manager and business-friendly. I think that as the environment gets more difficult, I mean, if you own one property and it's vacant, you have a 100% vacancy rate. I mean, if you own 1,000 properties and you have 50 vacant, you know, it's not that big a deal. If you get a lawsuit from one of one units that you own, you're done. You're out. And I think that there's a lot of stuff that you guys navigate for your customers that they're just, that the individual landlord's just not aware of. So I would actually think if you look at other countries where rents become, most of the world has more than half of its housing is rental. In the US, it's about 60/40, you know, 60% owned, 40% rent. That's been pretty even for the last 100 years. It did dip a little bit within the early 2000s with the housing crisis, people getting all those easy loans. The number of tenants dropped down to about 31%. And then after that, it rebounded back a little bit ahead of 40%, and we're still at about 40%.

Interesting.

Households that rent. I think that's going to inch upward as things become more and more expensive. You've seen it. Europe is mostly about 60/40 rent versus owned. Australia, some of these, the more developed world has a lot more tenants than the US does.

Interesting.

And so I actually think that the US will go closer to 50/50 than than go the other way, especially with the real estate market. The real estate market's not, it's tough to buy a home right now. Interest rates are, you know, they're high for the last few months. They're not historically high. They're historically average right now, but people are finding it harder and harder to buy. Yeah. So people always have to have somewhere to live.

Yeah. This is very on topic for PM Trends and we're coming up on time, Dave. I wanted to thank you and Rentvine for your support of PM Trends 2026. It's been really fun to get you back on the show and kind of get up to speed with what you guys are doing. Anything else you want to mention or shout out, or where should people go to keep up with you and Renfine?

Just go to renfine.com. Everything's there. You know, just know that we're the good guys. We're taking care of, we're looking out for you and we'd love to have you.

All right. Thanks again, Dave.

Thanks a lot, Peter. Appreciate it.

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.