Inside the Owner's Mind: Key Findings from the 2026 PM Trends Report (Webinar Replay)

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What's up, y'all? Good to see you. Tell us where you're tuning in from today. It's great to see everybody. Excited to talk about some PM Trends today.

Excellent. Well, Jordan, it's been a few weeks since our onstage launch of the PM Trends report at BrokerOwner, but not everyone was there, and we also ran out of hard copies. So what are we doing today exactly?

Today we're doing the big reveal on year 2 of PM Trends. And the big idea here, the big idea was that we like to think that we have a sense, some ideas about property management and by extension what owners and landlords think about property management. But the reality is there's a subset of the market that we kind of sort of don't, or at least I certainly don't. And those are self-managing landlords, the folks that by definition are not interacting with us for a variety of reasons. So we're really curious about what they're thinking, their motivations are. And this is year 2 of doing a 500-person survey partnered with a really legit polling agency. And we're excited to share the results with you guys today.

Great. Let's jump into it.

All right. Let's pull up some slides and do a deep dive. All right. So we're going to go ahead and kick this thing off. Let's move into the next slide and talk a little bit about the methodology. A little letter from us, Skip. You can read that when you get time. Let's keep going here. So we get right into the meat. Okay. We're starting off with some key findings right out of the gate. When we thought about what was significant that we found this time around, first thing that stood out was 86% of single-unit owners having no intent to buy more, which is a little surprising. I don't know about you, Peter, but I've heard plenty of chatter about, hey, we got to get these folks to, to buy more. We got to get them to land and expand. Some sensible thinking. And yet it is kind of constrained by intent, right?

Totally. Yeah. This surprised me for sure. I thought more owners would be interested. And I think we have an opportunity here to educate our owners on, you know, basically what single-family rentals can do for them and their family. But short of a massive education process for your owners, at least it's good to know who's coming in the door and what their intentions are.

100%. Yeah. Some other findings that stood out: 92% would sacrifice cash flow for a better tenant experience. What does that even mean? That seems crazy. Really stuck out. Less surprising, 75% of the folks who surveyed plan to use AI to find the next property manager, and 74% are comfortable with AI handling property management related tasks. Next slide. Let's keep going. Okay, so where does this data come from? Well, it comes from small independent landlords defined as folks that own 1 through 10 rental units. What part of the country? You can see the region breakdown pretty evenly across the board, although it's definitely weighted towards the South and the West. What's the income of these folks? You can see the breakdown. There as well. Majority of these folks are making somewhere between $100K and $200K. Income is actually a significant kind of factor in mapping to preferences. You can see employment status as well.

This—

the fielding of this research took place in December of 2025. 500 landlords surveyed. Next slide. All right, so this is how we get into the methodology. When you do this much data work, the money, the juice is in segmentation, and we segmented a couple of different ways. On the right is a more traditional segmentation, generational. That was meaningful. You can see 10% were Gen Z, 38% Millennials, 34% Gen X, 18% Boomers. That provided some meaningful, some meaningful nuance around segmentation. But we also segmented around what we're calling trajectory. We're going to be talking about this kind of over and over throughout this report. It was a novel way to segment folks based on their intent with their property. And we have 4 buckets: expanders. These are folks that plan to buy more units, not planning to sell. These are folks that want to grow their portfolio. Holders, folks that just want to sit tight. They don't want to buy or sell. Repositioners, these are folks that are buying and selling at the same time, which presumably means they have multiple properties. And then exiters, folks getting out. The reason that this slice matters is that we found it highly correlative to a meaningful difference in preferences and behaviors that you can act on. So we'll be circling back to that.

Shockingly differentiated. And I was really— I was initially skeptical of this segmentation, but the more we looked at the results, the more valuable and interesting this became. So We, we try to use the same color scheme throughout the whole report and keep an eye out for these segments as we go through the rest of the data over the remainder of the hour.

100%.

All right.

Next slide. All right. One more. And we're going to take— next slide. We're going to take a brief moment to recognize one of our sponsors. This research actually costs money, folks. You may think, you know, Peter and, and Jordan slinging out some Google survey forms, and not quite. We actually partnered with Harris Poll that does presidential polling, similar to Pew Research, a legitimate publishing house, and that actually does cost money. And one of our key sponsors was Collin Bank. Collin Bank is, in a nutshell, they're the next-gen bank in the industry. They have an API-first-driven approach They're really focused on giving you access to your data and allowing you to take advantage of that by reconciling it as you please, when you want, with the data coming from all of your other systems. So if you haven't taken a look at ColumnBank, I suggest checking them out. They're on the trade show circuit. George has been on Peter's podcast. You can check out that episode, but these folks are doing some interesting stuff and they were key sponsors of this report. Next slide. All right, the generational handoff, who's getting out and who's, who's getting in. What I want you to understand here is that this is how these generational segments in our survey map against the general population. So you can see we're a little over-indexed on Gen Z. We're a little under-indexed on Gen Z. The Gen Z represents 20% of the US adult population. In our survey, it's 10%. Boomers represent 38% of adult population, and our landlord population was 18%. So this is just kind of a weighting factor here. Next slide. This is an example of a slice that was interesting. It, it makes sense, but something that I, I certainly wasn't fully calibrated to. You can see that the mix of respondents skews towards male, skews heavily towards folks that are employed, skews towards folks that have children, and then the last one you can see the skew around gender. Next slide. And this is portfolio size here. So the vast majority of folks had 2 to 3 properties in the mix. Minority had 1 property and decent representation, representation of folks from 4 to 10 properties. Over time, we're going to keep bringing this, this number down. The survey that we did last year went as high as folks that owned up to 50 properties. We capped it here with folks that own 10 properties. Next time around, we'll probably do something like 5 properties. The more we skew that down, it does thin out the sample set, but where there's a will, there's a way.

Next slide.

All right. And here we're looking a little bit at motivations. What— this is an example of what we're going to do throughout this presentation. We're going I'm going to show you the actual question that we asked, because this is a survey and you get to interpret what somebody thought that question meant when they answered it. In this case, the question was, which of the following best describes why you own rental property? 42% wealth building, 28% said supplemental income, and 25% said family slash legacy. Next slide. All right, this is back to these slices again. Again, exiters, repositioners, holders, expanders. These are the definitions. Take another gander at these definitions. This is going to come up when we show you slices on these groups again in the future. Next slide. All right, and here's the first little tease of how the nuance that we saw with these groups and actually mapped really cleanly. We looked at, in this case, 6 different dimensions. To what degree do they use a property manager? What's their overall level of comfort with software? What's their comfort with AI? What's their financial resilience? What's their willingness to pay? And what is their desired approval threshold? And these 6 factors mapped quite cleanly to the different groups that you see here. You can see that repositioners, folks buying or selling, in general had the greatest degree of comfort with all of these activities. A lot of deference, willing to pay, fairly financially resilient. Exiters, folks getting, getting out, trying to sell, not trying to buy. They're, they're tight. They're tight to the chest. They're not comfortable with AI. They're not that financially resilient. They're much less likely to use a property manager. They're much more conservative about their approval thresholds.

Jordan, the, the repositioners and exiters make sense to me. That's intuitive. What do you make up the reason for such a huge gap between expanders and holders? Because they're relatively close in intention. They're not selling. The only difference is one of them plans to buy more property and one of them doesn't. Why do you think they're so different?

I take this as just enthusiasm for the category. Folks that are buying are fundamentally more bullish. They're voting with their dollars. They want to be in it. And if they want to be in it and doing it at scale, they're more amenable to the types of activities that go along with doing the thing. Whereas holders, a little harder to read, but the general conclusion that they've reached is they don't want to go deeper into this for now anyway. Sure. All right. Next slide. This is where they're owning property. You can see there that 75% own local, 25% own in other markets. Question here was, do you live in the same metropolitan area as the majority of your rental properties? Next slide. All right. And here's a little breakdown of the geography again. Little geographic skew here, kind of in line with what we'd expect. Next slide.

All right.

Over to you, Pete.

All right. Let's get into some exciting stuff. Jump to the next slide. We're going to go now into intention. What do these respondents want from property managers? And remember, the survey went out to about half of respondents who currently work with a property manager. And roughly half don't currently work with a property manager. So we wanted to get a broad representation in relation to property management. Back one slide. I want to talk about Rentvine. So Rentvine is our other title sponsor for this report. As Jordan mentioned, this is expensive research. Harris Poll is not cheap to engage for a big project like this, especially trying to reach rental owners, which are difficult to identify. Huge thank you to Rentvine. If you haven't heard about Rentvine, I kind of think of them as the property— the property management software by property managers for property managers. The folks behind Rentvine are from our industry and have a background in property management. They've done what we're doing every day, and that shows in the product. There's a lot to like about Rentvine. The biggest thing right now is their API. They just announced a new set of API interfaces that make it even easier to talk to Rentvine using Agentic AI solutions, or you can even hook them into some of your favorite chatbots with the new MCP. So really exciting stuff here. They're kind of blazing a trail for our industry. Huge props to them for recognizing the value of open access and open API long before it was sort of at the front of everyone's mind as it is right now with all the AI stuff. You know, these guys are huge supporters of our industry. They're at almost every conference. Go up, check them out, see what they're about. And thank you again to Rentvine for sponsoring PM Trends 2026. All right, let's jump into it. So, yeah, so this is what I was saying earlier. 500 total landlords surveyed. 70% have ever used a property manager. That includes some people who did use a property manager, no longer do. 62% currently use a property manager. Next slide. Here's the, here's the usage breakdown by generation. Millennials, 73% of respondents use a property manager, where only 29% of baby boomers do. Huge generational gap there. Todd had a post this morning. We gave him kind of an early look at the report. He highlighted that boomers are an outlier throughout our results. And so keep an eye out for boomers kind of being the outlier to a lot of responses. And this question is no exception. So just as you're developing your marketing and your sales scripts, keep in mind that millennials and Gen X and Gen Z are far, far more likely to be using a property manager or interested in using a property manager. Compared to baby boomers. And, you know, we could speculate on a lot of different reasons for that, but this is what the data is telling us. Next slide. Okay. We're going to look now at breakdown on portfolio size. So owners with 6 to 10 units, large rental owners, are way more likely to use a property manager. And that makes sense, right? Because they have more to do, more properties, more leases to renew or lease-ups to complete, more maintenance requests, more turns. So they need professional help. They need us basically. And then here we are again looking at these, these cuts, repositioners, expanders, holders, and exiters. You can see on the results here, repositioners, 93% use a property manager. So if you're looking for an easy layup sale, You want to get multi-unit owners and people who are actively buying and selling on the phone with your, with yourself or your salesperson, your BDM. If you can do that, you have a high chance of converting that owner because they're primed to like using and working with a property manager. Next. Okay. So this question asked, which of the following is the primary reason that made you choose to hire a property manager? Rather than hiring, handling things yourself. So you can see responses here, stress and cash flow being, you know, the, the largest, you know, response that we saw, whereas time and risk, less factors. Again, I just go right to using this in your marketing. You want to speak to your prospects using language that's going to resonate with them. So encourage you to focus on stress relief. And increasing cash flow rather than freeing up time or reducing risk. I mean, reducing risk is a huge part of what we do as property managers, but it's just— it doesn't get people to sign on the dotted line. They don't get excited about it. I mean, talk to any insurance salesperson. It's difficult to get someone excited about reducing the risk in their life because risk is one of those invisible things that really doesn't matter until it does. You know, you and I know that the process that we use to screen tenants reduces the likelihood of a fair housing lawsuit and an eviction by probably a factor of 10 compared to an individual landlord doing those things. But it's still a relatively low-risk thing in the first place. And so for most property owners, they just never deal with those things. And so they don't understand the risk reduction that we're providing. So That's a difficult thing to convey. And we're seeing here that we shouldn't even basically try to figure it out because we see that that's not what we're being hired for anyway. Next slide. Okay. Here's question 340. Which of the following is the primary reason that made you choose to hire a property manager rather than handling yourself? So same question, but broken out by generation. Let's go to the next slide. We got a lot to cover. You can dig into this report in this answer when you have time. Okay. Love this slide. This is one of the standout takeaways from this report. Really think— really kind of take a minute to absorb this slide. We asked property owners, what services would you be willing to pay extra for from your property management company? So we didn't ask like, what do you think should be included? We asked, what would you be willing to pay extra for? So take a look at these responses here and notice that all of them were around half of owners, close to half or a little over half of rental owners willing to pay extra for these things. So asset management, quarterly inspections, which we do at our property management and our owners do pay extra for. So can confirm that one from personal experience. Tenant damage protection, all-in-one financial services, Instant rent payments, lost rent protection, professional pictures, 3D tour, floor plan for listing. So a couple of things go through my mind when I see this. First is this is an opportunity for an owner benefit package. There's been a huge focus on resident benefit packages and they've been fantastic for our industry. They're now the target of some legislation and possibly litigation. And I would love to see our industry start to really work on this. Opportunity of owner benefit packages that are an optional upsell. The easiest customer to sell to is one you already have. The problem we have in property management is we don't have anything more to sell to them. We're already selling, you know, we already provide our professional property management services. So unless they buy another property, which we don't really have control over, we have nothing more to sell them. But if we could develop a nice owner benefit package that provided real value and we see here, these are things people are willing to pay extra for. Now we have an upsell opportunity for our owners. And if you put an upsell opportunity in front of all of your owners every year, I guarantee you a double-digit percentage of those owners are going to take you up on it. So you can design an upsell opportunity using some of these items on the screen. Make sure it's profitable for you, of course, and just put it in front of your owners as an option. So there's, there's Jordan, any thoughts on this? Because this is like huge, I think.

I think so too. Literally instantly by talking about PMAXing, you summoned Todd O in the chat here who said, "OBPs don't need to be an optional upsell. We make them mandatory. We've had one for years." Okay, so yeah, you can package this any way you want. My takeaway from, from this is not the order, right? As soon as we published this, I saw Lior from Blanket. Republish this because asset management is at the top. Awesome. Get that. Love it. This ranking does not carry a lot of weight for me. This, this is— if you're, uh, viewing this as decision-making, it's a false decision. Look at this through the lens of what do you have conviction about? What do you think you would be able to do well and really deliver meaningful value? And do that on the list. It doesn't matter if 51% or 41% of your customer base is willing to pay. There's a significant opportunity here. My takeaway is simply that pricing is the most leveraged thing that impacts revenue, and it's the thing we're least likely to talk about or experiment with. It feels heavy, cumbersome. So takeaway, Try, ask, see, serve, do what you have conviction about. There is, there's, there's meaningfully more willingness to pay than we're aware of at present.

Love it. Next slide. So this is the, you know, the breakdown, if you're curious, you know, by generation and who has children and who doesn't have children. Note the one thing I'll say on the slide, you can, you go in more detail, but people who have children, way more likely to be interested in this stuff. Way, way, way more likely. I think it's just because they're busy. So they're looking for opportunities to hand things off, more things to their property manager to handle.

Next slide.

Okay. We're going to talk now about communication and after-hours access. So we asked property owners, how often do you expect to be able to reach your property manager? Outside of normal business hours. So nights, weekends, things like that. 24%. So a quarter of all respondents said all of the time.

We—

I should always be able to reach my property manager outside of business hours. That's insane. I mean, for what property owners are paying, though, that expectation is wild to me. However, That's what the data is telling us. And you can see the rest of the breakdown here. 41%, most of the time. 25%, some of the time. So if you just take those top two, adds up to two-thirds of owners expect to be able to reach their property manager all or most of the time after hours. And if you throw in the 25%, it's about 90% expect to be able to reach their property manager at least some of the time outside of business hours.

So look at Adam in the chat here.

Yeah, Adam says, I'll always be available to you for a fee.

Yeah, it's a 1-800 number.

You know, you could potentially lump this in with the previous slide. You know, I don't— we didn't ask about owners' willingness to pay extra for this, but I just make up that you could add to some of your higher-end plans or to an owner benefit package after-hours access to your property manager, and that would probably convince a lot of people to sign up. So, you know, I'm still wrestling with what this means for our operations and how we set expectations with property owners. But this is one of the key takeaways from this report that I wanted to get into the hands of property managers so that they can understand and kind of level set of where expectations have risen to in terms of communications. Next. We also asked about response time. So previous slide was about when do you expect to be able to reach your property manager? This slide is about how fast should the property manager get back to you?

Hmm.

So, yep, by channel. So we asked with a phone call, with a text, and by email. And you can see that the responses here are all pretty similar. Most property owners are expecting within 30 minutes to get a response regardless of channel. So you can take your ideas about getting back to owners within the same business day and throw them right in the dumpster because that is not their expectation. Their expectation is within 30 minutes and an hour on the outside. On the outside. So don't be taking a 2-hour lunch. They're going to be mad. So again, this is similar to the last slide. I just like, what does this really mean for our industry? How do we relate to this? But let's just get the data out into the hands of property managers and let them wrestle with it. Jordan.

Feel the same way. This is not where we get prescriptive and actually tell you not to take lunch. This is where we say, hey, this is what people want. Do with it as you see fit. My— our advice is to reason about this as a consumer. Here's my experiences as a consumer. People can have strong opinions about response times and who is picking up in general, but it's all going to be contextual. If I'm thinking about calling my property manager and the property manager wants to have me as the owner talking to an AI agent, not, not super excited about that. By contrast, if I am calling Domino's Pizza and my options are to be talking to someone on the other side of the world or a strong AI agent to order my pizza, I'm pretty happy. And that chasm actually exists within property management, the gap between prospective tenant and current owner and everything that, that exists in between. It does require some nuance and some gradation here, particularly Vanessa made a comment about after-hours demand. She's looking at that from the tenant POV. Absolutely. It's overwhelming demand. Staffing to take all prospective tenant calls in the middle of summer it's very, very lumpy. So this speaks to more appetite for new agentic voice tech that, that we're seeing pop up as, as at least a part of the solution here.

Next slide. Uh, okay, yeah, this is more of the same. Next slide. We got to keep moving here. Uh, quick update on NPS. Long story short, it's pretty much unchanged once you account for the, some of the demographic details compared to last time we looked at this. So not a lot to dig into here. Next slide. Next slide. I did want to highlight where we stand in relation to other industries in terms of Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score is that thing where if you ever had a survey where it's like, how likely are you to recommend XYZ Property Manager to a friend or family member? That's the net promoter score question, 0 through 10. The way they calculate it, the ending score ranges from -100 to +100. Property management shows up kind of in the middle of the pack in the 40s. You can see the other categories, some other categories we threw in here just to kind of benchmark what that score really looks like. Next. Next. Okay, so we wanted to get an understanding from property owners what causes them to think about firing their property manager. And so one of the things we narrowed in on is expenses. So we asked them, if your single-unit rental property experienced an issue requiring you to remedy, how expensive would it have to be in order for you to, to fire your property manager, basically. And so you can see here that for just a $5,000 to $10,000 expense, 27% of property owners at that point, more than a quarter, are thinking about letting you go over that expense. And once you get up to what I would consider to be a fairly ordinary turn, at least for some of the older homes in Ohio here, $10,000 to $15,000, you're at almost half or around half of property owners who are ready to let you go. So this makes you think about how can we smooth out some of these expenses for our property owners? What either financial solutions exist there or operational solutions in terms of reserves being set aside? How can we streamline and smooth this out so our property owners don't experience these large expenses as a major cash disruption? Next.

Well, Peter, there were a couple of questions here about what this was inclusive of. Guys, guys, as a reminder, you could see the question. If you just go back real quick, Amy, you could see the question. We didn't specify. We asked broadly, whatever. We asked broadly, but the takeaway here is cash out of pocket. You know, reading the question, I took this as people saying cash out of my pocket, and we know that is the greatest area of sensitivity, not, not theoretical loss. Right or wrong, theoretical loss is dramatically less pain-inducing than cash out of pocket. Next slide.

Okay, so here we kind of summarized churn risk. Um, exitters, boomers, and income rental owners with income under $100K are most likely to churn. Lowest churn is going to be repositioners, millennials, and wealthy owners. No real surprises there. Next slide. Over to you, Drew.

All right, let's keep going. A different view here of what they're doing day to day. And the first question that we asked in this section was, have you ever used any of the following to help manage your rental property? And this is basically asking if these were software options. And what you can see here is that millennials self-report that they're using way more software than boomers. Not shocking. Next slide. Along with that, millennials are way more pleased with the software that they're using than boomers. Boomers just in general aren't impressed with the software solutions that they're touching. It, it's kind of amazing how well this correlates here. It's quite clean. And what this shows you is we can project where we're headed. You can see a time-adjusted view of where we're headed going forward. Next slide. All right, so I'm going to read the question out loud here so we're on the same page. How comfortable are you with your property manager using AI to assist them with each of the following tasks? And the options were very comfortable, slightly comfortable, slightly uncomfortable, and very uncomfortable. And let's look at the answers at the bottom. The thing that was still at 63%, but by far ranked the lowest, is calls to the owner. So what they're saying is using AI to talk to the tenant or prospective tenant or anybody else that it needs to. Great. Talking to me? No, I do not want to have an AI agent talking to me. Now, I don't overstate it because it still is at 63%, but leasing answers 80%, setting rent prices 78%. You know, that's impressive. You can imagine all the caveats associated with that.

Shout out RealPage.

Exactly. With each of these items, triaging maintenance 78%, no-brainer. Drafting lease terms, drafting 75%. Communicating with tenants, 73%. So what are we seeing here broadly? Just very comfortable, very comfortable deferring in this area. Next slide. All right. What we saw here was that folks that are using property managers are much more comfortable on the whole than folks not using property managers when it comes to AI. Why is this? I believe what's happening here is that folks that are using property manager are hiring them for their expertise. They're hiring them to defer. They're hiring them to, uh, listen to the expert, take their advice and counsel, and reap the benefits. So this isn't surprising to me, but it's something to calibrate and be reminded that folks that are not using a property manager are a different breed. They have different set of priorities in a lot of different dimensions with which we'll cover more shortly. Next slide. Finding a property manager using AI. Bottom line, yes, they're doing it. A lot of comfort here, a lot of intent to do it again. This is only going to go up from here. Common sense. Next slide.

You're just going to blow by that one, Jordan? To me, this was the—

the—

all right. You tell me. Go, go, go.

Yeah, this just like had me screaming, rolling on the ground, crying, jumping for joy. I don't even know what, but 75% of rental owners either used AI or plan to use AI to find their next property manager. That is monumental. That is a total upending of everything we've been doing as property managers. To get to the top of Google, to increase our Google score, SEO, paid ads. All of it is, is in question now as property owners start to use ChatGPT and others to find a property manager. How do we rank in these AI search results? Nobody knows. It changes every week. Is it crazy? I mean, this is crazy. So there's no answers here. There's no direction. This is a big deal because I think the 2 or 3 property managers in every local market who somehow by whatever means do getting good with these AI search results, they're going to run away with the market because there's no more like 10 results on Google. This is like 2 or 3. That are going to really get the majority line share of the responses from AI search. So yeah, this could get crazy. There's a lot of groups out there who are making an effort to help property managers rank in AI search results, but I think it's early days there. And yeah, this could be, this could be a big change.

I would take this in the spirit of the same turn that we saw with SEO prior, which is to say a lot of snake oil in the market. A lot of people get ripped off, a lot of people spending money on things that have no efficacy whatsoever. And common sense prevails. Common sense is the thing to lean on. When Peter says we have no idea, that's kind of sort of true. That's true for 10 folks that are all leaned in and pumping the models full of information about their company and what they do. But the reality is the market's not quite like that. What we know is that to be listed, you have to be in the game. The more information you're sharing, the more hooks, the more evaluation criteria there is to be had. So the default answer right now is disclosure, disclosure rather than holding back, rather than being really guarded. Disclosure is the answer. The more you're sharing about your business and what you do, the more dimensions and possible opportunities there are to get listed in some, some form or fashion. That's what we know at this stage. Really high level. Next slide. Okay. Offshore. This is— this begins the conversation around the awareness that the landlord has around what's actually happening in the industry across a bunch of different directions. One of the biggest takeaways that we found is that the landlord is simply not calibrated to what is actually happening in their own unit, in property management, in the industry in general. And this is one of those areas we asked both about the, the preponderance of how many folks, how many of their, of them are working with a property manager that is using outsourced global teams. And in general, the feeling was that that's not happening a ton. And you pair that up with the results here that speak to comfort. What statement best describes your comfort with your property management company using non-U.S. team members who handle your financial and tenant data? Now look at the generational gap. Look at that red streak on the boomers. Just not about it. Not comfortable. And the gradation here was between nothing would make me comfortable, you know, some liability insurance, that would make me comfortable. Some background checks, that would do it for me. Third-party security audit, that would do it for me. Other conditions. For boomers, nothing would make me comfortable. We're not about it. You know, little xenophobia vibes here, right? God bless America. Make of it, make up of it what you will. But you can see here there is some real generational resistance. And then for the other groups, you can see that there is more or less resistance based on these specific items— liability, background checks, third-party IT security. Pete, to what degree do you think anybody is actually doing these things that some landlords said would make them more comfortable?

Very, very few. Very few. I mean, we onboarded with an IT security vendor earlier this year. That's— I'm happy we did that. But I think very few property managers are doing anything like that. Very few are doing background checks on remote team members or are getting any type of like special liability insurance for them. So yeah, this is another one of those. Not sure I have great recommendations, but wanted you to have this data because it's interesting.

Next slide.

What fees are fair, guys? To me, a 4-letter word in business is fair. And we asked it here. It's so subjective. Make of it what you will. Here was the question: What tenant fees are normal for your property manager to charge and/or keep? And the options were charged and PM keeps all of it, charged and shared with the property manager, charged and not shared with the property manager, and not charged or unsure. What you can see here is like, man, people have feelings. Let's start with charged. Property manager, property manager keeps it all. Tenant benefits package, 27% said that's what's, that's what's going on. That's what's normal. 27% of The commentary here presumably would be that 20%, 27% of the market is charging and keeping tenant benefits package revenue. I'm going to ask you guys, what do you think is actually happening right now? Do you think 27% of folks that have a tenant benefits package are keeping that revenue versus sharing it? I'll let you come to your own conclusion there. You can see here, this is the beginning of this trend of foot of landlords being out of sync with what's actually happening in the market. I'd take this one back to your team and stew on it.

Yeah, I heard someone, I heard someone argue recently for turning off suppressed fees in the chart of accounts settings so that landlords see all the fees that tenants are paying. And then the fact that we're getting those, that fee suppression is probably what explains the disparity here between what landlord— what landlords think we're doing versus what we're actually doing. Is that good, bad, or indifferent? It's all disclosed in the PMA. I don't know, but interesting.

Yeah. All right. Next slide. I like— I like Rob's comment. Emphasis should be on outcomes, not itemized fees. It's interesting. Okay. Pete, you want to— you want to take this one?

Yeah. The airlines just called. They said emphasis should be on outcomes, not itemized fees. Yeah. So basically we asked property owners, are you comfortable with your property manager requiring your tenant to purchase these things? And if so, how comfortable are you? Are you comfortable with us Property managers requiring our tenants to purchase renters insurance, 91% are comfortable or very comfortable. That makes sense. Surprisingly, quite comfortable with the tenant liability program, which actually doesn't exist yet. And then also tenant benefit package. So I was pleasantly surprised to see 82% of property owners are comfortable or very comfortable with us charging tenant benefit packages. Mm-hmm.

Clear value here. Next slide. All right, here's the question you asked: How comfortable would you feel if the rent payment platform used by your property manager started marketing financial products or other services directly to your tenants? Not that that's ever happened, not that we're implying that that's ever happened in this industry, but just in theory We wanted to ask about it. 31% uncomfortable. By generation, 77% of boomers said approximately, hell no, over my dead body, you'll pull it from my cold, dead hands. Gen Z, a lot less resistance here, which is, which is interesting. So 31% overall, but it actually is pretty heavily skewed based on the boomers. We could recalc the math without that, but you can see visually about where it falls out. Next slide. Okay.

All right.

Can we bring Vanessa up on here? Vanessa, excited to talk to you a little bit about this data, which we're able to partner with you on here and kind of talk about again that gap between reality and what people are, are, are intuiting on their own. But the reality is we wouldn't actually be calibrated to reality if not for people like you that were actually crunching the numbers. So tell me, Vanessa, what did you see here?

Yeah, I think this slide is super interesting because it tells two completely different stories depending on who you ask. Right. So the blue line is showing what owners or landlords perceive as vacancy at 3 weeks, same across 2024 and 2025. And then in yellow is actual days on market reported from ShowMojo. And that's going to be, you know, on our platform, we We have 1.3 million leased units across all 50 states. And what our data is showing is that vacancy or days on market has nearly doubled since 2021. But that perception hasn't changed, right? So that's what's tricky is when you're communicating with your owners, they think that you should be moving spaces significantly faster than what the market is actually telling you, or what, what the market, how the market is actually performing. So I think, you know, there's a couple things here in terms of actionable takeaways, and it's walking into a conversation with your owners with data that equips you to have these conversations and to close that perception gap, because in reality, the leasing market has gotten, gotten meaningfully more difficult, right? So more competition, fewer leads, longer absorption times. But that hasn't— that reality has not yet sunk in for a lot of owners. So I think that's the opportunity, is being able to proactively manage those expectations. And I would note, we did our data talk for Q1 yesterday and we saw the first drop in days on market in 4 years, year over year for Q1. So that's huge. But we're still seeing leads decline. So it's like what's moving days on market down? And it's that rents have dropped. So essentially this, this perception gap might be narrowing because PMs and owners are pricing spaces more realistically now, and that's resulting in this lower days on market. So maybe since the time we've done this survey, we're starting to see this gap Narrow.

Here's the bottom line, guys. Education. The numbers up, the numbers down. You are the only person that is going to inform your owner of this. There's nobody else that's going to have this conversation. Show Mojo is doing an amazing job of this, of, uh, publishing this data, but you can't expect Vanessa and her team to talk to your owner. That's your job. You got to educate. You got to have that conversation. And this is actually real service. This is not self-serving. This is part of the value that you provide is calibrating them to reality. Next slide.

So this slide kind of shows you the why behind what we just saw, right? It's so it tells the story of how the leasing market has fundamentally shifted over this 7-year period. So you can see in red is lead volume, lead volumes down 55% since 2018. And that is not— that's a wildly, wildly high number. Right. So it's more than half the leads that were coming in 7 years ago simply are not coming in today. So that's a lot of pressure. But I think the other thing to call out is the white bar graph, which is rent reductions. They hit a record high in Q4 2025. So 39% of listings had to cut rent in order to fill that door. I, in, in the data we released yesterday, we saw that number drop year over year as well. So that's showing you that we're getting a little more real about what market clearing rents are in going into 2026. Um, I would expect that trend to continue into 2Q, but overall the market is just harder, fewer prospects, more competition, more downward pressure on rent. Um, I think what is worth calling out though is this green line. So that is inquiry to showing conversion rate, um, it's grown. This is, this is gathered from our customer base, so it's only people who are using leasing automation tools, but it increased from 31% up to 52% in 2025, which is a 68% improvement in conversion. In that same period, that lead volume was collapsing. So I think, you know, what that tells us is that operators and the, the winners in a tough leasing market are adapting. So using automation allows you to respond faster, follow up consistently, and keep your prospects engaged. And that is the only way to continue to be successful when leads are down 50%, right? You have to be able to move more of those leads through your funnel and convert at a higher rate into a lease, or you'll have days on market just continue to extend out. So I think that's really the takeaway here and actually really feeds into what Jordan and Peter were speaking on earlier, is that there is an expectation for near instantaneous responses. And the ones who— the operators who provide that to prospective renters and to their owners are the ones who are going to retain owners, retain tenants, attract new residents. And realistically, if you're not going to be on call 24/7, you need technology to support that response rate. But I think that's really what this is showing you, that it's really tough. So how do you win in a super tough market? And then when the market comes around, you'll be positioned to be a huge winner. You know, when, when conditions are more favorable.

That's a great point. You keep the gains as the volume goes back up. As long as you stay disciplined, you keep the conversion gains.

Yeah, think about how fast you can move spaces if you're converting at over 50%. And we just launched our AI agent last month, and that should continue to enhance that. But if you're, if you're moving 50, 60-plus percent of your leads into showings, you're going to reduce days on market in a meaningful way. And so when leads come back, your spaces are going to fly.

Well, that— thank you and appreciate the work you guys are doing in sharing this incredibly valuable information. All right. Next slide. Back to you, Pete. You muted.

Let's get into the deal. Uh, we're going to start to move pretty quick here because we are coming up on the top of the hour. So we did ask property owners what's the dollar amount they like to see for a maintenance approval limit. $500 still seems to be the magic number for a lot of owners. Half of them are over that, half of them are under that. We actually segment our plans that have different pricing by approval limit. So the lower the approval limit you want, the more you have to pay because that's more work for us. So Interesting data here if you want to dig into it more. Next slide. Let's go to the next slide. We asked about— I love this one. We asked, how willing would you be to sacrifice some cash flow to ensure a better renting experience for your tenants? 98% of repositioners were highly willing and 92% overall were somewhat or very willing to sacrifice cash flow to improve the tenant experience. So I want to spend some more time on this, thinking about what this could mean and the different ways this question could be interpreted. For the sake of time, we're going to move forward here. Let's go to the next slide. I love this one, too. We asked owners about a hypothetical. We said, what's the maximum discount in rent you would accept for guaranteed rent paid on time? So in other words, if I could promise you that you would get your rent in full on the first every month for the next 12 months, would you take a 2% discount in rent, 5%, a 10% discount in rent? And we found that 90% of owners would accept some sort of discount. You can see the breakout there on what would be the maximum discount they would accept in return for a program like this. Again, this is an opportunity for an owner benefit package. For a vendor to spring up and offer this service. I believe there actually already is one that I recently became aware of who offers this. Again, that boomer outlier here. So next, let's go to the next slide. You want to talk through this one, Jordan? This is, this is your favorite slide, I think.

Yeah, I did find this one interesting. So what we're seeing here— well, let's start with the question. If your single-unit rental property experienced an unexpected issue requiring you to fix it, how expensive would the repair have to be for you to seriously consider selling the property? Not firing a property manager, but selling the property. And obviously the PM gets fired in the process. What we saw here is that there was a cluster of answers here, and it's kind of all over the map. 5% said less than $5K, 8% said $5K to $10K, 18% said $10K to $15K, 31% would sell at less than $15,000 repair, and 56% hold past a $15,000 repair. But here's what I want to point out. Income defines the breaking point when we're asking, well, why did they answer less or more? Why? Money. Very simply, money in pocket. Look down at the table down below. You can see that what people make by income maps directly to their willingness to hold through a higher level of repair. It maps to their NPS satisfaction. People making more are more satisfied with property managers. We also would confirm that median liquid assets are higher for folks making more money and that the folks— the percent carrying credit card debt goes down as income goes up. So rare to get a chart that goes along that smoothly. Pleased to see that here. Next slide. Back to you, Pete.

Okay. Financial resilience by investor type. Again, note the expanders who are okay with it. They're not as worried about it, whereas exiters, they're on their way out. They do not want to spend money on this property at all. They're selling soon anyway. So no surprise there. Next slide. All right. Let's bring Brad Johnson up. And we incorporated some Profit Coach data into this report. We want to thank them for being a data partner and sponsor of this report. Brad, why don't you talk us through what we're looking at here?

Yeah, good to see you, gentlemen. Thanks for this research. This is really awesome. Um, what you're looking at here is that, um, most property managers are a little scared, it looks like, uh, to charge the sort of fees that they need to in order to drive the revenue per unit that they need in order to be profitable. So at a really high level, you have to particular RPU. Depends on your market, depends on your expenses, depends on a lot of things, but you need a certain revenue base to reach the profitability that you want as a business owner. And what we find at Profit Coach is that most people don't have that RPU number where it needs to be. And their hesitancy is usually, if I do that, if I implement this ancillary fee or that ancillary fee, I will get fired. I'll have all these churn events. First of all, Well, that's not true. It just doesn't work like that typically. And then second of all, we can see from this data and from the next slide that not only do owners say they're okay with it, a lot of them are asking for it. And they're asking for additional services to be able to choose from, to be able to pay for the, you know, to the PM company in order to get those things. And I think the biggest reason is Some landlords hire property managers to maximize ROI, but a lot of them, and in my personal experience, I would say most of them hire property managers for peace of mind. And they are willing to take off some of the profits from their cash flow. So, you know, they're willing to sacrifice some cash flow in order to mitigate risk and in order to have more peace of mind. And so even if they're not mandatory, there are a lot of fees out there, and these are some good examples right here that they're saying, um, that owners want us to offer them so that they can trade dollars for peace of mind, so that they can, you know, do, do other things. Like you said, I was struck by the, the difference there between like the— not only the generations, but like who has kid, who's married, all of these things. The more other things that people have going on in their lives, the more they want us to do And in general, we are often not raising our hands as property managers to say, oh yeah, we can do that for a fee. We can do that. So that was my big takeaway from these couple slides.

Thank you so much, Brad. That's great insight. Uh, we appreciate your partnership. Uh, next slide. I think you're up, Jordan.

Risk and reality. Next slide. Let's dive into risk. On average, what level of property damage do you expect your tenants to cause over the course of a year?

Lease?

58% minor, 22% said moderate, 10% said significant. We don't have this data. Next time, Pete, we're going to find out how to get this data. But if we did have this data, I'm pretty sure it would not map up on the same slope. Again, just a little bit of disconnect from what's actually happening.

Next slide.

Will they pay? On average, how likely do you think it is that a tenant will default on payment? Uh, 38% said likely. That's interesting. 38% of landlords feel that, that tenant will default on payments. 48% of millennials said likely, 41% of Gen X, 12% of boomers expect default likely. Next slide. All right, insurance costs going up. We know this. It's a meaningful part of pain here in the mix.

Next slide.

Ray, my man, can you come on screen here? Going on a little bit about some magic MELD data here. There's a lot going on here visually. Ray, you want to take a crack at unpacking?

Yeah, I'll just go to the big— this is the big highlighted item. Like everybody's expectations on cost is so unreasonable against the inflation that's happened over the last probably 5 or 6 years. Kind of the big thing to go through is you can see the landlord perception there. You can see the data and bar graphs on basically like what are average repairs costing. And we're talking about almost like 70% increase there, you know, since 2020. And so people's expectation and costs basically have not matched reality in any form or fashion, which I know a lot of property managers deal with. And, you know, just expectations and reality creates a lot of distrust. If what I perceive to be the value and what you're telling me are far different, are you screwing me over? So this has created a major trust issue in the industry.

So practically, what's your take on coaching your owners through that education conversation, knowing that there is some distrust and there's not full, you know, there's not always full, laid-out transparency?

Super biased here, but I think you got to make data the enemy. Um, I think a lot of people go into conversations and go, nope, this is what it is, and all they have to do is rely on your word. And if somebody like Peter Lohmann hopped into a room and said, listen, I've been running this business a long time, he's got a bunch of inherent trust built. But if you've got a maintenance coordinator or property manager that's been on the job 2 years and they're having that conversation, they're not coming at it with the conviction and the massive amount of trust and context that a broker-owner has. So just making sure that people are bringing data. That's like one of the reasons we brought cost predictions into our product and we're expanding so people can start articulating. Here's what the market says that particular thing costs. It's not me. I'm not the bad guy. Here's this bad boogeyman data guy. And I think the big thing is, you know, we got to see a shift kind of like Kelley Blue Book did to the auto market. You don't want the sales guy to be the bad guy, car sales guy. You want Kelley Blue Book to be the reality holder and be like, sorry, nobody wants your 2002 Toyota Tercel anymore. And it's only worth $50.

I love that. I'm totally with you. Anchor against something objective. In the absence of that, there's a lot of wondering, a lot of hand-waving. Next slide.

This is my favorite, favorite slide is expectations and approval thresholds. Going back to One of the things that's absolutely fascinating is like, if you've been following some of the work that we do, is like resident SAT is such a big deal to renewals, which is such a big deal to the ultimate investor return. And there's some things that we can kind of put in our own way of like, I want to approve everything. Well, if you kind of look at that data, we actually track this. It almost takes 2 days longer If you need an investor approval, that is putting a ticking time clock on basically that resident experience and potentially creating lease turn risk, which is ultimately going to cost the investors a lot of money. I think this is going to be one of the largest opportunities. If you look at the boomers, Xers, and millennials, maybe they're just flush with cash. It's great, but it's like we've got to start conditioning the market that that number, the lower it is, the more risk you create. We've got to tie that back. And these numbers don't look like they've necessarily moved a lot. At least if you look at NTE amounts over the years, they have definitely not matched inflation. And there is just major risk created when approvals are brought in. And if again, you look at that inflationary data, more repairs are requiring approval just because things are more expensive now, which is creating more time to create repairs, which is is creating more resident risk, which is creating more investor churn. So I expect this to be a big push in the industry in the next year or two. Again, coupled with data on what things should cost, and we should be able to educate investors like, listen, I'm not going to call you to go replace a kitchen faucet, which is basically kind of where we're at now.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that. This is a, this is a great example of how the owner can be irrational to their own detriment. The owners— enabling the owner's desires for control can actually really shoot them in the foot. And so you have to ask, what kind of business do you want to run? Do you want to cater to the owner that wants a ton of control and maybe charge them more money, but net the tenant is getting worse outcome, and as is the owner? Or do you want to be more prescriptive and say, hey, this is how we do things, You may want to color outside the lines and there's other options that will cater to that. But you do have to ask where in your business do you put your foot down and lead because you're just high conviction that you're on the hook for the outcome. You can make money delivering crappier outcomes, but in the end, who wants to do that?

Well, and I'll say just as a last point, if you've seen the number one service earlier in the report that investors would pay for is asset management. It's like, help me make decisions. It's very counterintuitive to this, right? If we're really kind of playing the property manager, asset manager, that's some of the control that has got to be regained to the operator. You want me to help you deliver better returns? These are some of the cases that it's like you need to give this up or at least move it or change the way that it works in general.

So, hmm. All right. Well, you're doing the Lord's work publishing this kind of data, man. It's a game changer. Thank you, Ray. Thank you for this information here. All right, next slide. Pete, you want to narrate this one?

Yeah. So this is one of my favorite slides from the report. By the way, I know we're running a little long. I did drop a link to download this report. It's PMTrends.com. It's free. We didn't even email gate it. We want this to get in front of everybody in the industry. Feel free to share it, distribute it, print it, give it to your team, give it to your investors, do whatever you want with the report. We want this to be out there. This is something that Jordan and I really care about. We're passionate about it, this type of original research and making it available. So go to PMTrends.com, get your copy. Okay. So on the slide here, there's two different forces at work in our industry. Residential property management. Force number one is the increased share that we're getting of overall rental properties, meaning more and more every year rental homes are professionally managed. And we saw all the way from the original Iceberg Report to where we are now that we're seeing a higher and higher percentage of rental owners elect to use a professional property manager. However, force number 2 is there's actually fewer and fewer single-family rental homes. Surprisingly, this was kind of shocking to me, but once you think about it, it makes sense. How many of you have lost property, have lost accounts due to the owner selling? And the person who bought that home was not another investor, but was somebody who moved in, an owner-occupied home. So a lot of rentals have turned into owner-occupied homes since 2016, and we've lost over 1.5 million rental homes from our overall marketplace. So we're gaining. So the title of the slide nails it. Jordan came up with this: a shrinking pie, but a growing slice. Now, I would love to have a growing slice of a growing pie. And maybe we, maybe we're going to see this trend reverse. I would like to see that. But for right now, if you are experiencing contraction in your market, there may be secular forces at work that are sort of having an outsized impact on your experience as an individual business owner. That's all I got.

Great summary. Next slide. Okay, back to you, Synthesis.

Yeah, so we're nearing the end here. We pulled together different pieces and parts of the data to see what we could find by combining questions and slicing and dicing the data. One of the things we uncovered was that your most demanding clients, um, and we define demanding as someone who expects after-hours access most or all of the time, surprisingly are reasonable to work with. They rate property managers higher on average compared to easy clients. Um, they're more willing for you to collect and keep application fees. Late fees and pet fees. So some of your most demanding clients may be a blessing in disguise. Some of your easiest clients who have low expectations of after-hours access to you may actually be tougher to work with in the long run. So this helped me reframe some of our hardest rental owner clients and how we deal and approach with them. Next slide. Summary of this slide. Todd really touched on this in his LinkedIn post this morning. Baby boomers really diverge from the entire rest of the demographic respondents. Um, they are just way less comfortable with, you name it. If we asked about it, baby boomers were less comfortable with it. And so that's something to be aware of as you move through your marketing and sales motions. Next slide. So who is your unicorn client? Based on the data we see here, that's a millennial repositioner, a millennial who's actively buying and selling rental properties. This is a perfect client or as close as you're going to get there. 93% of them use a property manager. 93% of them are super comfortable with software and AI. 99% of them are willing to sacrifice some cash flow to, to enhance the renter experience. They have a reasonable approval threshold, rent guarantees, So this is just like if you wanted to zero in on if I could have 100% clients like this, then my life would be easy. Then this is who that person would be. Next slide. You want to take this one, Jordan? I think it's got some outside data that you pulled.

Yeah, this is really just speaking to inventory. It's just speaking to the fact that we can see from 3 different disparate sources— Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor— .com that inventory is being shifted and moved as a single-family home rental listings previously listed for sale are now moving over onto the rental side. So you guys already know this is happening. People want to sell their home and they can't, and so they rent it out. It kind of conflicts with what we showed previously about the net decline in inventory, but you guys know that this is a factor, which just means that there's more fly-by-night operators that are looking to manage these types of work with these types of parties because they had access to the failed transaction. And also there's folks in the market that didn't really want to be in the market. They're just kind of taking refuge and waiting it out.

Next slide.

Okay. So we wanted to know where do rental owners go to learn about real estate, property management, and real estate investing? And so we actually had 12 different options for their— for them to pick from. These were the top 5, with YouTube and Facebook really kind of running away. And that kind of makes sense if you think about between yourself, your peers, where do they spend time online? Personally, I spend a ton of time on YouTube and Facebook. And if you've ever gotten a link to a YouTube Short from me that I texted you, you can probably confirm that's true. So a little embarrassing, but that's where the people are spending time because that's, it's entertaining. It's interesting and educational at the same time. So, uh, again, marketing dollars. This is, use this as a guide on where to spend marketing dollars. Don't spend money where people, your prospective customers, aren't hanging out or are less likely to be hanging out. Next. Okay. This is about AI search adoption. Um, I think we've mostly covered this. Let's go to the next slide. Okay. Here's a growth playbook hack for you guys. These are 3 strategies pulled directly from the research report on how to grow your business. Strategy number 1, target millennials on YouTube. We talked about how millennials kind of make up that unicorn client, the millennial repositioners. They're on YouTube. If you could create compelling YouTube content and we've seen a couple of people do a really good job here, it's going to get broad distribution for free on their platform and draw in your ideal client. Strategy number 2, premium bundles. We talked about that owner benefit package. Make it optional or be like Todd, make it required, but offer some kind of upsell opportunity to your rental owners in a value-add way. This is highly unlikely to come under regulatory scrutiny and is— we already know from the report that they're open to this. Strategy number 3, AI search. I went on a long rant on that already, but we need to figure out how to show up in search results from the AI chatbots. Next slide. Okay, here's retention strategies. So this we talked about last slide was marketing strategies. These are retention strategies. How do we reduce our owner churn. Number 1 is going to be after-hours responsiveness. We talked early in this presentation about how high owners' expectations are on responsiveness. If you can figure out a way to satisfy that without going bankrupt, you're going to have some happy clients. Strategy number 2 is helping owners select an approval threshold that matches what they're comfortable with. I talked about how we do this at my company. If you go to ROPMG.com/pricing, you can see the 3 different plans that we offer with different maintenance approval limits to satisfy owners who have different comfort levels with how much money we can spend without their approval. And strategy number 3 is a rent guarantee. 90% of rental owners would accept this with a 10% discount, or that was the median discount. Find a way to offer this. I'm sure Todd's going to spin up a way to offer this in-house. There is at least one third-party provider, provider who offers this now. And I think this could be a great way to help keep your owners because if they're getting guaranteed rent on time, I think they're going to be less likely to churn. Next slide. That's it. That's it.

That's a wrap, folks. Thank you for sticking around and listening this long. Really appreciate you guys taking the time to tune in here. We're going to continue to publish original insights like this We're going to keep chopping up the data. We're grateful to you guys and for your patronage and for your listening and just continue to do great work in the market.

Thanks, everybody.

Until next time.

Peace. Peace.