Merging Mynd with Roofstock President Doug Brien

Thanks for checking out today's episode. Just a quick note that I'd love to have you join me inside CRANE, the new private community built exclusively for property management business owners. Go to joincrane.co to learn more.

The power is going to be in the data. We don't want to sign up for Elise AI and pay them a huge fee and give them all our data to benefit them and everybody else. Like, we want to keep our data for ourselves. Because we have a whole data team and we know how to structure it and use it. And our bet is that ultimately we are going to be able to generate and harvest a lot more value than other companies because we control our own system, we control our technology, we control our data. So we really can build these agents that we think can do a lot of property management work and continue to iterate.

Welcome to Season 4 of Peter Lohmann's Podcast. This podcast is a show about all things residential property management, from property operations to sales and marketing to growing and managing your team. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder of RL Property Management. For Season 4, I have an exciting new guest each week. We go deep into conversation about problems facing professional property managers and the best ways to overcome them. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back, everybody, to Peter Lohmann's podcast. I am thrilled today to introduce Doug Bryan. Doug, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm excited to get into discussion. You've done a lot of amazing things in our industry and you are currently head of a very large organization. And so you've got a ton of perspective on what property managers are facing right now. Before we do that though, I'd love to take 1 to 2 minutes and just catch up on how you got to your current role and just a little bit of your career history.

Yeah, I mean, I think I probably got to where I am today in a way that's pretty different than most. I played college football at Cal and I was a kicker and ended up getting drafted by the 49ers and played in the NFL for 12 years. And during that time I did a bunch of research and, you know, kind of made this commitment to myself that like, I didn't want to be one of those guys that had this amazing opportunity to play in the NFL and have nothing to show for it. So did a lot of research on, you know, the best ways to invest, how to, you know, both create tax-efficient cash flow and, grow my wealth because my ultimate goal after I finished football was to do what I wanted to do and not what I had to do. And what, and what I mean by that is like take some job that paid an amount that was enough to kind of support the life I wanted. Like I wanted to put myself in a position to where like I had enough, you know, passive income that I could like do what I wanted to do, take some risks. Not have to make anything for 3 years and go big on some big opportunity. So that was a goal. Did a bunch of research, ended up learning a lot about real estate and became very intrigued. My rookie year on the 49ers, we won the Super Bowl and I literally took my Super Bowl check and kind of my savings. Like I literally, I drove my high school car with, it was a 1986 Honda Prelude. Like rusty. One door didn't work. So like my girlfriend, now wife, had to like Dukes of Hazzard slide in the window. I drove it all year and people gave me a super hard time, but I saved enough money after my rookie year to buy a house. And I bought my first house and it was a fixer-upper and I ended up, you know, having a good place to live, but also made a bunch of money just by like adding value. And then I started to talk to family friends who were in real estate, read a lot of books. Rich Dad Poor Dad was pretty impactful and just ended up deciding that I was going to be a real estate investor and every off-season invest time and to learn, did free unpaid internships with mentors and family friends. Read books, ultimately got an MBA in real estate finance at Tulane when I signed a long-term deal with the Saints. But basically just like kept educating myself to a point where when I retired in 2005, it was just like this supernatural obvious transition into real estate. And I started with multifamily and was doing that for a couple of years, starting kind of in 2006, 2007, and then the foreclosure crisis happen. And the way I describe it is I sort of knew enough to be dangerous. If you, I don't know what you were doing or at that time, but I'm sure there were some listeners who were in the real estate business and everybody kind of saw it and had some reason to talk themselves out of getting involved. Yeah. And multifamily guys were like, well, single family's unmanageable. Like, yeah, the houses are cheap, but you can't manage them at scale. I don't know. I heard lots of reasons why quote unquote real estate professionals thought that investing in single family at scale was a bad idea.

Yeah.

But I knew enough to be dangerous and I was kind of like, yeah, I don't know if I totally buy that. And I had a partner who was a friend who's a software engineer and we did a bunch of research together and kind of thought about like a systems approach, like how, how could we make it manageable? Like, Are people really thinking about cloud and mobile computing and how those relatively new technologies could be leveraged? And our conclusion was no, nobody was really thinking about it the right way. And we just decided to go raise— we'll first start with our own money. We bought 26 houses, I think, with our own money. And then like kind of proved it out and said, let's go start raising friends and family money. And so Long story short, started my first company with Colin called Waypoint Homes. We bought 17,000 houses over almost 8 years, took it public, ran it as a REIT, merged it with Colony, became Invitation Homes, and then decided to launch Mind in 2016 with what we thought were like some pretty big ideas, some big learnings from Waypoint of kind of how to do it bigger and better and decided to focus more on technology and an asset-light model. So instead of raising private equity type of money to buy real estate and own the real estate, we decided to build that tech and data-enabled service platform to kind of enable the industry and create a far more scalable model. And so, you know, here I am 8 years after starting Mind, recently merged with Roofstock, and super excited about the future of SFR and the impact that Roofstock and mine can make on it.

Yeah, thank you so much. That was a great sort of primer for anyone who isn't familiar with your background. You and I last spoke shortly before the merger was set to close, and I'm curious to sort of get an update from you on how things have been going since then. That was a few months ago. I, I'm guessing the dust has started to settle a little bit. How's it going? What's on your mind these days now that that's closed?

That for anybody who hasn't been involved in a merger, like the post-merger integration is just, it's a lot of work. You know, there's people, process, and technology. There's culture. I mean, we're pretty fortunate that Gary and I, so Gary Beasley, who was the CEO or is the CEO of Roofstock, him and I were partners back at Waypoint Homes. So, He joined us like 3 or 4 years after we started. And when we went public, Gary and I were co-CEOs before. So it's pretty rare when you're able to bring 2 companies with 2 leaders that have actually worked together very well. And so a lot of the cultural problems that are usually one of the biggest impediments to a successful integration, like, I wouldn't say that there's nothing there, but it's just like, largely diffused, right? Because it's just like we built companies, different companies with similar culture and similar DNAs. And so it has been really exciting to me how quickly our teams have come together and, you know, not just doing the things that we each did. Like we did this whole exercise that like mine did this, Roofstock did this. What are the things, what are the capabilities this new company, we're sort of, thinking of it as Roofstock 2.0, we're thinking of this as like, this is a new company we're bringing together. What are the things that we need to get profitable to make it through this challenging period? But I think most importantly, to position the company when the next wave of demand comes, that we're going to be highly successful. Yeah. And so we've gone through that exercise. And it's interesting. And this just kind of goes back to my point about people really working together pretty quickly. Like we've actually created new products that don't exist in the industry and neither company did previously. For example, Roofstock had this capability that they call this business line they called S3. And basically what S3 did and does is sell on the MLS. So sell single-family homes on the MLS at scale. Right? So one of the interesting dynamics in single family is today, if you want to sell a home to an investor, they're going to buy based on a yield. And the yields are pretty low, meaning prices, you know, investors aren't willing to pay as much because the yields are pretty low and the interest rates that they have to pay are high. Whereas You could also sell a single-family home to an end user, someone who's going to live in the home, right? And they are not paying based on the yield. They're buying it because it's their home. And so there's this arbitrage of like 15 to 20%. It's pretty significant. Like sell a house to an end user homeowner, get 15 to 20% more. Sell to a yield investor, get 15 to 20% less. Like That sounds really compelling, but it's really challenging to sell on the MLS at scale. And so what S3 does is basically partner our property management and asset management service with their selling service and basically say like, hey, you may have 200, 500, 800, a couple thousand in some cases homes that you want to dispose of. You don't like the price you can get today selling in bulk or as a portfolio to an investor, bring your properties over to us. Mind will manage them and your property management, do property management and asset management. And then as every home, as the lease expires over the next couple of years, we will then our asset management team will underwrite that asset, figure out how to best reposition it, renovate it for maximum sales price. And then the S3 team sells it. And so what we can do is harvest income while we hold it and then really efficiently sell every house as they become vacant. And then depending on the size of the portfolio and lease expirations over a year or two, basically sell off your portfolio, but get 15 to 20% more. That was not something anybody was offering in a very short period of time, our team came together and said like, we should just combine these capabilities into something new.

Yeah.

And we're seeing a ton of demand for that offering.

Got it. So that sounds like a really great solution for institutional landlords who are looking to dispose of these highly appreciated assets.

And for retail investors, Peter, because I know, you know, there's a lot of retail investors here or listening, we also can do it on the MLS. And really be for, you know, on a one-off basis. Yeah, obviously we don't even manage the properties, just S3 can sell it, but we do it with a lot more data and kind of all of our insights from our company to really understand how to renovate the home, how to price the home, and then sell it really efficiently.

What's fascinating to me about that is you got your start the opposite of that, which is buying discounted single-family homes from homeowners and basically packaging these all together, eventually becoming a massive REIT.

And, you know, just where we didn't actually buy hardly any from homeowners, we bought them mostly from banks.

Gotcha. Sure. So, you know, homeowners defaulted and the banks took them and then you were able to swoop in and get them at a discount, then rent them out, capture that arbitrage essentially. And now we've come full cycle and you're on the complete other side of that. You're disposing of investor-owned properties and selling them to retail owners, or not retail, but homeowners at a premium. Yeah. So you're, you're actually capturing deltas on both ends of this big long real estate cycle that we've been in. Really interesting. I picture you as just being very opportunistic in your approach to real estate investing overall. And I'm curious to discuss how that shows up in your approach to property management as well.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I hadn't actually thought of it that way. It's like, yeah, we sort of captured arbitrage on each side. And look, I mean, this— I still think we're in the early innings of the evolution of single-family rental as an industry and still trying to understand like what it's ultimately going to look like, because I even think this arbitrage we have right now because of interest rates being so high, it's it's temporary.

Yeah.

It's not going to always be there. So yeah, what does the future hold? I don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, in terms of property management, I mean, it's been, I think kind of the basis of the, of the cultural alignment with Roofstock has been both companies. And again, this goes back to the learnings from Waypoint to execute single-family well at scale, you have to leverage technology and data, and there's such an opportunity to invest in that in both companies have. So as we bring together these companies, you know, we capture all kinds of data. We have, I think it's like up to 660 real-time operating data points.

Wow.

So we call it our IOPS package. We don't, you know, send out a PDF. It's literally a portal. And our investors, now granted, it's mostly institutional investors that take advantage of this, In theory, retail investors could too. But the point is we are capturing all this data and we use that to inform our investors, but we also use it to inform ourselves about how the operation's going. And on the acquisitions or investment side of things, Roofstock has created something called the Rental Genome. So they, now we have data on the 100 million plus homes in the United States. We know rent data, we know crime, school, like all the data we suck in, both third-party data. And now we're going to integrate, integrate all that operating data into the Rental Genome. So it's really a treasure trove of like really valuable data to help you pick the right market, pick the right asset, pay the right price, and then ultimately benchmark performance so that we, you know, we can manage more efficiently than anybody else. And at the end of the day, generate returns.

I love that. So a lot, a lot of focus on the end user experience, meaning the institutional investor or the retail owner, making sure they have access to as much data and context as possible when they're looking at their own returns.

Hey Peter, just quick question. Sure. I just want to, you just said institutional investor and retail owner. And I want to ask you why you use the word owner after retail, because we call our retail clients investors. Now, some of them don't think of themselves as that, but like, hearkening back to my NFL days, part of my personal mission is to make it easier to invest in single-family rentals for individuals. And to kind of educate and train people how to think like an investor. That's actually been one of our company values. Think like an investor. The more we can train our team to think like an investor, then they can talk to people who maybe think of themselves as a retail owner.

Yeah.

But like we can help them think of themselves as a retail investor. So I'm just curious, why was that an intentional choice of words?

I wouldn't say it was that intentional. I am curious, You make a great distinction there. And if you chat with someone who calls your main line, they're interested in property management and they explain that they just moved out of the house and they want to rent it out. Will you take on a client like that or do you just say, hey, you know what, we're really set up to work with investors. If you're interested in becoming a real estate investor, we'd love to help you along that journey. But if you're just thinking of, you know, renting this out for a year or two, like, would you pass on that as a potential client?

You know, it's a great question. And, you know, as you think about product market fit and focus and go-to-market, like these are things we talk about a lot. The fact is, so we would call the investor that you just described an accidental investor. Yeah. Not an intentional investor. Our best product market fit is with intentional investors. 'Cause if you think about what, how institutional investors think and behave, and you think about how intentional retail investors think and behave. They're kind of similar and really it's the intentional retail kind of aspires to have the tools and ability to invest more like an institutional investor or like a company that's buying homes. And so to answer your question, depending on other criteria, yes, we take them, but we are going to try to work with them as an investor and like we will talk to them in language that helps them hopefully start to think about their, this home that they own as the investor. Now sometimes people leave us because they just, that's not how they want to think about their property that they inherited or moved out of. And that's okay. But I would say our, our best product market fit, the DNA of the company, the product we've built, is best suited for an individual who says, you know, I got my day job, I want to, I'm saving money, I have an investment strategy, I invest in stocks and bonds and real estate, and I want to grow that portfolio thoughtfully over time and think carefully about which markets and which asset. Like, we are good at working with those kinds of investors.

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Yeah, I mean, great question and you're right, it's a huge difference. And I would just say the caveat is, you know, when you think about like having a bunch of different investors, All investors are not created equally, so it's different for different kinds of investors. How much time do we spend with accidental investors? Like a lot. Yeah. Right? Because we're educating and it's like, why does this matter? Why wouldn't you do it this? It's like, it's a lot of time. Mm-hmm. Intentional retail investors, less. I mean, it's interesting too, with institutional investors, you actually spend a lot of time with them. But it's over a bigger portfolio. So when you think of time spent per house, it's actually more efficient. Now you got to perform like if you're not performing, they will go elsewhere. So that, that is true. But what also is true at Waypoint, you know, we did, we, we actually, we raised about $3.5 billion of equity and debt to buy those 17 17,000 homes. And at the end of the day, we look back and it's like, yeah, I mean, 17,000 is a lot, but when you think of it in a market of 16 to 17 million, like it's a drop in the bucket. And I still have conviction that there will be companies out there that can like transform this industry and the retail and institutional investor experience, and they're going to own, Or manage hundreds of thousands, if not a million. I mean, there's multiple companies out there saying we're going to get to a million homes at some point, and I got my money that somebody will. And I look at our company and I say, if not us, then who? Like, why not us? Like, why wouldn't it be us? And so we spent about half our time raising capital.

Wow.

Right? So we got to the 17,000 houses and we were kind of like, geez, What, why only $17,000? It's like, because it's so time-consuming to go raise all the money. And so here we are with Roofstock. We have about $20,000 today. I mean, I feel like we have, we have a path to $50,000 in the next 6 to 12 months.

Wow.

Now it may not unfold that way, but in terms of combining with other companies, taking on large portfolios that are out there, like our company can get up to hundreds of thousands of homes in the next 3 to 5 years. And a big part of the reason we can do that is because we're not going to have to go raise all the capital, equity and debt to do it. And instead, we focus our time on the platform, on the operation, on the technology, on the data. I mean, we could probably talk for half an hour about AI. When you look at what AI agents and bots can do, and you look at the property management use case, I mean, we think ultimately half the work in property management can be done better. So like less expensively, obviously for the property management company, but can actually deliver a better experience for both retail investors and institutional investors and residents alike because so much of the work is like questions that need to be asked and delays in getting answers and finding data. And agents are— AI agents are really good at that.

Yeah.

And they scale exponentially. And so we are really leaning into that, and that's going to be a big part of us getting, you know, bigger and more efficient as, as we do that.

Sure. So Mind somewhat famously built their own software, their own accounting software in-house. I'm curious, does that put you at an advantage when it comes to implementing AI because you control the platform and you can easily bolt things on? Or is it actually going to be harder because some of the larger property management accounting softwares have already pulled in AI? Maybe they have bigger software development teams and they can spread costs over millions of units. How do you think about this?

Yeah, I mean, there's a different answer for everybody. It just depends on who you are. For us, it's a huge advantage. For one thing, the good AI tech that's out there that's like third-party SaaS and you can license it, it's expensive and it's going to get even more expensive. Like the value that these agents and bots can create is so great that we hypothesize they're just kind of sucking people in now and then they're going to start raising prices and they're going to have no choice but to pay it because the AI creates so much value.

Interesting.

But the real deal, Peter, is like AI technology is going to become somewhat ubiquitous. Like it's just out there. Like it's not that complicated to build this stuff. The power is going to be in the data. It's like who captures the most data, structures their data, owns their data. Like we don't want to sign up for Elise AI and pay them a huge fee and give them all our data to benefit them and everybody else. Like we want to keep our data for ourselves because we have a whole data team and we know how to structure it and use it. And our bet is that ultimately we are going to be able to generate and harvest a lot more value than other companies because we control our own system. We control our technology, we control our data. So we really can build these agents that we think can do a lot of property management work and continue to iterate. And when there's a mistake, like we don't have to fill out a ticket and send it into the help box with Elise AI or whoever. I'm not trying to pick on Elise AI, but they're, obviously very successful and wait for and hope that maybe they fix the problem someday. Like we can fix it like in 48 hours and make the improvement. So for us, it's a big advantage. I mean, look, if you're a small retail investor, I think the best you can do is look at the universe of alternatives out there and look at different companies and their offerings and kind of figure out what— I mean, I do think it's really important as you look at a property management company to really understand the tech that they're using and the benefit that that tech can derive for you as an investor. And, you know, have that— like, I think that needs to be kind of part of the criteria as you look at property managers in the future.

Yeah. To prep for the show, I was listening to your interview with Jordan Waila back in 2018. I can't I don't believe it was that long ago. And you were talking about data on that show quite a lot. So you, you've been very consistent in your approach to, you know, basically believing in the value of data in real estate and property management. I'd love to hear you reflect on that a little bit more now that some time has passed. Like, do you, do you look at data in the sense of data you're exposing to your investor clients like we talked about earlier on the portal? Is that your primary focus, or do you also look at data basically that can inform your property management operations and allow you to improve how you manage those properties and your systems and processes for doing that?

It's, it's both.

Okay.

And just as you think about customer service and answering questions, it's like kind of put it into 3 different categories. It's like creating transparency for investors. Yes, for sure. That's really helpful. I would say it creates more value by enabling our team to make better decisions and have better insights. And it's also really important for just customer service, right? So for institutional investors, they really just care about like the operations, like How long is it taking to get a vacant house occupied? What's the rent you're able to achieve versus market and how long does it take you? It's like all those basic operating metrics. That's all they care about. Retail investors care about that and customer service. Like, are you able to answer the questions? Are you able to do it in a timely manner? There's a whole like customer service layer that really does not exist in the institutional realm. And that's where I think a ton of value can be added for retail investors. 'Cause the reality is like, this is a, I mean, you're in property management. It's a hard thing to like have all the conversations and spend all the time. And it's, you know, sometimes I feel like, you know what, let me focus on like solving the operational problem and like let's talk about it less. Right? Because you're kind of pull, you know, retail investors unintentionally pull resources from fixing the problem, explaining the problem. And this is where if you have the right data, you use it properly, you can actually get people answers really, really quickly. And I think drive better operational performance. I mean, one of the things, and you know, I, I don't think this is going too technical, but it's like, Property management is nothing but a series of workflows. Like that's what software tries to enable. And what we've been able to do is not only build our own software, but our own workflows that are very specific to single-family rental. And part of what we're going to start doing is going through these workflows and literally looking item by item and identifying the aspects or literally the tasks, which are a part of a workflow that an AI agent can do better and faster than a human and building our, the future of our software like that, where it's like we're actually trying to lean into the technology. And for our team, like what we're telling them is like, look, we're not trying, like we're never going to get rid of our property managers. What we want to be able to do is have them, yeah, manage a bigger portfolio. That's good for our business, but be able to spend more time on the high-value items that humans, the judgment calls, the ambiguity that we see in property management that, I mean, look, what's AI going to be able to do in the future? I don't know, but There's a whole lot of things they can't do right now. And we want our talented people to lean into that work. And we think by kind of think of it as dividing and conquering between our human property managers and our AI agent property managers to just deliver a completely different and better service. Like that's the future of property management.

I can picture it. I can absolutely picture it. It will happen. It'll be really interesting to see how quickly your internal development proceeds relative to the, you know, the, the publicly available software that we have access to. Today's episode is brought to you by Buildium, software that's made a huge difference in my day-to-day as a property manager. It's probably a tool you've heard of, and for good reason. Buildium is the most recommended property management platform out there with thousands of property managers using it right now to get ahead. Buildium makes everything flow, from seamless communication with residents and owners to powerful financial reporting and analytics. And the best part? It grows with you. Whether you're managing 50 doors or 500, Buildium scales with your business so you can grow at your own pace. I've been using Buildium for over 10 years, and it's helped me scale my portfolio to over 650 doors. That's no small feat. I believe in Buildium so much that I even shared my story about how it helped me save over $100,000 in resources, which you can check out on their website. And I'm not alone. Buildium is highly recommended across our industry for a reason. Just recently, I had a chance to be part of NARPM's annual conference where Buildium launched their 2025 Property Management Industry Report. They dug into some big issues for next year, like staffing challenges, resident retention, and how property managers are planning to respond. The report is loaded with insights to help you thrive in competitive markets. And let me tell you, there's a lot more. If you didn't catch the keynote at NARPM, no worries. You can grab the full report for free. Head over to buildium.com where you can download it. Just scroll to the top and you'll see a link. While you're there, go ahead and book a demo. Their platform experts will give you a one-on-one tour and answer all your questions. There's absolutely no pressure, just endless possibilities. Thanks again to Buildium for sponsoring today's episode. I'm really curious about, you know, this, this idea of property management at scale. You mentioned earlier, eventually there's certainly gonna be somebody who hits a million units, hundreds of thousands of units under management as a third-party manager. We've seen a bunch of groups take a swing at this now over 10 years. We've seen some, you know, private equity-backed groups, VC-backed groups, bootstrap groups going after multi-state, you know, nationwide property management. Frankly, the track record hasn't been great, and I'm wondering what, like, I know I'm kind of asking you to speculate here, but what's holding the industry back from 1 or 2 or 3 multimillion-unit companies from emerging? Like, what mistakes are being made or what industry forces or economic forces are sort of getting in the way here?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I do think to your earlier point about like what I would call a principal-owned business or portfolio, so like take Invitation Homes, right? Like they have one client.

Yeah.

Themselves. Right. I mean, that's not entirely true now because they have gotten into the third-party business, but they're only working with institutions and they're only working with institutions that have like the same geography and like same product type to like make it as simple and straightforward as possible. And for them and their, the system they have, that's totally the thing to do. I mean, I honestly think that the biggest thing holding people back, I mean, look, there's market forces, like property management companies grow faster when there's, when the industry is growing.

Right.

Because, and that happened a lot, 2021, '22, like, and then back, you know, when we started at Waypoint, foreclosure crisis days, like tons of growth of the industry. Every property that's bought needs to be managed. You're out looking for a new manager. Like that's an easy customer to grab. Today, growth has slowed down a lot because you're going after wallet share from basically a different property manager, there's just like not that much new investment activity. So that's putting a lull on the market for everybody. But I honestly also just see this like evolution of what I would call the SFR playbook in terms of people, process, and tech. What part of the property management is centralized? What, what roles really need to be regionalized? How do you use data and process How much benefit can you get from scale? How, you know, what technology and what system are you using that allow you to like have more agility or be nimble and, and, and manage in different markets? And, you know, like we have something called a role matrix where we know the roles that are needed, but depending on the size of the market, we might have one person filling 4 or 5 roles because we don't have that much scale. Like that's not something that AppFolio or Yardi has contemplated or built. It's a unique single-family rental use case that makes it challenging to scale and not have enough scale in an individual market. So I do, I mean, I would kind of go back to the highest level answer to your question is figuring out how to combine the right operating model and enable that with optimal technology and data such that it really truly is scalable. I mean, look, capital's a big part of it too. Roofstock's raised a lot of capital. We've raised a lot of capital. You've got to raise the money and it's sizable amounts to build this infrastructure in front of this scale. And my prediction is that when the market comes back, it'll definitely look different than it was in '21 and '22, but there is a ton of capital and pent-up demand, both retail and institutional. It's going to start flowing back into the market at some point, maybe sooner than some people think. And when you see that, I think you're going to see A, some consolidation. We intend to be a consolidator and join forces with other property management companies and say, look, like we're investing in the technology and the infrastructure, like we can scale. And I think you're going to start to see in this next wave some successful companies scale more than others have in the past.

Got it. Is Mind or slash Roofstock in acquisition? Are you looking at buying up third-party management companies right now?

We, yeah, we are. We are looking now. It tends to be, you know, larger companies that we would want to do something with because we're trying to get to scale and, you know, a transaction buying a company is a lot of work kind of regardless of the size. So our focus is just to be candid, like more on larger companies, maybe even companies that had aggregated smaller PM companies. And have some reasonable scale, like, you know, 10,000+ stores. Doesn't have to be that many, but, you know, thousands. And then bring them on as a partner to help us all collectively achieve scale and benefit, harvest all the benefits that I think, you know, the most modern technology can produce.

[Speaker:GRANT] Sure. Yeah, on that question of centralization and scale, when I think about, you know, we're only in one location. We're just here in Columbus, Ohio. When I think about moving to another geography, even just Cleveland or Cincinnati right here in my same state, the first question that pops up for me is that question of centralization. What do we keep in the sort of back office corporate and what is front lines at the local office? And I can think of two extremes. One is like extreme decentralization, kind of a Berkshire Hathaway model where there's just a skeleton crew at the corporate office. They're highly— the local managers are highly empowered. They, they may even be running different software systems and the, the head office is more of kind of in like an asset allocation mode. Or the other extreme, which is like super centralization where most everything's happening at the corporate office, the bare minimum, anything that has to be done locally, you might have 1 or 2 people there, but really the focus is getting everything back to that standardized central location and process. How do you think about this? And maybe even more interesting would be how has your thinking on this shifted since you started?

I mean, look, technology continues to change the game. I mean, there's at least one company I know out there that is in multiple markets and literally has zero on-the-ground folks.

Wow.

In any of the markets. Now, for institutional investors, that would never fly. You know, I have questions about it, but the way they do it, the way they do it is really interesting because it leverages technology and data. I mean, if you have an insurance product where you sell, like you say, hey, if you manage, if we manage for you, we will give you this much money every month and you're guaranteeing, it's basically an insurance product. Well, it takes a lot of the questions off the table. Like, I don't care how long my property is vacant. Like, as long as I get my check every day. Like, now, is that going to work out for that company in the long term? Like, I don't know. You know, if you look at Lyft and Uber and the way they engage an entirely independent contractor workforce and create a cohesive service with very few boots on the ground, like, That is interesting. Like that is being experimented with, like how light of a footprint can you have on the ground? For us, it's somewhere in the middle. I mean, all of our leasing is done centrally. I mean, really the only roles, and it depends on the size of the market, but like I'd say it's better to have your property manager in market, not necessarily required. Based on scale, we, once we get to a certain scale, we'll have maintenance technicians. So like driving mine vans around, like once we get to a couple hundred doors, we have that. So that's a boot on the ground. And then we have a role called a property associate, a PA, and that's someone who's like doing inspections, posting notices. A lot of the institutional knowledge you need in a market can enabled through technology. Like we basically have a lookup where AI can look up local legislation so that if a property manager has a question about in a certain city or municipality, how something has to be dealt with, we can find that information instantaneously using AI.

I like that. So that's cool.

There are ways to like I think mitigate some of the risk and some of the challenges that you would have, like why you would say I have to have somebody local. But the reality is like when you think about leasing, dispatching, repairs and maintenance, property accounting, resident services, like these are all centralized functions that rely more on technology and like you just don't have to have them in market. So We, you know, one of the things we say is we can open up a new market in 60 days, start with a single person, and then build up our on-the-ground workforce with scale in a way that's efficient for us. But then, you know, we have enough on-the-ground knowledge to deal with problems that, you know, we call 'em just like, you know, door handle turning. Like no computer will ever, or it's a long ways away. Before the, you know, turning the door handle kind of work goes away. Yeah, that's what you need people on the ground for.

Really interesting. I appreciate the context. This is a question that I come back to often, and I think it's highly relevant for anyone who's looking to grow past a single market, which, you know, operating in a single market really does limit you.

It's hard. It's hard. You know, it's funny when you ask the question, Peter, because it's like I reflect back on my career and it's like I almost don't even remember what that's like because we started in the Bay Area. We always knew we're going to scale like this. We have to figure out how to make this a scalable business. And it was like 2 years we operated, like for 2 years, I think we got up to a couple thousand homes in the Bay Area. And the first market we went into was Southern California. And it was like a really big deal and a really big struggle. And we figured out a lot of things and made a lot of mistakes. But once we kind of got that nailed, I think we went to like Orlando and Atlanta at once. So then we went to 2 more markets at one time. And before you knew it, we were in, I think, like 16 markets at Waypoint. And you kind of develop this playbook. And the reality is, you know, as the operating playbook and technology and data has evolved, it actually makes you better and I think helps you address what intentional investors want, which is, I mean, look, diversification is a thing across investing in every single asset class. And so it's like historically people didn't buy, it was something like 85% of all retail real estate investors invested within a 60-mile radius of their house. Like I always just kind of scratch my head. It's like, that is, I mean, look, I don't want to disparage people, but it's just like, to me, it's just like purely with an investor hat on, like that is terrible diversification. You live there. Your job is probably there. You might own the home you live in there. And like, if something happens in that area, you like all of your asset value, you have so much risk. Right? So if you think about how people invest in the stock market and like optimizing for returns and risk management, you gotta invest across different markets.

Yep.

And like that is something we want to enable. And if that's like a, you know, a north star, creating more of a professional, sophisticated investment experience for investors, like you kind of have to be in multiple markets.

I love that. I think, I think we'll end there, Doug. This has been great. I appreciate you taking some time and coming on the show today. For anyone who wants to sort of follow along with what you're up to at Roofstock and Mind, where's the best place for them to do that?

We have websites for both Roofstock and Mind. I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, I think those are probably the, the best ways. But yeah, appreciate the time, Peter. And yeah, I hope we can Talk again in the future.

Sounds great. Thanks, Doug. 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.