Peter Lohmann covers the Housing for the 21st Century Act, which streamlines construction but drops the institutional investor ban; a Florida HOA manager who stole $1 million from condo associations between 2021 and 2025; and AppFolio's benchmark report showing 86% of managers prioritizing resident experience and 44% already using AI.
There's just been a major update in the effort to ban institutional landlords from buying homes. AppFolio just released a new benchmarking report, and a property manager has been accused of stealing over $1 million. My name is Peter Lohmann, and this is your property management news for the week in under 6 minutes. House Republicans and Democrats just passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act. You may have heard about this. It's mostly a build more housing faster package. It clears unnecessary regulation and delays for new construction, tries to cut federal review delays and legalizes and permits more of like the missing middle type of housing and small multifamily. It's all great stuff. It's got some practical things in here too, faster voucher lease-ups by reducing duplicate inspections. They've got some stuff in here for manufactured housing, some small mortgage stuff. So a lot of regulatory clearing, which is great for more housing, which overall is going to drive rents down or keep them from rising as quickly and control home prices. But important to note here is that the ban on institutional landlords and institutional commercial huge companies from purchasing single-family homes, basically houses, was not included. So left out of the final bill. Don't know the reasons why. Some folks aren't happy about this, but that's what you need to know. Next up, Florida HOA manager is accused of turning condo associations into his personal ATM. Police are saying he stole up to $1 million or more between 2021 and 2025. The biggest takeaway for property managers, this is a controls issue. One person had too much access and not enough oversight. Basic guardrails that a lot of you probably already have in place would've stopped this, like multiple people approving disbursements, separating out operating and reserve accounts, sending bank statements directly to board members. A lot of the stuff that is kind of common sense, but for whatever reason wasn't in place at this management company and the associations that he was working for. Lastly for today, AppFolio's 2026 Property Management Benchmark Report was just released. This is brand new and a couple key 3 findings here I want to highlight for you. They found that the industry's biggest 2 challenges right now are higher vacancy and higher operating costs. Let me know if that resonates with you. In response, 86% of property managers are prioritizing the resident experience, mostly around communication, trying to reduce movement friction, a lot of the stuff that we're all working on. The report also talks a lot about fraud. We're seeing this go mainstream. More than half of respondents saw an increase in application fraud last year. That's huge. We're noticing this as well at my management company, and they're saying it's hurting performance no surprise. So screening and verification are really hot topics with property managers right now. And of course, AI, they had some really interesting questions about AI. You should go check out the full report. Basically, 44% of respondents are using it now, and those users are expecting faster portfolio growth than people who aren't using AI. Kind of an interesting finding there. You can find the full report on their website or in my newsletter. I'm going to link to it in the next issue. That's all the news I have for you this week. Have a good one.
