In this weekly property‑management news roundup, Peter Lohmann, newsletter author and owner of a 750‑door management company, highlights three major industry developments and offers practical advice for managers. First, he details a backlash against Beagle, a property‑management insurance provider, whose aggressive cold‑calling and deceptive calendar‑invite tactics have angered many managers, prompting calls for a do‑not‑call list. Second, he discusses Entrada’s recent IPO filing that coincides with a class‑action lawsuit over its Rent+ product, which auto‑enrolls tenants in a credit‑building service without clear disclosure, and notes an FTC warning to multiple software firms about fee transparency. Third, he reports New Mountain Capital’s $2 billion acquisition of Asset Living, framing it as part of a broader private‑equity wave consolidating fragmented residential‑management and HOA markets. Lohmann concludes with strategic takeaways: maintain clean operations, accurate financials, and be prepared for potential acquisition interest, while balancing tenant‑fairness and regulatory scrutiny.
Chapters
You're not— Oxley's not in frame. Come here, dude. I don't think it's going to work. Beagle, the property management insurance company, is making property managers very angry with their cold calling tactics. Entrada filed for an IPO and got hit with a class action lawsuit, and private equity just dropped over $2 billion on a single property management company. If you don't know me, I'm Peter Lohmann. I write a free weekly email newsletter for 20,000 property managers and own a 750-door property management management company myself. Here's the week's news. First up, I made a post on LinkedIn asking Beagle, the well-known property management insurance company that I've talked about before, to please stop cold calling the industry into the ground. Dozens of Crane members and lots of folks on LinkedIn have reported continuous cold calls for weeks, sometimes months on end, even after they've explicitly asked to be removed from the list. One Crane member told me they got called every 2 weeks like clockwork and have been begging Beagle to stop. Another said they had to threaten legal action to make the call stop. Now, I've made some cold calls to drum up business before. I'm not necessarily against cold calling, but it's the way they're doing it that's driving people mad. Their reps are leaving voicemails that make it sound like a new owner inquiring about management services. So you call back kind of excited thinking you've got a hot lead and it's a sales pitch from Beagle. One person described a 7 AM call from a rep who claimed he had spent 10 minutes on their website, except he didn't realize he was calling a California company at 7 in the morning in their time zone. Even worse, and I hate this, people are reporting sales meetings that just quietly appear on their calendars. The sneaky calendar invite is not okay, people. Now, to their credit, Beagle's leadership did show up in the comments, probably because I tagged them, offering an email address to get added to their do not call list. But you can have the best product in the world and behavior like this will torch your reputation in the property management space. It's a small industry and word spreads fast. One commenter said it perfectly. It doesn't matter how good the product is if this is how you show up. Another called the fake owner voicemails the definition of deceptive marketing. I couldn't agree more. Beagle, knock it off. Next up, Entrada filed for an IPO, and in the same week they got hit with a class action lawsuit. Talk about rough timing. If you don't know who Entrada is, they're big in the multifamily world, kind of like the Appfolio of multifamily. Anyway, the lawsuit is about a product called Rent Plus. To tenants, Rent+ is marketed as a credit building tool. You pay your rent on time and we report it to the credit bureaus and your score goes up. Sounds great. There's similar products in our space, single-family rental space, such as Boom, CredHub, and I think SecondNature has one as well. The problem, according to the complaint, is how people end up enrolled. Plaintiffs say they were auto-enrolled with the change buried in the lease. One tenant said it was on page 46 of a 50-page lease renewal, and to opt out, you had to go to a separate website. They've been paying around $10 ever since. Here's the part that matters for us. Entrada has a separate property manager-facing website that pitches Rent+ as a way to increase operating income. There's literally a calculator for showing how much ancillary revenue you can earn by enrolling your tenants. The tenant sees build your credit and the property manager sees extra revenue per door. Same product, two very different sales pitches. And it's not just this one lawsuit. The FTC sent Entrada and 12 other property management software providers a warning letter back in December about being transparent. Parent with tenants on fees, which we reported on, by the way. If you want to know exactly who got that letter, go to PeterLohmann.com and we uncovered that information and broke it for the industry. Now there's a tension here I want to unpack a bit. I believe property owners and their property managers have a right to charge for things beyond rent that are delivering value to residents and even make it mandatory should they choose. However, in all cases, this should be disclosed clearly and plainly in the rental listing, the application, and the lease. That said, tenants are facing extraordinary financial pressure right now. This might not be a great time for us as an industry to test the limits of what we can charge for or require in exchange for a place to live. It's clear this is an area of focus for the FTC right now. They literally told us that. What's not mentioned in the story is the fact that property managers are often making extraordinary profit margins on these programs that aren't shared with the property owner. That adds another twist to the story, which complicates things further. There's an argument to be made here that this is rent by another name, which the owner has a claim to. I'll leave it at that. Lastly, private equity firm New Mountain Capital agreed to buy a property management company called Asset Living for $2 billion. Asset Living is a giant. They manage multifamily student and affordable housing across more than 40 states, and they've been around since 1986. The CEO is staying on, and New Mountain has something like $60 billion in assets under management. So this is serious money. Here's why I'm flagging it. This is part of a bigger trend. Institutional money is pouring into residential property management right now. The same week that this was announced, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on private equity rolling up HOA management companies. That's a $54 billion market today, projected to hit around $73 billion by 2030. There's more and more HOAs being built every day, and it's wildly fragmented. The two biggest players combined only control about 11% of the market. So this is similar to residential rental property management. We're talking 9,500+ management companies out there. For a private equity firm, that's a dream. Huge pile of small local operators with recurring revenue ready to be bought up and combined. Long story short, big money players have figured out what a lot of us already know: property management is a fantastic business. Recurring revenue, sticky clients, recession resistant, and you don't even have to own the real estate to capture the fees. If you own a management company, this is good news and a heads up at the same time. The good news: your business is probably worth more than you think, and the pool of people who want to buy it is growing fast. The heads is consolidation is coming to your market and you're going to be competing with very well-funded rollups at some point if you're not already. Now, neither of these is a reason to panic. These are good reasons to get your operation tight, your numbers clean, and your options open. Whether you want to sell someday or just run this thing forever and hand it down to your kids, you want to be doing this from a position of strength. That's all for this week. I'm Peter Lohmann. I'll see you next week.
