Peter Lohmann recaps industry news including the Pure + HRG merger managing 40,000 doors, the postponed Elevate sales kickoff now in March, and the NARPM Capital Summit in Washington. He also highlights a video by Alex Klarfeld on data ownership in property-management software, drawing parallels to a $100 million car-dealership settlement.
Peter Lohmann here coming at you with some news for the week. So first thing, and everyone's talking about this right now, the Pure HRG merger. It's a big deal. This is a new combined entity with 40,000 doors under management. And in Friday's newsletter, I went into some detail about some of the numbers I was able to pull and try to get an understanding of how large these two groups were at the time they merged. Now, we don't really know the actual numbers, but I was able to, from some public sources, try to determine what their growth path had looked like. And if you saw on Friday, there's like a graph showing the growth of HRG and then the contraction of HRG. HRG actually contracted over 40% from their peak. At one point they were alone 40,000 doors. Now the combined entity is at 40,000 doors. And I, I, you know, in digging into this, I had a couple sort of thoughts and feelings about it. One, I really want these guys to win. There's a lot of great people who work at Pure and HRG or who have sold to Pure or HRG, and we need a big win in this industry. We need a kind of a breakout success, multi-market, you know, if not national property management company, because that's going to sort of prove the thesis in a way, and it's going to validate what we're all working so hard on, which is, hey, how do we manage these rental properties in a way that's value-add for the property owner and for the resident and for our own companies? And I think if we can see a company like PureHRG or another company like Evernest really break out and succeed here, This is gonna drive a lot of additional investment into our space, both into obviously growth-oriented property management companies themselves, but it's also gonna be a shot in the arm for the vendors and the point solutions and the software solutions that we're all using every day to help run our companies. So the point I made in the newsletter, if you've played with my unit churn visualizer, you know how hard it is to maintain your size and even try to grow. The bigger you get, the harder that becomes. If you churn 15 or 20% every year, 300 doors, that's not such a big deal. At 40,000 doors, turns out that is 7,800 doors that you're churning every year just to stay afloat. If you assume like a roughly 20% annual churn, which is industry average. So more details on that on Friday if you missed it. But really interesting stuff going on there. Some other stuff happening around the industry. Elevate sales kickoff was postponed. Unfortunate for that crew. I love those guys and I like what they're up to. Tough break with the weather that we had, but we have a new date for that, March 16th to 18th. Recommend looking into that, especially if you have any salespeople on your team. Another thing I really want to highlight is the NARPM Capital Summit coming up really soon. It's in a few weeks. That's in DC, of course. Everyone who's listening to this should be a member of NARPM. I've always been clear that I think every property manager should be a NARPM member. They do a lot of great work, advocacy work for our industry. Last couple years, I've really upped my contribution to their advocacy fund to try to support what they're doing. These are the guys that are out on the front lines really battling for us, for property management business owners and for our industry, and trying to battle back some of the most egregious federal legislation or regulation that's either been enacted or proposed. And so shout out to, I know there's a lot of folks who are working hard on those things, and if you can make it out to the summit, I've heard really great things. I haven't been able to go out myself, but I think it would be worth your, worth your while if you can make it. Also wanted to highlight Peter and the Wolf is relaunching. So if you saw Peter and the Wolf the last few years, my partner in Crane, Wolfgang Kroski, and I, we do a monthly live show. It's informal, so it's different than like my podcast, which is kind of a more formal interview style show. Peter and the Wolf is casual. So Wolf and I just get on the mic. It's a live show over Zoom, and we're just talking about anything that's on our mind, any news, anything that's coming up. Wolf brings a great energy to the show and we have a nice dynamic. So sometimes we'll do call-ins. So if you have questions about your property management business or anything having to do with running your company, we like to do those call-in shows as well. So there's a link to register for, I think it's season 4 premiere coming up in just a couple weeks. So I'd love to see you there. It's always great energy in the chat and it's, we have fun with it. We keep it light. Last item I wanted to mention for this week is an interesting video. So There's a guy named Alex Klarfeld. He's the co-founder of Divi Homes, which was a pretty big deal. He put together a video looking at whether property managers or just business owners in general who are using software have a right to access their own data via API. So there's an interesting couple of cases in the car dealership world. Actually, there's a couple big softwares in, in the car dealership world, just like we have in our industry where all the data is kind of centralized. And there was a bunch of car dealerships that got together and said, hey, these companies aren't treating us right. They're not giving access to our data. And there was a couple of laws. It was litigated very heavily. And in the end, the dealerships won. I believe it was either a settlement or a judgment for $100 million. I think it was a settlement in the end. And so there's some parallels here with our industry. We deal— more and more data is becoming what is essential and critical. It's kind of like you hear people say data is the new oil, and especially in the age of AI, understanding where your data is and having access to that data is ever more important and is going to continue to become more important. So I'm keeping a pretty close eye on some of these threads and trying to understand how this is all going to play out and where we as property management business owners sit at the intersection of some of these big forces that are kind of coming against each other right now. So kind of an interesting storyline. I'm gonna continue to pull on this and see where things lead. So that about wraps it up for the news today. I try and keep these brief. Again, let me know if you like this kind of video style of news where I throw in a little bit more commentary and a little bit more color on some of these things. And, uh, hope you have a great week.
