Peter Lohmann recaps property-management news including a new PMAssist-Crane partnership giving members access to premium newsletters, his Systems Conference presentation on reducing owner churn, and an AppFolio-Beagle lawsuit update. Season 6 of his podcast launches with Evernest CEO Matthew Whitaker and shifts to year-round bi-weekly episodes.
How's it going? I'm Peter Lohmann, and here's some recent property management news from the last week that you may have missed. First thing I want to talk about is Trump came out with a post on his social network saying he wants to ban institutional ownership of single-family homes. Of course, he didn't release many details, and he's the type of guy who really goes back and forth on stuff a lot. You never really know what the end result is going to be, but this would obviously be pretty detrimental to our industry. A lot of us have institutional clients that we manage property for, and really really would do nothing to solve the housing crisis. It's not going to change the number of homes in the country. It's just going to change who can own them. That doesn't actually change affordability whatsoever. In fact, some people would argue it could even make things worse because it's going to reduce institutional interest in things like build-to-rent. So this is a little disturbing. I hope this kind of dies on the vine and doesn't go anywhere. And there's a lot of great commentary on LinkedIn about this topic. Jay Parsons had a great post kind of going into some the details, which is worth jumping into if you're curious. But yeah, not a fan of this. Honestly, pretty stupid idea and disappointed to see that getting some traction. Next up was PMAssist and Crane announced a partnership last week that's going to let Crane members consume inside their community paid newsletters from Todd and Abby. That's PMAssist. And this is really exciting for Crane members. Todd and Abby have one of the best newsletters in the industry. I'm a huge fan. I've been a subscriber for years. I love their content and that's why frankly I reached out to them and said, hey, can we make a deal? I'd love to have all of Crane members have access to the content that you guys are putting out. So we nailed, uh, down those details in Q4 and made the announcement last week. So if you're a Crane member, you can get into Circle and you now have access to all of their paid, uh, newsletters, including their JotForms that go along with it. So yeah, I'm thrilled about this. This is a big deal and it's gonna really be a huge value add for Crane members. And I'm frankly happy for Todd and Abby to get more distribution on newsletter because it's fantastic. I mean, if I would have had some of this content back when I started my management company or more when I was coming up, it would have been a total game changer. So that's really cool to see. Next up, Systems Conference is this week. Actually, I am at the Systems Conference right now, not literally as I record this, but as you're watching this, I am at the Systems Conference. Hey, if you're around this week, come say hi. Love to get to know you a little bit. Feel free to flag me down if you see me. I've got a couple of talks throughout the week. I believe I'm speaking about how to optimize your move-in process to reduce owner churn. So feel free to stop by and check that out. Excited to share kind of what I'm doing at RL Property Management. Some of the things we put in place to really streamline that. Excited to be in and around Vegas all week. I'll be at a bunch of the dinners and the events and bouncing around the sessions. So come say hi. Next up, the AppFolio-Beagle dispute. Very hot topic. I don't want to say that I broke the story, but I certainly turned on our little corner of the world to what was happening with it and was pretty excited to be able to uncover some of the actual court filings and really get the industry tuned into what's going on there. Because frankly, I think it is relevant. So Propmodo did a little summary and gave it some coverage. You can click through their link there in the newsletter, last week's newsletter. Haven't heard much in terms of latest developments there. It's something I'm really keeping an eye on and is, you know, as somebody who operates a management company, the question of who gets to be on the platforms and who doesn't and how can you interact with these platforms if you're not a partner and if you are a partner, it, I think there's going to be some, um, interesting developments over the year and curious to see how this plays out. So if you haven't caught up on what's going on there, I have a video on it from last Actually, it was 2 weeks ago on Tuesday I released a video. You can find that on my YouTube channel if you're looking for more details there. Next up, season 6 of my podcast just launched. So last week was the season premiere episode with Matthew Whitaker. He's the CEO of Evernest. Evernest is right around 20,000 doors right now. So they are massive and they've been around a long time. They've been at it for a long time. And I had Matthew Whitaker on my podcast. Several years ago, really got, got to know him and enjoyed speaking with him. And it was great to reconnect and sort of get the latest on what Evernest is up to, how they're thinking about growth and churn and everything else that's going on with them. So really great episode, great conversation if you want to check that out. And some of you may notice that season 6 of the podcast launched early. Typically, I launch seasons of my podcast in the late summer or fall. And we made a change. We're going to be doing the podcast every other week all year, year round now. So excited to make that change and get more content into the hands of property managers who can use it on a more regular cadence and really kind of keep the momentum with the podcast going all year round. We're really investing in the podcast. You may notice that the production quality has gone up. It's available in more places. We're really making sure the video experience for the podcast is first class. And on par with the audio-first experience. So love any feedback you have on the podcast. I'm really excited to get some more listeners and subscribers this year. So I'd love if you share with anyone in the industry who you think would benefit. And if you're interested, we do have some spots open for Q1 and Q2 for sponsors as well for the podcast. So just let me know if that's something you'd be interested in. So that was the news at the end of last week, and hope you're all having a great week. Let me know how you like this new format. I'm experimenting with a couple different ways of incorporating video into the Tuesday edition of the newsletter. This is more of a video recap, a news recap format. And if you like that, I will start to do this every week. And it's just a different way to consume the news. If you kind of want to hear me talk you through the news and give a little bit of my commentary, I'm happy to do that. It's kind of fun. So let me know what you think.
