Peter Lohmann found that accidental landlords—owners who never lived in their properties—churn at twice the rate of intentional investors. His company now screens them more carefully before onboarding and runs education programs to teach them to think like investors.
I pulled some data on the owners that were actually churning, and I tried to break— I tried to segment this data. I tried to segment it in a couple of different ways. I looked at, are these homeowners what we call accidental landlords or homeowners that are churning? And the way I define that was, have they ever lived in the property before? That's how I would define that. And then I looked at investors, intentional investors. So those two segments are homeowner accidental landlords churning at a higher rate relative to their base percentage of our overall clients. Are they churning at a higher rate compared to investors? And the answer was they were. We learned that accidental landlords, at least for our company, were churning at like double the rate of investor clients. So we took that and did a bunch of stuff to try and screen out ones that we would be more likely to churn. And we also did try to— we kicked off a huge education project to try and sort of turn these accidental landlords more into investors and help them think about the property, you know, more like an investor. So that was one way we segmented the churn data.
