Delegating work, tracking progress, and managing issues often leads to frustration. So, businesses buy workflow software with all the bells and whistles; only to realize that it’s too cumbersome and confusing.
Today, I am talking with Vinay Patankar of Process Street. After experiencing similar pain with software, he decided to create his own simple way to manage recurring workflows for teams.
[02:40] Why isn't there software that can do these tasks while I sleep?
[04:57] Philosophy behind process development and problem with most products - the people who built and designed them.
[05:45] First-generation Software: The experience on paper is not necessarily the best experience on a computer.
[06:15] Can my grandmother figure this out? Create easy and intuitive software that anyone can use without any kind of context or previous knowledge.
[08:05] Process Street is not just a process documentation platform, but a superpower checklist for accountability.
[11:17] Rules around Tasks: Customize checklist based on variables or conditions.
[12:27] Create automations to do fast integrations with other systems.
[15:50] Document processes to do it right, the first time; but not slow you down.
[17:23] Process breaks down and people start doing it their way, but don’t document or update their processes.
[19:50] Track Changes: Capturing every change made to a process on the backend. [21:22] Process Street gets processes done faster and more accurately.
[24:20] Everything becomes better; creates momentum, saves time, improves efficiency.
[25:35] Process Street’s Support Channels: General, sales, and engineering.
[26:47] Catch-22: Struggling to manage team, keep things organized, maintain culture, document processes, and systemize business to grow and move forward.
[28:24] Pre-made Process Templates: Tenant move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords.
[29:09] What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes.
[30:25] Process Street down the road: Future features to include role-based assignments, task permissions, and mobile app.
User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software.
Once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it.
What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes.
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Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.
DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.
Today's very special guest, super excited about, head of a really cool software platform, Vinay Patankar. Welcome to the show. He is here representing Process Street.
Vinay: Thank you, Jason. I'm excited to be here. Hey, everyone.
Jason: Vinay, give everybody a little bit of background. How did Process Street come about? Let's start with you. What's your background in all of these?
Vinay: Sure. My background is I've done a few things. I'm from Australia originally. I kind of worked in tech, worked in finance, work as a recruiter, started a couple of companies, and ended up on running a company that was a marketing agency. We're doing lead generation for consumer finance. Basically, driving leads for credit cards for Citigroup, and insurance for Geico and things like that. We basically had a very repetitive process where we were launching new campaigns on different ad networks. I'm running a lot of different tests, so maybe we're watching 20 or 30 different tests every day. At this point in time, we're working a lot with the new ad networks where maybe they hadn't released their API yet or essentially there wasn't much automation possible. A lot of that was being done manually.
I had a team in India that was helping managing one of those campaigns. I basically had a lot of issues tracking all of that–delegating work, tracking that it was done, making sure that it was done correctly, getting visibility over the progress of all these tasks, which meant that I was staying up until 6:00 o'clock in the morning sometimes kind of working with my team in India and I got really frustrated. I was like, "Why isn't there a software that can just do these for me while I sleep?" That was the original pain that I was feeling.
I knew that there were workflow products in the enterprise. I'd work with tools like Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Workflow, [...], and these very multi-million-dollar expensive products. I knew that they existed, and I understood, "Oh, yeah." You define a workflow then it's in a very controlled set of tracks. People just kind of follow it and execute it. This is how a lot of the really big businesses that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands of people like manage their processes. I'm like, "Why isn't there a tool that does this that is as easy to use as Gmail." That was kind of the original spark. I just wanted it for my own team to use. We built it as an internal tool, initially, and got my own company on it. Then, started showing it to people and it was like, "It's so cool." We kind of eventually spun that as a product and that was the beginning. Essentially, just scratching my own itch.
Jason: You still have the agency stuff?
Vinay: No. That's long gone.
Jason: Okay. Great. Originally, this was built to fill a real need in a real-world situation and a real-world scenario which a lot of times the challenge with software is that it's not. It's built on some theory or idea by some nerd. When it comes to practical reality, it's got too many clicks. It's not super user-friendly. It becomes really cumbersome and confusing, but it does everything. It's got all these features and bells and whistles.
In developing this, what's the philosophy behind the process and how do you balance that?
Vinay: For sure. Awesome question. The kind of thing that you just said is exactly the problem with most of the incumbent products in our space. The products I've mentioned before like SharePoint and SAP Workflow and this and that, that's the exact problem. They were designed by business process analysts, by Six Sigma specialists, that come from the process engineering department in IBM or something. I've gone to business school, I've done MBAs, have a very specialized understanding of how business processes were supposed to work, understand how design a flow diagrams, and essentially, took what they learned in the university and put it on a computer. It's like took what they've drawn in a piece of paper and put it on a computer. It's interesting. That's actually how a lot of first-generation software was built. It’s like, "Let's take this thing we do offline and let's put it on a computer."
The experience that you get on the paper is not necessarily the best experience that you have on a computer. You actually see that in a lot of products. The first-generation products were designed that way. My approach to it was user centric or basically, user first. The idea was we're not selling to people who have degrees and business information systems. We're selling to people that run property management companies or people that run a local restaurant, some of them runs a hotel, some of them runs a HR team or sales team or something. It's not necessarily people that have their specialize process department or enterprise.
Our approach was what is going to be the easiest piece of software that we can make that people who have no education, no understanding, don't know what the processes is, don't know what the workflow is, never done any of that before in their life, or ever read anything about it, that they're going to be able to intuitively understand, pickup, and just use without requiring any kind of context or previous knowledge. That's the approach that we've been taking which is really this, "Can my grandmother figure this out?" kind of approach.
Jason: Yeah. I think when it comes to anything complicated maybe for an eight-year-old or for grandma to do it, then there's resistance no matter who is doing it. If you're a high-functioning, quick-thinking, entrepreneur or you have a team member that English is the second language and they're overseas, regardless, it lubricates the process to have that ease. User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software. It's my number one qualifier for looking software, "Will my team actually use it? Will it be easy for them? How quick they adapt it?" Because adaption for software is one of the biggest challenges getting a team to actually use it.
Vinay: Absolutely, yeah.
Jason: Maybe you could explain what Process Street is for those that are listening because it's not just a process documentation platform which is great and awesome. There are platforms that are just for process documentation that are out there. When some people use their Google Drive to document processes, they put them all in documents and they've got screenshots and just texts. It's beyond that. It's got this benefit of being a checklist where there's accountability, there's a record, and there's history of the people actually using the process. It also is this workflow tool that can be directly integrated with your external tools through Zapier, third party systems. It can capture data instead of just be something that somebody refers to and looks at. It really does a lot of things. How would you describe Process Street to those that are just not familiar with it?
Vinay: Yeah. It's tricky. We're almost in a new category here. The easiest way I explain it to normal people that don't know anything about processes or workflow or stuff like that. It's that we’re a superpower checklist. You have a checklist. This is something that needs to get done. Some of that, we have a checklist we want to follow. In property management, you have a checklist for every time a tenant moves in or a tenant moves out. We have a checklist every time we sign up a new landlord. Essentially, these are all the things we have to do, and we want to make sure that we remember to do, or someone on our team remembers to do every time a tenant moves in, a tenant moves out. "Make sure you do a background check. Make sure you get the contract signed. Make sure they get the keys. Make sure that you inspect the property." And this and that, right?
It sounds simple. It's a simple way of explaining it. But then once, you have that checklist and you can build a checklist really fast–as fast as you can, just typing out a list of stuff in excel, or doc, or whatever. But then once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it. This is where the superpower is coming. You can have each of those steps and you can say, "Make sure the tenants get their keys." Inside that, you can have instructions. You can have, "This is where the keys are located. The keys are numbered this way." Once you've given them the key, go into here, fill-up this form, and make sure you got the tenant to sign in this book that they've received the keys and take photo of the book or something.
Again, in each of these tasks, I can add in instructions on how to do the tasks. As you've mentioned before, you can add in form fields to actually collect data along the way. If you have a step that's like, "Collect the tenant’s information." You can type in the field, what's the tenants name, what's their address, what's the address of the house, and things like that. You can catalogue all their information that kind of turns similar to submitting a form or filling up a spreadsheet where you get all of that data in a tabular form, you can use that in the future for automations as we talked about.
You can control rules around the tasks. Now, I have a checklist inside each task. I have different steps. I can have content. I can have form fields inside those steps. Now, I can start to create rules around tasks. Now I can say that, if it's an apartment building, add these tasks for, "Have a building key." If it's a house, hide that task for, "give building key." I can customize this checklist based on variables or conditions that are happening in the scenario. For example, is it a house or is it an apartment? Is it in suburb A or suburb B? Maybe there's a different agent or something else that has to happen based on that scenario.
I can add handoff. I can say, "Wait until John collects the keys and then assign Brandy to go and call the landlord or return the keys." I can handoff steps. I can say when somebody needs to do something kind of handoff. I can create automations and due dates. I can say, "This task is due two days after the keys are given." Or, "This task is due three days before the staging date." Or, "This task is due two days after the staging date." I can start to create all these automations and controls around how the tasks work when they're ordered, automating when they become due related to other various events, handing off between different people in the team and stuff like that.
I can create lots of automations and other systems from that data as well. For example, if somebody sent you an email, that's like, "Oh, I'm interested in your property." You can have that trigger automatically run your checklist. Now, every time I add a tag on this email, it runs the checklist automatically and copies all the details of the email into this checklist so that when I’m running through it, I’d have it all day. If I change something in my CRM or in my rent management system, if a lease expiry comes up in rent manager, you can use that to trigger and automatically launch a checklist.
You can then have data from your checklist pushing to other systems. If I know for example, the tenant’s name, I've collected their name and their email, and the house address, I can take that data and I can put it into hello sign and I can generate a contract that automatically gets sent out for signature to that client. Once the signature is signed, it can come back and notify [...] triggers is actually a new feature in Zapier they just released which is find and update checklist. But now you don’t even have to wait for that signature to come back and then pull back in the signed document, save it to the checklist, checkoff the task signed by the tenant and hand it off to somebody else in the team to do the next task. We start to do all sorts of fast integrations with other systems once you get all that set-up.
Jason: Okay. I want to paint a picture for those listening. I use Process Street in my own business. I started using it because I'd seen a lot of property managers using it. A lot of property managers said, "Hey, this is really intuitive. It's very easy to use," so I started using it. What really pushed me over the edge is we used Basecamp internally as a communications system and platform which it is great at, but it really isn't good for repetitive processes. We have more process documentation scattered throughout several different Basecamp projects for different teams, indexed documents, we had some on Google Drive, and it just got really crazy. There wasn't a central repository to go to. Just changing that alone was a game changer for us. Having one place, "Oh, did you look in Process Street? It's in there. Everybody can go to that."
What really pushed me over the edge though was I had spoken with a gentleman and I told you before this call, I remember his name, his name was Bob Abbott. Bob is a property manager. he was telling me how he runs his company. He's got his profit margin to 65% in his business by using Filipino labor and by using Process Street. He showed me how he uses it. We had some really cool conversations geeking out because we're both kind of nerdy. That's almost unheard of in the property management industry to create that sort of margin. It's very possible to do in property management because there's a lot of systemized things, there's a lot of repetitive things, and there's a lot of things where you need somebody manually to do stuff. You can give them the processes and the checklist to do it.
One of the conversations we had which I think is an important balance to strike is, with my team, we want to document processes to the point where a beginner could do it the right way the first time. We also want to balance that with, we don't want it to slow them down once they know it. Just like driving a car. The very first time somebody drives a car, they're probably checking all their mirrors, adjusting their seat, and doing all this stuff. After they get used to that, they'll probably just hop in and drive. With us, with our team, we try to make our processes as few steps as possible, but as many as necessary to create that balance, so it doesn't get in the way when our experienced team members are trying to use it but to show record that they've done these tasks for this particular client or used this particular case or situation.
What I've really noticed that’s brilliant is that just by having a process that’s actually used to do the process and your team is required to use the process to show record that they’ve done it, the process gets better overtime. What happens, I've noticed, in the business is I create a process document in the past, give it to a new team member, they would look at it and say, "Well, this is outdated." It always ends up being outdated because nobody's using it on a daily basis. Then, we have to fix it and adjust it, and then they learn how to use that. Once they get familiar with it, they never look at it anymore unless they forget something.
What happens over time, the process breaks down. They'll start doing their own things. They start changing it. They figure out some innovations. They think innovations. Maybe it's worse, maybe it's better, but that isn't captured in the process. Then, if they quit or you lose them, our goal before they quit or leave, we've got them to update their processes because they weren't using it. There's this huge advantage, I've noticed, in just having the team use the actual process software that the processes in and going through each time. If there's a change that needs to be made, we can adjust it, they can adjust it, if I give them the permission to. We can improve it over time. Just the clarity in taking all of our processes in to where they're actually usable as a checklist is a huge step from having just the process you think is documented well enough to somebody actually being able to use it. It's a big leap and that leap has caused us to significantly change all of the processes that we brought over into it, so far.
Vinay: That's awesome. What we find is that as you continue to iterate your processes over time, that's really when they become more valuable. I think that's normal for most systems. You can go look at the enterprise companies, their processes are some of their most valuable pieces of IP because they've been so refined over so many thousands of customers or years or whatever. They're now really, really valuable and they’re kind of like protected secrets for that organization.
Some cool things you can do, for example, if you have 10 checklists running and you're onboarding 10 different landlords, or you’re moving in 10 different tenants, and you do want to make a change. One of your PMs comes back and says, "Hey, I noticed that this is incorrect," or "This needs to be clear if we do it this way." You could update the process and you can live pushout that update to all the 10 tenants. If you have 10 people in the field at the moment, even when we have no way of knowing, they can be in a car and by the time they get of their car, their house, and they open the process, it's got a new step in there. The steps change a little bit and now they'll just follow the adjusted step. You don’t need to run a training program, don't need to send out an email, it's just kind of like, "Oh, the process is updated. Let's do it."
On the backend, it's actually not exposed right now but on the backend, we're actually tracking all these changes for you. Every time you're making a change to one of your processes, we're capturing those changes in the backends’ versions. We're working on dashboards that will let you see how the output of your process changes overtime as you iterate it. It's like, "Oh. It's taking us two weeks to onboard a landlord when we did version one of this. Now, it's a version 100. It's only taking us four days or something." You kind of see, as you continue to iterate your process over time, how they're improving or how they're affecting other metrics. That's pretty cool as well.
One of the things we're really excited about, it's kind of a big part of the vision of the platform, is around what you said before where there are some processes where maybe you don't want to add extra work to somebody to their task. We definitely have a lot of processes like that. A good example is answering support tickets. We don't want somebody to run a checklist on every single support ticket that they're answering especially once they're in the roll after a while. They know how it works. But we do want them to do it for trainings. We want them to run that checklist for their reference or something as they're going through getting used to it. It's pretty important for us an our organization. We actually have everybody in the company do support when they come in. That's an example of what we just want people to run at the beginning.
What we're really moving towards is we're trying to make our processes actually reduce the amount of time that it takes to get that process done. When you're using Process Street, it's actually less time to get that process done than if you were to not use the Process Street process. That's our ideal scenario. Not only is it faster for it to get done, but things got done more accurately; things got done in a higher detail way.
A good example is we have a sales proposal processes where we send out a proposal for a price point for a set of users if we’re working on enterprise deal. For the rep, basically, what they have to do is they have to come in to their CRM, click a link in the CRM which launches a process, then they've got to fill in a few pieces of info. From that, it pools in a lot of information automatically from the client. All the client's details are filled out automatically. They don't have to do any of that. They've got to put a few things like how many users do they want, what's the price that we agreed upon, or do they want a one-year deal or a two-year deal, kind of things like that. They basically just punch in a few things in the process, really quickly, just takes 20 seconds. That then hands-off automatically to their manager who then looks at the proposal and approves it inside Process Street. Once that's approved, it creates a whole kind of proposal with all these multiple checkboxes and things that can get signed. It will probably take you 30 minutes to set up if you're going to go through the whole thing yourself.
It goes back and it updates the CRM. It creates opportunities and changes the statuses, the confidence, it makes the proposal sent, and puts in links to the proposal, and updates all this information whether the proposal is sent out. That whole thing, for a rep to do that manually, to go customize a Word doc, [...], mapping all the fields, sent it out, go to the CRM, update all these different fields in the CRM, and follow up tasks and all this stuff, it takes them 30 minutes or an hour or something. With the Process Street process, they can do it in less than a minute.
We're actually working on trying to build processes that actually significantly make you faster and more accurate to use the platform than without. Obviously, it can't happen for every kind of process. You can't completely automate going to a house and inspecting it. There’s a pretty manual aspect to that but for the ones that we can, that are very digital, we are trying to [...] as possible.
Jason: Yeah. Sales people are notoriously known for not leaving good notes, not wanting to deal with software too much. Any burden you can take off their plate, software-wise, is a big win. You're saving money every single time.
Vinay: For you though, as a business owner or as the team leader in sales, there's way more benefit than that. If you can shave off these minutes or hours off each of your reps like a week, it's just not a pure timesaving thing. They bill more so they would actually close more deals in that period of time. It creates more momentum for the whole team because the whole team bills more. The whole team saving time and building more which kind of creates this whole pause and momentum of like then you're able to hire better reps and you're more able to expand territories, this and that. Everything just becomes better.
It's actually a pretty good lesson in most of your teams. If you can really get the operations piece tight; you can get your processes tight–your sales operations, your marketing operations, your support operations—it makes the whole team compounding much more efficient. It makes your whole organization much more attractive to other people because you don’t want to come in to a place that's a whole giant mess where they just going to have to be spending all their time copying and pasting stuff and dealing with spreadsheets. You'll be able to hire much more high-quality people. You'll be able to execute a much larger amounts of projects and whatnot. It’s just kind of all your infrastructures to sell it.
Jason: Yeah. You've mentioned that you have everybody that come in and do support. Do you have your developers do support on a regular basis, so they have to live inside this tool and deal with support-related things?
Vinay: Yeah. We have different support channels. We have general support, sales support, and engineering support. Engineering do kind of work in engineering support. It's generally more complicated problems versus how much does the product cost or things like that but they’re generally dealing with a more complicated [...], something with the API or something like that. Yeah, they’re in support as well.
Jason: Interesting. Property managers that are listening, a lot of times, what ends up happening is there's two, I call them the first two sand traps. The first major sand trap of property manager falls into in the solopreneur stage, they get to maybe 50 or 60 units under management. They're doing it mostly on their own. They're struggling to figure things out. Then the first thing they think of doing is getting people like hiring people. People are so expensive. Having a tool like this could immediately allow them to outsource into offload and create some leverage in their business.
Where it becomes even more necessary, I think for a tool like Process Street, is when you get into that 2-400 door category which is kind of the next sand trap that they fall into, this is where they’ve got a team now. They're struggling to manage this team, they're struggling to keep things organized, they're struggling to maintain some semblance of culture, and their big challenge right now is documentation. It's almost always a big challenge. They need to document their processes, they need to systemize the business, it’s this huge constraint that's limiting their ability to grow and move forward. By then, it becomes critical for them to get something like this in place where they've got a really good processes, really good documentation, and really good clarity as a team as what's actually being done.
Vinay: Yeah, absolutely. It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation because you've got more work going on when you're in that next level of business because you got more customers and more doors. You kind of feel like you've got less time to work in your processes, but your processes are more important at that point of the company. I think the point in your CRM or whatever is probably a similarly stressful project to undertake but once it's done, you're very happy to do it. You might feel that you're underwater right now, but that's probably a good sign that you need to work on some of the processes. If you're that underwater because you won't be able to scale that way.
The other thing that we have that helps a lot with data is we have tons of templates. We actually create pre-made process templates. We've got a whole bunch in property management. We've got some generic ones around it. Some of those mentioned, tenants move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords. We also have some ones that are like, "Oh, this is how you do it if your system is AppFolio," or something like that. It’s kind of like more generic ones and ones where you can kind of switch in and interacting with your different property management systems. That actually helps a lot if you do feel like you're really underwater, and you don't know where to start with your documentation, you don't have any time for this, "Come check out their offer." You come and check out all the different property management templates that we have and that's a really good starting point.
Jason: Yeah. You can also share your process with other people. You can ask another property manager, "Hey, what's your process?" If they're using Process Street and they can share that with you, and you can immediately import it in your tool which is cool. It has a lot of really cool features. If you're on one of the higher plans, you can also do that context sensitive [..] statements. If a certain task is complete in a certain way, you can expose or hide certain other steps to make it faster or more hyper relevant to what needs to be done then. You can get as crazy with this as you want which I think is fascinating or you can be simple as just having a few steps with the couple screenshots and some texts.
Immediately, I think, anybody could take whatever processes they currently have, bring it over, copy, and paste it in. Then, they can start optimizing it. I've even taken just checklist in a text document of steps, you can just paste that in and it spits it out as each separate step. It really is a rapid tool for getting processes built out. It's been a game changer for those that have implemented it especially those that just didn't have anything. It's a huge leap, huge step up.
What's on the horizon for Process Street? What else do you think those that are managing property should know about Process Street?
Vinay: A couple of things we have coming up is, one thing that I know a lot of our property management customers are excited about, we have hundreds and hundreds–I don't even know how many–of property management companies all the way from single person operators up to we have big teams in [...] and Keller Williams and stuff like that. We do work with a lot of property management companies. One of the ones that they're really excited about is a feature called role-based assignments. Right now, you can predefine on a checklist who needs to do what. You can say, "Either Bob in finance needs to do this collect payment task or the finance team needs to do this collect payment task." You can say, "The property management agent needs to do these four tasks at the beginning." But the way that it was right now is you could only indicate that this person has to do these four tasks.
It gets a little bit tricky when you have a team of property managers. One property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager A. Another property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager B. Another one comes in gets assigned to property Manager C. You want to rotate your assignments, or you want to map who's the account manager on this and make sure that the correct account manager is assigned to that.
We have now a feature called role assignments. At the beginning of the checklist, you kind of have a dropdown that says, "Who is the PM that is responsible for this account?" You can select that and that will automatically assign all the property management, PM-related tasks to that particular PM. You can maybe say like, "Who's their district manager? Who's their regional manager?" That will might assign some of the approval tasks to their particular manager for that PM that you selected.
Instead of saying, "This task is always assigned to Bob." It's like, "This task is assigned to a property manager. I just don't know exactly which person on the team is going to be that. I'll assign it out later or I'll use the type of automation to assign that." For example, if I click this on Salesforce or I click this from one of my property management systems, I could look at who's the logged in user or who's the user that owns this account. I could automatically push in that email address into the process and automatically assign all those tasks to that particular person.
Actually, a really cool one for this is, there's actually two cool features that just came out. Now, the features that came out is called task permissions. What task permissions do is it lets you control who can see specific tasks in the checklist. I have 10 tasks. I can say that, "Right now, anybody who comes into the checklist can see all the tasks in the checklist." I can say, "I want the property manager to see these five tasks. I want the manager to see these three tasks. I want the finance to see this one task."
What's really cool is you can bring in the actual tenant or you can bring in the landlord as a guest into the system. It's like a free user that you can bring in. You can say, "I just want the landlord to see this one task at the top of these two tasks." It's like, "Fill in some form fields here, tell me your property, your address, and some information about when you want someone to come see you. Sign this contract here and then, done." Those two steps are exposed to the landlord. Then your team can come in afterwards, pick it up, and continue it out. "Let's do a background check on this person, a credit check, or whatever," and start doing internal steps. You now can break up the process and have external people, some internal people, an internal manager, all kind of working on the same process but not seeing all the information. It’s kind of being siloed into their own tasks and things that they need to see.
That's pretty cool for bringing in landlords or tenants if you need them to upload documents or complete any complicated set of forms. It's really useful. You can @ mention them, have conversations with them. You can reject their uploads and say, "Do it again. Do it again." A lot of these gets done over hundreds of emails back and forth, and they always seem to get lost. It's really cool managing that. Another big project we're working is the mobile app. I think a lot of people will like that too.
Jason: Yeah. Very cool. I think a lot of the systems that we have that feed into the Process Street were using some sort of a third-party form like Typeform or Gravity Forms and then, we're feeding in in that. You're saying it'll be possible or even easier to have tenants or clients to submit things through...
Vinay: Yeah. They could do that whole form into a task inside the process and just expose one task or two tasks to those clients. You wouldn’t even use those external forms anymore.
Jason: You want the client or the tenant to see, call the client up, and say these things because then it seems disingenuous.
Vinay: Exactly. You could be doing an interview and you have notes on the interview and stuff like that. There's a lot of things where you want that wall of privacy. Someone can submit a leave application or an expense approval or something like that. You want to be able to have a conversation with HR or conversation with the manager just about the person who submitted it get seen.
Jason: Yeah. I think in some way, if I create a process, if I put a video in there, I have checklist steps, there's so much clarity and transparency for my team to know how to get work done that they don’t have to come to me. Any question, as an entrepreneur, that we get asked once by our team is going to be asked again. Unless, it's documented somewhere. Every single one of those interruptions cost you at least 50 minutes a time. Every single one of those interruptions may take, each time you're training somebody or bringing somebody new, if that's not systemized, it can take you hours. The only way to really move forward with the business is to create a business that is somehow scalable. In order to do that, the foundation is having some SOPs in place; having some Standard Operating Procedures, having some process documentation. I think the brilliance of Process Street is adding that layer of accountability in mixing it in a checklist, having people move through a process, and being able to see who has done what for that transparency.
Is there anything else that people listening should now about Process Street before we wrap this up?
Vinay: Just that it's free to check out and that you should go sign up for free account at www.process.st.
Jason: Alright. Cool. Check out Process Street. It's process.st. Vinay, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show. Really great to have you here.
Vinay: Absolutely. It's been great. Thanks for having me.
Jason: Alright. Cool. For those of you that are listening, I do recommend you check Process Street. It is a really nice blend between ease and what's easy. I think it's a software that once you get into it, it's very intuitive, easy for people to figure it out, so don't be afraid. If you are a nerd, you really geek out on tech, and automation, I think it has plenty there to satisfy you. I think they’re coming out with some cool new things that will give Podio, another system, a run for their money. That'll get a little too complicated for most people. Check that out.
If you're a DoorGrow Hacker and you've enjoyed the show, make sure to like and subscribe if you're watching in YouTube. Make sure on iTunes that you give us a real review. We're going to appreciate that. Everybody listening, if you are a property management business owner and wants to grow your business, make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club by going to doorgrowclub.com and join our free Facebook group and our awesome community.
Again, thanks to Vinay. Thanks to everybody that's been checking out this show and listening. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
Searching here, searching there...How do investors find rental properties that align with their financial goals? Is there a way to provide them access to these assets?
Today, I am talking with Dan Ganguly, president of HomeUnion and founder of INVESTimate. As an entrepreneur, he’s always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. So, if a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, a property manager needs a feed of investment properties to present to potential buyers.
[04:05] Questions for Investors: What’s your budget? Risk preference? Age and stage in life? Do you need cash?
[05:13] Two Brands Connected: HomeUnion’s where investors search for properties; INVESTimate’s where property managers and realtors work with investors.
[06:30] Business Model Change: Internet-only to tool that increases engagement between property managers dealing with investors.
[07:43] Where to Start: Build a relationship sooner than later in the sales cycle process.
[09:00] Help property managers build better Websites as a front door for people.
[13:53] What does the local property manager do? Signs up with service, pays monthly fee, and puts on private/white labels.
[14:58] Realtor gets MLS feed for home buying; property manager gets MLS feed with intelligent filters and big data for investment buying.
[15:15] Everybody knows their #1 prospect is their existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you.
[16:12] Other Options: MLS, Zillow, and similar Websites focus on finding stuff (schools, pools, etc.) that get people into a neighborhood.
[16:35] INVESTimate: Offers big data platform with 110 million properties, 20 years of transactions, 200,000 neighborhoods, and more than 9 million rentals.
[19:30] Is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual.
[20:15] INVESTimate: Investors get best of both worlds when making a transaction.
[21:45] Different risk-reward gradients/categories help people make the right decision.
[26:45] Feedback from Property Managers: How has this changed their business?
[32:05] Bottom Line: Business owners make money, get a door, and much more.
It’s a fish net to grab fish, and then we nurture the fish until they buy.
Your #1 prospect is an existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you.
We can’t force them to buy, but give them a reason and product to buy.
Bottom Line: Business owners make money and get a door.
DoorGrowClub Facebook Group
Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.
DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.
And today, I have a very special guest. I’m hanging out here with Don Ganguly. Don is the CEO of Homeunion, is that correct?
Don: Yeah. I’m the president of Homeunion and founder of Investimate.
Jason: President and the founder of Investimate. Don, I want to welcome you to being here on the Door Grow Show.
Don: I’m glad to be here.
Jason: Don, you have an interesting background. You have a lot of experience in entrepreneurism, I think people would be really interested here some tidbits from you today, and some insights. I’m excited to get it into your business and service. But let’s start with you. Can you give us a little background on you and just some of your experience and what lead you to where you are now in business?
Don: Sure. I’m sort of a vocationally reformed engineer. This is my third company. The last one we did was actually an outsourcing service company for mortgage banks and services. We were actually helping originators doing the big boom and people [...] were getting a loan. When everything fell apart we were helping the services service those loans and try to keep people in their houses. We touched I think over $75 billion of service. That company ended up getting sold to Oracle, to a banking software company.
But it was the progenitor to this whole Homeunion and Investimate thing that we founded because we were able to see all these properties all over the country that had some pretty decent prices and a good rental price ratio. When we looked at that, we figured there are all these homes that made good investments and people that live in the coast don’t get access to these assets. We looked at that and said, “Is there a way that we could provide access to rental properties the way people buy stocks and bonds?” If you look at the way rental properties are bought, we base them a little how homes are bought. So people go to a listing site, they get a list of properties, they do some back and beyond below calculations, figure out the rent, go to the neighborhood, or pick up the neighborhood, call a realtor, and then bounce around and try to find the right property that they like.
If you’re look at an analog to that and say, “Hey, if you go to a wealth advisor and say, ‘I’ve got this much money to invest, what should I buy?’” The wealth advisors are going to say, “Okay. I got some stocks, here’s the idea, and here’s the score, here’s Apple, here’s Facebook, which one of these do you think you want in your portfolio and let’s go through a list.” The question they ask you often is, “Hey, what’s your budget? What’s your risk preference? What’s your age and state in life? Do you need cash?” And then they put a portfolio together that’s got a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it all enlines to your financial goal.
We took that playbook and we brought it to this Investimate product that we built which says, “We can ask investors the same type of questions about their real estate investments and then let the system go out and find the right assets and build them a portfolio or a set of assets that need those financial criteria.” The non trivial exercise because to do that, we actually had to calibrate everything from a risk and reward stand point. Right? How risky is this house? And what’s in that house type of thing.
That’s how we came to this. As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. Often, the existing stakeholders don’t have the answers. You got to think of something a little bit different. That’s how we got into this business.
Jason: Help us understand these two brands, how they’re connected first and what they are. Just the overview.
Don: No, I’m happy to. Homeunion used to be a retail platform where investors can come in and basically search for properties and invest. The first incarnation of Homeunion, we were actually serving as overall asset managers for these properties and then farming out the actual work to property managers on the ground. And then last year we made the call, it was becoming too big a business for us. We’ve done over 200 other transactions and we didn’t want to be in property management. We ended up giving those properties out to the property managers that were managing it, productized it and provided it as a platform for property managers and realtors that are working with investors.
The product itself has been tested for four and a half years, it’d done $200 million of transaction within 5% of forecast and a good use by investors to buy properties all around the country, highly exercised. What we just see is the business model from being an internet only model that brought consumers to my front door to a product that would then serve people like property managers who are actually dealing with investors day to day, giving them a tool to engage with their investors. That’s the connection between the two.
The Homeunion brand is an internal user of the investment product. So any leads that come in there are fed to our property management partners in various locations because we are not in the business. When we engage with that investor and they want to buy a property, then that property is managed by one of our partners. Both of them actually feed into the advantage of the property management tool.
Jason: Let’s take our typical listeners. We’ve got a property management business owner, they got a small business, maybe they’ve got 100-200 doors on their management. They’re wanting to grow their business, they’re trying to deal with team changes, and staffing, and operations, and trying to systemize things for the first time ever. And then we have these solutions available that they can use to support in bringing investors. Where would they start with your services?
Don: Yes. If I look at businesses such as yours and others, you’re helping them grow doors. How do you grow doors? You grow doors by finding more investors and having investors buying more doors, right? The property manager either at the bottom of the food chain which is that when the investors already bought that property, then they put their hand up and compete with four other property managers and say, “I’m the best guy in this market and you should come and put your property with me.” Or they can be more proactive and go up the food channel and up that funnel and have a conversation with the investor when the investor starts looking for that property.
Be early in the solutions process. What happened to them is if you’re at that point in the fulcrum then you are actually able to participate in the property management process more naturally rather than doing it after the fact.
Jason: If you’re part of this process earlier in the sales cycle then they’re going to have this relationship with you that’s already set and you’re by default mostly going to get the management contract.
Don: You got it. Because you've been partnering with them ahead of time. At the same token, let me just take the other side of the coin there, the good work that you’re doing and others are doing is that saying, “Okay, listen, you need to market your business in some fashion. You need to get traffic on your website. You need to put content up.” There are various stakeholders that are helping property managers build better websites, you have a business in that, and a better front door for people to come in. When those people come in, then what do you have for them? That’s where we come in.
I’ll give you a simple analog. If you’re a realtor, what do you need? You need an idea speed to your local MLS. Otherwise you can’t show any property. When a company comes in and says, “Hey, I want to buy from you.” If you have a website that doesn’t show any properties or you don’t have an ability to send that buyer of homes to buy then you can’t participate. It’s a minimum stake for a realtor.
Jason: [...] tool.
Don: If I am an “investor realtor” and that sort of property management, if I’m catering to investors then I need an ability to serve up investment properties or properties that are more likely to be good investment. Or put another way, I need to give you an investment lens through which to look at these properties so that you can then engage in buying a rental property through my system. If I don’t have that then I’m back to the bottom of the food chain because I’m searching here, I’m searching there, I’m doing all of these.
If a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, I think a property manager needs a feed of investment properties that it can present to its potential buyer, if the property manager wants to jump up the food chain. That’s what Investimate provides.
If you’re a property manager in a particular market and we’re in 15 or 16 markets around the country, we have real time connections to the local lifting services, what we would do is we would white label Investimate for your website so it would say, “ABC Property Manager” with your logo and your color on the front. When you use Door Grow or another service to drive investors to your website, then they come in and they have a way to search for rental properties in your patch or around the country, if you allow them to. Because you still get a referral fee for that and engage with you in that fashion. That’s one part of it.
The second part is if you look at the realtors and I go back to the home buying because everyone gets that business. If you go to the home buying end of the business, what happens? The realtors are all over that bill when it reels its head. When a home buyer says I want to buy, you have a short window in which to grab that person and about 20 realtors are all over it from leads, from various places. The name of the game and how quickly can I get that person.
On the investment side, nobody wakes up and says, “I just have to buy rental property in the next 24 hours. Otherwise I’m going to have a hissy fit of some kind.” That doesn’t quite work that way. When people make that decision saying, “Hey, maybe I should be in real estate, I know a lot of wealth is built that way. I should be out of the stock market, or I’ve already bought two properties, I think it’s time for me to buy another one. I got some excess cash.” What they need is a steady dive of stuff that fits their preferences and in nurturing. It’s very different from the home buying.
The investment platform actually comes with a set of campaign management and a set of investor support services. When you’re under Investimate, and you’re a customer of ABC Property Management. So you come in and say I’m Jason. You register you start using the site, we call you and say, “Jason, we’re investment support with ABC Property Management, we’re here to help you use the system and help you understand what’s in here.” You get acclimatized with the system, you understand what it is, we get an idea of your preferences and the system also captures your preferences.
Now, you’ve told me you like sci-fi movies or romcom and I now keep sending you scifi and romcom till one day you watch that movie, because that’s how investors work. They drip feed them until they put their hand up and say, “That’s probably interesting.” Now I got to buy box. Once I get that buy box, then I call ABC Property Manager and say, “Hey, I’ve got Jason who’s got X amount to invest. He’s looking in Austin. This is sort of his buy box, this is the sort of the property he’s looking for. Please help him out and do the local due diligence.” We serve that lead up at that point. It’s the website, it’s a set of intelligence filter that connects to the local listing service, and it’s a whole analytics lens that allows them to search like they would search with stocks and bonds. I can get more into the data side of it, it’s much deeper than that.
To answer your question what does that local property manager do? He signs up with the service, it’s a small monthly fee, and he private labels it, white labels it on his website, and he’s off to the races. The way we make money, really, most of it is from when there’s a successful transaction. What we ask for them is to load whatever lead customers they have into that proprietary database that always stays there on and then these people as they come in, it’s a fishnet to grab fish, and then we nurture those fish ‘til they buy. It’s a long term way to keep their brand in front of customers and leads and others.
I’ll tell you something that a lot of the property managers are working with, not only loading customers, they’ll think, “Hey, here is a whole bunch of people we touched in the last five years. We didn’t do business with them but we touched them in some fashion. I want those registered to me.” And a lot of them wake up and are prospect of buying stuff. All because once you see the product then they’ll say, “Yeah. I’m interested and I will use this to buy something.” That’s what we bring to the tables. What a realtor gets from a strict MLS feed for home buying, a property manager gets an MLS feed with a bunch of intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. That’s what we’re doing.
Jason: I love the idea. Everybody listening knows or should know that their number one prospect is your existing customer. They already know you, trust you, and like you. You’re already probably managing a property for them. They’re one of the most likely to do business with you again, and if you have opportunities, a property’s available and they’re already investors, it would be a very easier thing to get them into an additional property. They’re going to have a high level of trust with you. If you have this easy pull of properties that they could see and view and they’re getting dripped, and they’re getting notified, and they’re in your funnel and system here, then eventually something is going to grab them. They’re going to go, “Hey, this looks like a deal I could sink my teeth into. I’m going to go for this.”
For the skeptics that are listening, you’ve got the property managers that also do real estate and they’ve already got the MLS and they’re like, “Wow, why don’t I just put the MLS on.” And they can just look for property, any property. Let’s really clarify the difference between just having the MLS and having the Investimate tool.
Don: Great question. The MLS or Zillow or Realtor.com or any of these sites, are geared towards you looking for school pools, stuff that gets you into a neighborhood to live in. What we did is we created a big data platform where we have 110 million properties, we have the entire US Housing Stock, we have 20 years of transactions. We have 200,000 neighborhoods, we have an initiative here with University of California where we collect over 9 million rentals all over the internet so we could put that into our model, and we do a couple of different things with it.
We process over $200 billion of properties to bill them out. What we do with it is first thing we’ve done is we calibrated neighborhoods from A to D as a neighborhood investment grading. Think of this as a bond grading so the D is not, we’re not in D neighborhood. C is not necessarily saying it’s a bad neighborhood, it just says it’s a neighborhood that’s a little bit more volatile, you get in with the lower quantum of money, it’s a high yield property, that neighborhood property isn’t going to give you as much growth. But you can pull me a portfolio depending on what else you’re trying to buy.
An E neighborhood has a higher quantum of investment. It’s a more expensive neighborhood, view is not going to be that great, and you are going to see a lot more growth. The question is should I buy Apple stock at $800 and buy five units of Apple stocks or should I buy something that’s $50 and buy hundred units of it? Or should I do a little bit of both? We’ve given them a risk reward calibration so they can look at both of these things. Then we forecast, we have a model that estimates the rent. We have a rent valuation model, we have a cascade waterfall where we compare to [...] and a bunch of other things to say here’s a range of the rent. We then estimate the price and see if it’s above or below what we model the price to be at. Based on that we come up with a big range on their property.
Then, we provide a con of rich neighborhood information on the renter. If you go to an investment, you’ll see how much money do the renters make, what’s the average income, how come they can afford the rent, where are the rents on this neighborhood, am I an outlier rent? Once my renter goes, “I’ll never be able to fulfill it because I’m the only guy in that neighborhood where my renter’s paying higher among everybody.”
There’s a ton of good strategic data and there’s price trends and rent trends on that neighborhood. When investors go in, it’s a shame when you look at the stock. What’s my risk in this stock? What’s the previous growth has been? What’s my dividend play? What had done historically? What is it expected to do? What other research can I get around it? It’s that one place where all that information is encapsulated.
The potential rental property buyers are doing what [...]. They’re going to go to Zillow, find new property, we’re doing a back of the napkin, going to a rental meter, finding the rent and then coming back, going to a realtor, looking at the neighborhood, they don’t like it, go to another one. We put all of that into one piece on the back of big data.
Like in many model, is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. You and I may be living next door to each other and you’ve done a lot of great things in your property. You may be a little bit different than mine. How do we do that? The property manager solved that last mile problems. The model, the data helps them create a buy box, instead of guard rails, instead of neighborhood, it’s a type of property. And then the property manager goes and then says, “Yes, the data is right on this one. The renter’s exactly what we said.” or “You know what, this property is gutted on the inside and it’s not going to work.”
It’s a combination of that site, of the platform, and the local property manager at the point of purchase. Investimate, you get the best of both in terms of making a transaction. Now, why is the property manager the best partner? Because he or she has to manage that property afterwards. They’re not going to go in and say yeah, the rent’s going to be $2,000, no problem. The moment it closes, then they come back and say the rent’s $1,500, that’s the beginning of the end as far as their whole credibility goes. All that big data is underlying the investment lens of [...], just going in that a little bit more.
When we look at the MLS, we pull the listing services every 30 minutes. It’s real time. We apply 50 to 60 different filters to pull stuff in. We exclude stuff. If they’re common, if we don’t like them, we exclude those things, exclude D neighborhood. There’s a set of filters that go in, then we [...] the rich data, then there’s a que where a set of eyeballs do a quality check. Then, it makes it into the platform. It’s a highly curated investment focused platform that’s available for the property manager to showcase to his or her client.
Jason: Alright, that was a great explanation. Basically, what I’m hearing is this is like MLS. It includes all the MLS stuff but it’s better. It includes more tools, more resources geared specifically towards the investor, and they’re able to make decisions. This is maybe a random question but I’m really curious about these different gradients or different categorizations that you have of risk reward and how are people making this decision whether they want As or Ds?
Don: It really depends on the risk profile, at the end of the day. If you go for a C property, when do you buy a Triple C bond? A Triple C bond is a high yield bond for sure, because it’s not an A bond. But when you buy Triple C bond, you also know that there could be defaults, there could be things that wreck your returns. You’re getting that high yield to compensate for the risk.
When you buy a Triple A bond, it’s more deterministic. In a higher end neighborhood, you’ve got rents that are not quite as high to the ratio of the property price, but you’ve got renters that tend to be more stable, that have been there longer period of time, and their homes tend to appreciate. But it requires more money to get in. It all depends in the investor’s personal preferences, are they looking for money now, are they looking more to build a portfolio and after 15 years when it’s all paid off that’s [...]. Are they looking for growth where they wanna spin around and flip it in five years? That’s a whole different discussion, they you go after more growth properties. You need at least five years for real estate before you cover all your transaction costs, or three plus years.
It just totally depends on the investment and their requirements. They might buy some properties for cash flow, they might buy some for growth, and they might buy some that’s in between. We hear investors say hey, I need cash flow, that’s my number one determinant. Other investors might say I don’t really need any money right now, but I wanna build up a portfolio that will grow and be safe. Others will say I need to cover my mortgage, and maybe make a little bit of money, then the balance in the middle, but I really need properties that are going to appreciate. I don’t really care about cash flow, but I don’t want to be out of pocket.
Those decisions then drive the type of properties, neighborhoods, locations, cities they end up with.
Jason: In your platform, curious, what do you see being the most popular for the investors that are typically using this with property managers in that categorization?
Don: Where people buy, 40% is what I call the B neighborhoods, 40% are on the C neighborhoods which are the high yield neighborhoods, and 20% are the As. As are obviously more expensive, and your buy will shrink when you get to the A neighborhood. That’s roughly what I see.
Jason: Got it. This would obviously work for non-property managers that are using it. Maybe their intention is just to use and look at this for their own stuff, or to look for flips, or turnkeys, or different types of deals than just some sort of long term management situation.
Don: It would work for realtors, any realtors that’s dealing with investors, they are also using the platform. We’ve got a number of realtors that signed up. The realtor piece is a little bit different. I’d sell you a home and you’re not going to buy another home from me for the next 7 to 10 years typically, I’m not going to come every year and sell you a home. Once I sell you a home, if I’m smart, I know you could be a potential investor. I say hey, if you’re looking for rental properties now, here’s a site that gives you local and national rental properties, and I’ll help you out with it. For the realtor, it becomes a cross sell. For a property manager, it’s an upsell, it’s one more property or a new guy coming in. But for the realtor it’s a cross sell to a customer or lead that already spent the money getting that customer or the lead. Now you say what else can I get out of their wallet? And this product does that.
In terms of flippers, we’re not really geared towards flippers. We’re not showing the big distressed assets out there that you can find and rehab. The big thing for the flippers are rehab numbers. How much do I have to put into this property to actually make money on it? I’m buying it $40,000 on the market, I put $20,000 in it so I’m already in $20,000. I can make another $20,000 because I can sell it at market. That requires on the ground running around and understanding what those rehab cost. They can use the system to identify stuff, I’m sure. But at the end of the day, I think these are people driving around neighborhoods or trying to find distressed assets that need that. There’s not an inordinate focus and people on that on that platform, just because our partners are not really chasing those types of deals. We need a partner on the ground for this, solving the last model. Any investor can come in and use it for sure.
Jason: Property managers that are already working with you and using your system in doing this, what sort of changes or feedback or results have you been hearing from them? What are they noticing and how has this changed their business?
Don: One thing a lot of them are noticing is that a lot of their customers or their leads are waking up and they are engaged in looking at properties. There’s two, three things they’re saying. One is they’re making offers and new properties, in some cases they’re selling properties to the system which helps the property manager get a listing. They get that listing, and if the investor is selling the property, they can get to keep the property management because it’s a rental property that they’re selling it as and they’re not kicking out the renter going to a homeowner. I think a lot of people like that because there’s no erosion or churn of their portfolio from that perspective.
Jason: What’s happening is even though properties are selling, which would normally turned into a property management business, they’re able to retain the management contracts and keep the tenants in place.
Don: That’s right.
Jason: Love it.
Don: For those investors that are willing to do that, there’s some that will want to sell in the open market for whatever reason. I think if we can increase the velocity of this, and as more and more people get connected to the investment network when you push something into that, it goes across, gets eyeballs everywhere. It may move a lot faster because the investment on the other end will want a rental property that’s already rented with a track record of history from that property manager, because the property manager will be able to give us what’s been happening in the last two or three years in performance on this property. That becomes a lot more attractive than to buy a new one and then do all this stuff to it.
Jason: So this is a proven property, they’re able to see that it’s rent rolled effectively, and this extends the reach then of this ability far beyond what the local MLS would provide because investors would be out of state and beyond are able to see this opportunity.
Don: And realtors are not that interested in selling rental properties to investors. The MLS and stuff like that, they get the least amount of attention from realtors. Putting it on this platform puts many more eyeballs. We get 120,000 users on the platform today.
Remember, we’ve been at this for four years, four and a half years. As the assigning of these property managers, they’re going into this. The [...] account is increasing dramatically month over month. Out of that, not everyone’s a buyer today but big enough sample size there that people would look at it and say this is something I want to buy. And the more product you put in there, the better you are.
Jason: Say they sign up, how easy is this to get connected into the website? Is it just some javascript code snippet that would be added to a page, or just some HTML like an iframe…
Don: Good question. It’s not iframe, it’s a hyperlink linked with their subdomain that gets added to their website and we can put it right over… For example the DMI franchise is rolling this out to a lot of their franchisees. We spoke to their website company and made sure that the logos and the colors and all that was consistent in how they wanted the brand to look for all DMI franchises and put it out there so they have the same experience, it’s stuff like that. It’s not a massive task, it’s a quick task of getting it up and running. They don’t even need someone familiar with website development on their end to put it up.
Jason: Fantastic. I would imagine besides that, they’re able to feed in maybe their list of clientele, or how do they get clients using or into this system?
Don: They send a file of their clients and their leads, and we separate the two. That gets loaded and tagged to them in the CRM for good. Anytime they do anything, they’re forever tagged to them. We look at the clients one way, we look at the leads one way, and they get a mail from Jason at ABC Property Management saying hey, we just implemented this new tool, come check it out, here’s all that it’s got. A series of mails inviting them to come check out the tool, what’s in it, and then we engage with them as investor support for Jason’s property management company, help them utilize the tool. That’s all branded to Jason, it’s not branded to anything else, it’s all branded to Jason. The backend calls are made to investment support to help them use the system, that’s all Jason.
Then, they start receiving some weekly properties that are hot in their particular market. If they put their hand up, we answer questions and take [...].
Jason: Great. The bottom line, everybody listening, that business owners are all thinking is this makes me money, right? They’re getting the real estate deals, they’re getting commissions on the real estate deals, anything else that I’m missing?
Don: They get a door...
Jason: And they get property management contracts.
Don: Yup, and let’s say for example we have property managers in California. A California property manager’s customer wants to buy in Austin, so the Austin person then can get a referral from the California buyer because the California buyer is not finding something in the price range they want in California.
One thing they always ask, our customers, is do you want to show only your market or do you want to show all markets? There’s pros and cons to it. If you only show your market, then that investor can only buy in your market and that’s all they get and you always get the door. The con is if they ever decide to buy somewhere else, they’re not going to buy through you because you didn’t show that.
Or, you show all markets and then if they do decide to buy somewhere else, then you get a referral fee from that. By the same token, you get inbound traffic from someone else. That’s the idea of that. But we give people that option, because we can show one, or two, or all. Most people tend to keep it fully open, but when you have people that say I don’t want to show anything other than my city. We’re okay with that as well, it’s the business owner’s choice.
Jason: So this has other potential benefits of really setting up a referral network, getting some deals.
Don: Yup. We’ve had situations where property managers just got a door, because somebody is buying a property. Then the person says they need a property manager, so then we get the door. Sometimes, they get the whole thing. If an investor wants to buy in their market, then they become the buyer’s agent, obviously they give up a referral fee back into the system so others can get paid. They get the door and that commission. At the same token then, they refer someone, they get a fee from that person from the door and the commission; it works both ways.
Jason: Alright. Don, this sounds fantastic. Is there any other common questions or things that you think people listening might be curious about related to this? And then how can they find out more?
Don: I think one thing we had expectations on, this is a long term relationship with your investors. Let’s say you’ve got 400 doors and 150 investors, the investors get exposed to it. It’s not that okay. In 60 days, they all come in and say great, now that you’ve given me this, here are 10 properties that I’m going to buy. They will buy over time, but what’s important is they are now much more connected with your brand and you start seeing deals happening with these investors when they decide to buy.
We can’t force them to buy, but we give them a reason to buy, and we give them a product to buy. That’s the one thing. The second thing is we do need the property management person trained on the system. We have a training program and all of that. When we transfer that investor in the right time, they need to be able to use the system to find the next property and the next one if this one doesn’t work out. Because ultimately, they’re the one fulfilling that.
A property management company sometimes has not been in the sales process, they’ve always been at the other end of the food chain. They’ve got to think that if they want to climb the food chain, they do need some competence and strive to be able to go and get that property and close the property with the investor. Although we’re taking a lot of the analytical work in a way by systems giving them all of that. They get a very clear buy box, but they still need to fulfill that buy box.
Jason: Let’s wrap this up, how would people find out more about your Investimate product, and how would they demo this and learn more about the business, and how do they get started?
Don: They would go to investimateroi.com, in there is a little video that talks about the product, an explanation of what it does for property managers and realtors, and an ability to set up an appointment for a demo. The best thing to do is always look at a demo. If they go there and they schedule a time, just like we’re doing here, we’ll get them on an online webinar and we’ll take them through the product and explain what it does, and see if it’s a fit for the business. It’s simple enough, yeah.
Jason: Fantastic. Don, this has been really interesting, really insightful. I think a lot of people’s wills returning as they listen to this. I think that you’ll probably be getting some demos of people checking it out.
Don: Great, thank you.
Jason: Thanks for being on the DoorGrow show.
Don: Glad to be here.
Jason: You can check that out at investimateroi.com. I appreciate Don being on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, then make sure you check us out at doorgrow.com. If you want to join the most awesome community of property management entrepreneurs on the planet, we are hanging out inside the DoorGrow Club. It is a free Facebook group, you can go to doorgrowclub.com, make sure you join the group. We will see you next time on the DoorGrow Show. Until then, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
Are you sure your kitchen table or big-screen TV will fit? If you’re interested in renting or buying a specific property, there’s a few steps to take before actually visiting it. Watch a virtual tour video and get pre-qualified.
Today, I am talking with Michael Sanz of Neesh Property, which started in 2009 and has more than 650 doors. We discuss the benefits of automating property showings, including the opportunity to spend more time with people and to travel. Who wouldn’t want to operate a property management business from beaches around the world?
[02:25] Purpose of Neesh Property: Holistic real estate that helps people buy, sell, rent, and arrange financing.
[03:20] Same Startup Suffering: Michael struggled to start a business, grow new doors, and retain customers.
[03:37] Identify and Prevent Problems: Michael controls and protects his business and simplifies his life through systemization and automation.
[05:45] Workforce Reduction: Michael went from 18 to 1½ staff members and replaced them with property management software to save money.
[07:58] Eliminate Office Space: Doesn’t affect how you do business.
[09:43] Competitive Advantage: Neesh Property closes deals and acquires new business by leasing properties quickly.
[10:30] Retain Relationships: Be client-focused, not location-focused when managing properties.
[12:40] Learn from Mistakes: Try and implement new things, which may or may not work completely; pivot when necessary.
[14:29] What’s the problem? Any problem, big or small, should be documented and automated to disappear.
[16:10] Build Knowledge Base: Take time to make “how-to, what to do...” videos, recordings, and other visuals to help people understand processes/procedures.
[21:05] Leverage People as Process: Create core team of people who are thinkers and decision-makers.
[27:38] Virtual Tour Stats: Neesh Property gets over 85% of its real estate booked based on the virtual platform and averages 1.8 showings per property.
[31:05] Good Tenants Gone Bad: Rather than giving best to the bad, give it to the best of everyone; mesh type of tenant to property.
[50:55] Common Beginner Pitfall: You don’t need to be cheaper than everybody else to get started and compete; change your value proposition.
Save Money: Replace staff members with property management software.
Be client-focused, not location-focused.
Meaningful Connections/Conversations: The rest just falls into place; it’s all systems.
Automation offers the opportunity to simplify your life and spend more time with people.
Matterport: 3D Camera and Virtual Tour Platform
DoorGrowClub Facebook Group
Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.
DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.
I am welcoming all the way from across the pond or even further maybe, Michael Sanz of Neesh Property Management. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Thank you very much for having me.
Jason: I’m excited to have you. You’re a really cool guy. I got to connect with you in the past in person, which was great to meet you in person, and you’ve done some really cool things. But before we get into some of that, and today’s topic for those listening, is automating property showings. We’re going to be talking about that. But before we get into that, why don’t you give people a little bit of background on you and let everyone know why I think you’re so awesome.
Michael: Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me at the conference in Missouri last year. It was amazing. Perfect. As Jason said, I’m Michael Sanz. I am from Australia, from Melbourne, and I have a company called Neesh Property Residential that has been going since 2009, has over 650 doors. I started how everybody else started out in real estate and started from zero, or how much people started, started from zero doors. I had a new relationship started at the time. Add the pressure and the stress of a new relationship coming into a new business, setting all that up.
I started from the study nook in an apartment that I had. I had left a previous business. It was quite a successful business. Left the partnership at the time and I started Neesh Property. What was Neesh Property to me? It was a holistic real estate that help people buy property, sell property, rent property, and arrange the finance. It’s holistic all under one roof.
I had suffered the same problems everybody else has suffered from starting a business, trying to grow new doors, I guess retain business when people sell their properties or go to other agencies. I spent a lot of time methodically going through all the pros and cons of a property management business and I really started to systemize it, automate it, and not let the business control me from an early point, but how I could control my real estate business and what protections I could put in place to make sure that I could do some hyper growth, retain the customers that I had, and simplify life.
A lot of people that know me would have say that I will operate Neesh Property from many beaches around the world. I would close down the company every Christmas time for two months. In real estate, people say, “That’s unheard of. What about maintenance? What about all the problems?” But I identified all these problems and I’ve been out of able to do a lot of travel, and I’ve spend a lot of family time while automating the business.
Jason, as you’re talking about today, automating how I show properties and really break down that process meant that I could be in Missouri and show people property before I went on stage, after I went on stage, and successfully lease property without really having to do anything at all.
Jason: This is wild. I think everybody listening goes, “Michael’s some sort of crazy, weird robot. This is some magical impossible thing. Nobody else can do this.” You’re maybe some sort of savant or guru. But you started your business and from the beginning had this intention of systemizing things and keeping things off your plate to keep that space, and some people, their intentions and focus is very different. They build a business that’s very difficult to manage and to run.
Paint a picture. You’ve got 650 doors right now, I think you’ve said, right?
Michael: I just sold a bulk of that and I’ve got Neesh Property. I’ve automated even more with a new portfolio, but that’s for a whole other conversation.
Jason: Help people understand your business logistically. How many team members do you have? I think this is where it really showcases how different your business is than most companies that are at a similar size.
Michael: Sure. At a point with the business, we had about 18 staff members. We had acquired another smaller business, and we acquired their team, and we had an office. A lot of which goes against the grain having office to me. But when I acquired another business, I took the office and it had a receptionist, it had a business development person, it had an account, they had all these people there. I couldn’t see, with total respect to their role, I couldn’t see the purpose of it, so I knocked them down from 18 down to 1½ staff members. One full-time property manager and one part-time who did routines and edit some showings as required.
Jason: Wait. So, you went from 18, bring on another company, and then you whittled that down to 1½ team members.
Michael: Yeah, correct. I couldn’t see the massive need to have all these people doing accounts when a lot of the property management software already did all the reconciliation. I was just having a bum on a seat to press a button to reconcile. I couldn’t see the purpose of having a receptionist when there are people there who could answer the phone, so we put in a good IVR, a good voicemail system, and we educated.
We identified that a lot of the calls that were coming in were from tenants either trying to report maintenance or [...] it was. Then we put in automated responses there, too, and if there’s any business call, “Press one if you’re a landlord, press two if it’s new business,” and then it would come through to my cell where I could answer and respond to it quite fast.
Identifying the flow of calls, the type of calls that are coming through the office meant I no longer had to have a receptionist there. In Australia, the wages are quite high. We’d be paying someone $50,000–$60,000 to sit at a front desk, to greet people if they came in. We have also identified that as property change, people will less and less likely to come to an office. Tenants wouldn’t necessarily walk into the office and let’s say they did walk into the office, we would be there to greet them but no one was really walking in. Owners rarely walk into an office anymore because they could call you, they could video call you.
We ended up getting rid of the office. We have spent from a big 250 square meter office place to a two-bedroom apartment, and guess what? It didn’t affect how we did business, didn’t affect us picking up new business, didn’t affect us losing any business, and the world still spins. It’s not chaos. For us identifying all these headaches we’re able to see what mattered. If the team couldn’t adapt to technology changes, video, virtual reality, automated IVR systems, and things like that, then there wasn’t really a place in the business for them, respectfully. I actually have one property manager leave to go with a company where they still did paper condition reports because that’s how she wanted to do them.
Jason: Right. You’re welcome to it. That’s so funny. Okay, so this will make a lot of sense and I think you and I have both significant, nerdy, technological side to us. This stuff sounds obvious to me and maybe obvious to you, some people listening maybe not so obvious. If they have all these questions, “How would I do this? I would I do that?” It’s scary. But if you make that your intention and your goal, you’ll figure it out just like you figured out whatever you’re doing now.
One of your big competitive advantages now in closing deals and in acquiring new business is your ability to lease properties so rapidly. Paint this picture of how rapidly and how different your leasing process is, just to prime the pump here.
Michael: To put it into another perspective—I know we touched on it previously—we were full suburbs. We manage properties in over 84 suburbs and we also have properties in two other states, which was Sydney and New South Wales in WA. WA is a four-hour plane ride and Sydney is 1½-hour plane ride from us.
Now, we weren’t insane, crazy totally. We only manage properties of the clients that we actually had on our book and we did that so that we could retain the relationship with them and we would appoint other local agents to help with open inspections or routine inspections, or things like that. And because I’m a frequent traveler, when I was in the area, I would pop in, say good day to the tenants, and just touch face that way, so the owners knew that they are getting full kind of service.
In Victoria, it is very much managed by our office and again, we are client-focused and not location-focused, which was one of our main selling points and is quite attractive to landlords that we had. Because we also offered mortgage brokering, we really didn’t do too many sales, we were mainly property management and then we offered mortgage brokering we saw the value in that. If it was [...] other agents that could help us do the menial tasks.
It wasn’t a headache for us, we didn’t stress about it, but we covered a lot of space. You can imagine when properties come up for rent. It’s cyclical because people [...] properties around at Christmas time, they go home to their families and their friends. We would have sometimes 10%–15% of the book would start to come up for rent and you can imagine the franticness of trying to get out all the inspections, deal with tenants, vacates, and all those headaches that came with it.
Now, it’s probably 11 where I started [...] this. This wouldn’t be a problem with the spread of properties. As I sat down, I started writing down all the problems that I could have. Petrol, time on the road, who am I going to have, how many staff members I need to to do this if I’m going to have potential growth? How do I automate this? That was the biggest thing. How do I automate this? What if it’s Christmas time and I want to go away on holiday? What am I going to do? The selfishness in me also came out because I still wanted to live and being an owner-operator. What would you do?
I identified with myself that if I made mistakes, that was okay because being a business owner, if we don’t try and implement the things we’re looking, that ain’t worth. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work in its entirety. It might mean that you just need to pivot a little bit and change what you’ve been doing to give another go. I had to automate the whole thing and I started the journey.
Jason: I’m hearing a process here and I think you’ve mentioned this twice now. For those listening, you may have caught on this but it sounds like you have this mental process that you go through probably constantly where you list out potential problems, and then you sit down and figure out what are the solutions, and then you have this intention throughout that whole process of, “How can I have vacations? How can I make sure that I don’t have to always be doing it?” Which is a very different mindset than most ppl have. They’re just figuring out, “How to do I keep the business running? How do I make sure that we don’t drop the ball?” And you’re like, “No. How can I,” as you put it, “take Christmas and not have to work? How can I go on holiday and not have to do this, and it would still work?” That’s a different problem to solve.
As entrepreneurs, we’re great at solving problems. But if we don’t give ourselves the right problem to work on, our subconscious isn’t going to work on it, our brains are not going to work on it, we’re not going to find those solutions. We stop prematurely at something superficial and that’s a whole level of depth to go beyond just making sure things work, it’s making sure things work without you. Maybe just describe that. What do you actually do? Do you just pull out a piece of paper and you write all the problems?
Michael: A big point when I had staff in the office is that if anyone reported any type of problem, big or small, it had to be written down. If an owner said, for example, “I can’t reach you on your mobile phone.” Or, “I don’t understand the statement,” just general questions. If someone doesn’t understand the statement, what we did was we recorded what the landlord income statement meant. “This is your name, this is the date and everything.” We do a video. We do a screenshare/screengrab video and in that was a link. If anyone asks anything about statement, it was there for them. It was in one of our FAQs. People could see it. All of a sudden, we didn’t get all these calls.
We worked out any problem in the business. Someone turned out in our office at 7:00 in the morning and said, “Why aren’t you open?” We address those things, we have better signage on the front door, and then all of a sudden, all these problems that a business would have were just disappearing and it was automated. By using video, by using written text, by having window displays, just simple things, the business became automated. So much so that religiously we close before Christmas and we open up towards the end of January, so that everyone gets time off to spend time with their family.
Jason: And everyone being your 1½ team members.
Michael: When I had a lot of team members, they were loving it big time. If people want to go on holiday, they can go on holiday because the business can run.
Jason: All right, so this is really cool. Basically, what you’re talking about is you built a knowledge base of frequently asked questions and leveraged video screen shares, recordings, showing them how to do things so they visually could see, hear, and understand what needed to happen. As they would go through these and have these questions, or you send them a link to this frequently asked questions or in your knowledge base, or you send them this video, they would watch this video. The magic of video is they would feel like you’re right there, walking them through it, tell them, they’d hear you, see you, they feel like you’re taking care of them, and you’re not even there. You did it one time and now, it can be used for 650 different people or however many clients ;that you have. They can go through it multiple times instead of just once because they may not remember. But they’ll remember, “Oh, there’s this thing I can go to to get it.”
Michael: Correct. A lot of the agents who I would speak to is on video. I don’t have to speak to video where it takes time, I don’t have enough time. A lot of the videos early on that I did [...] showing or like a routine inspection or open for inspection. I would just have the camera on a tripod and while I was waiting for people to come, I would do a video. “I’m at this property here. Look at this one,” or, “This is a leaking tap. This is how we address it. This is what we do.” Just small videos and I just built up content.
I had the tenants any problems, what to do if it’s raining. What to do if your hot water service breaks. What to do if your dog runs out to your next door neighbor. Just simple things I turned into a video so I didn’t have to answer again and again. Again, this is like I’ve touched on before when people could call up and they address the problem or an issue or concern, we try to turn that into a video so that it was answered once, solved 100 times.
Jason: The trick is that if you’re going to have to answer ever, once, take note of it, then put it on your to-do list to make a video so you don’t ever have to answer that again.
Michael: Yeah. I think as business owners we need to give ourselves the emotional permission today to take the time, even if takes us half an hour to do it, so we bank up future time. That task is going to take us a 30-minute phone call or whatever it is, we spend 30 minutes recording it now, and you’re going to have that conversation a hundred times, you just saved yourself 50 future hours and you could be doing other things.
Jason: Absolutely. We have done the same thing with clients who go through our program. I used to coach them all directly, but shifting it into video content allowed me to make sure that I said the same thing and got the best information to each client, and it allowed them to watch it more than once. My memory is not so amazing that I could remember every single thing I’ve said to every single clients about every single topic and not miss something. But I could put it into content. If I get a bunch of questions, I can add more content.
I think some people would say, “Jason,” or, “Michael, you guys are really lazy.” I think there’s brilliance in that. I wouldn’t call it laziness; I would call it, we don’t like doing stupid stuff over and over. I mean, really simply, and that’s really frustrating to have to do redundant work. But some people, they love that. They would just do the same thing everyday. They love doing that. That’s not me. I would guess that that’s not really you, either. You like being able to have freedom and not have to answer the same questions over and over and over again.
Michael: That’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result. I can’t understand doing the same thing over and over. I guess as business owners, we also get caught up in the really small things, and those small things we think become really important but they’re not. I’ve got some VAs that do the really menial, small tasks that I don’t even have to think about. Things that our software doesn’t do that a VA would do.
Get out of that mindset that you have to do these really small things because it’s not important and when we identified that owners and tenants just want to get that problem resolved. If it needs to get escalated, then yeah of course, take it on. But the small things, they don’t really care who answers, it’s fine. As long as it’s clear, their problem is solved, they can walk away happy, then they’re good. Don’t stress.
Jason: So, part of this automation, you’re leveraging technology, you’re leveraging video, you’re leveraging a database or knowledge base of frequently asked questions but also, you are leveraging people as process. You’re bringing people almost in a position of almost operating software in some instances. And then you have a core team of people that actually are thinkers and decision-makers that’s really small based on what you said.
Let’s get into then the topic at hand, which is automating property showing. How can those listening start to move towards automating property showings and what are the benefits you’ve seen by doing that? Let’s get them excited about the why they should do this first.
Michael: As a business owner, having staff members and having multiple properties that would come out open for inspection and also understanding that tenants are really demanding, they want to see the property, they would call you up and say, “Is it open now? Is somebody there now? Can I go now?” And then having a staff member get in the car, drive half an hour listening to music, speaking to their family and friends, doing whatever they want to do in the car, get to the property, wait for the tenant to turn up, show them the property, have them say, “Oh, yeah. It’s nice. The walls really look like they did in the photos.” Whatever it is, or they love it and again they’ll buy for it. “Can you wait for my friend to turn up? My partner’s on their way.” All these headaches. They do the inspection and then they spend another half an hour driving back or getting lunch on the way, or however long it is.
One time, okay, but if you replicate that, you’ve got 8, or 10, or 15 properties for rent at that time, that’s a headache for any company because of all these inefficiencies on the road. I identified, “Okay. Well, what do we do?”
My wife was working for a ticketing and event company based in San Diego. She was running it from Australia, it’s the operations. We’re in San Diego one time, I had this massive 3D 360 camera. I was going through all the theaters and from every seat there would be a 360 [...] so that people, when they go to buy a ticket, they could see their exact view of how they’re going to see the stage.
I was like, “Hang on. Why can’t I do this in real estate? What’s stopping me from doing [...]? This is so simple.” The camera was huge. It was massive at the time. Even three months later, I couldn’t find an actual camera to do it. What I was doing was going to the room and taking 100 shots everywhere and then stitching it together. For one image it was taking way too long.
At Christmas time, I was in London, closed the business down, before virtual reality [...]. It can be done. I was walking up the high street in London and I just thought, “I need to find something simple, cheap, to get the job done, and save me more time.” I just went on the phone, I looked at my phone, and I found a local supplier that had the Ricoh 360 camera. It has just been released. I went out and picked it up, and from that point in time, everything I did for real estate, for property had a 360 video.
And went then into step two, and I made sure that all the rental properties had a normal video, just with a smartphone or SLR. From that moment on, when I brought the 360 camera, I really hit all our properties hard. Before I go with 360 virtual reality and video, a lot of people that I speak to, they go out and buy the camera, they’ll do one tour which generally happens after the tenant has vacated and they’ve already had marketing for 4–6 weeks, they’ll do the tour and they’ll say, “You know what? Michael, I tried that. It’s not for me. Didn’t help me get a tenant. It was no good.” That’s the biggest feedback I had.
That’s cool. That’s fine. But for me, I want to persevere. I made sure that every single property we came up for rent, had a 360 virtual tour. Also in the start, it didn’t help with every single property because I had marketed without photos for four weeks prior, and I was able to find tenants thereabouts, most often than not. With the 360 virtual tours, it was the next time that it came up for rent. A tenant would give me notice to vacate. The day they gave me notice to vacate, the virtual tour went up on all the real estate platforms that are out there. We have the video and we have our photos which are okay. They’re good, they’re okay. But from day one, people could start to see the property without me having to worry about booking an open for inspection and the condition of the property is all boxed up, or the whole family’s home or whatever excuse the tenant was, people could start to see the property. That started to change things.
Just to reiterate, if you’re starting off, you have a property that’s coming up for rent, the tenant’s moving out, you can do the 360 tour afterwards. You may not get the hyper result that you’re expecting. Don’t stress. Replicate it on every single property you’ve got and you will start to see massive change from the next time it’s for rent and every time after that. Don’t stress. Give it time. People fail because they give up straight away.
Jason: And then each new door that you’re getting on, you’re going to do the virtual tour at the beginning so you’ll have that moving forward.
Michael: Correct. I got to the point where if a tenant gave notice to vacate, I went in there, and I do the 360 tour with all the furniture in there as it was. I didn’t put that on publicly but I was able to show people with the tenant’s permission, just give them a link, and remove the link after they see it afterwards. I wouldn’t get it publicly on the real estate platforms but I would have the tour and I would give it to people. That changed everything, too. Tenants were okay with that because you can edit the 360 images to blur out photos in the wall and things like that. That was pretty good. I also just did on the iPhone walk-through videos that I could also comment on. I would take just photos, too.
We had over 85% of our real estate booked on virtual platform. Can you imagine, Jason, having 85% of your business, that people can view the property without you having to worry about putting a lot box on, be physically attending the property, and having the issue of staff or even yourself going to have to show that property multiple times? To touch on that, we were averaging at 1.8 showings per property and I’ve got to cancel one showing per property on average.
Jason: No kidding.
Michael: Huge time savings. If you were to quantify that and you’re breaking out 15 properties a month, let’s say, that’s like $150,000 saving in a year, of time and profit based on our letting fees. Our letting fees are small than American letting fees. It’d be significantly higher in America but for us, it’s about $150,000 just the base saving in 15 properties a month.
Jason: Oh, yeah. So, the cost savings compared to the cost of getting the digital cameras and maybe the little bit of work and labor that would take to get these virtual tours done and everything, it was an obvious no brainer, financially.
Michael: Obviously, yeah. For me at the start, I would have spent a couple of thousand dollars, maybe more, trying to really solve it. I have a lot of cameras now, a lot of VR, a lot of 360 cameras, and I’m still using the same one that I bought years ago which was the Ricoh. But I’m trying to find the next camera that gives me more depth immersion like the Matterport but something that fits in my pocket. So, for me to do it, if it does not fit in my pocket, I’m not going to take it with me.
The Ricoh fits in the pocket. I think it’s $170 or something like that on Amazon. A tripod is $30 or $40 on Amazon. To host 22 platforms of the year is $20. The platform that I use is Vieweet It’s one of the cheapest one out there. It’s robust, it’s simple, it’s no frills. If you’re an agency, you’re just starting out, and you’re looking for cheap ways to do 360 automated showings, $130 for the camera, $30 for the tripod, $20 a year to list 20 showings that you can put up and take down. A lot of people don’t have more than 20 properties available all at once.
Jason: It's called Vieweet?
Michael: Yes. If you're in $200-$250 US, you can be up and running today to do these things. But just remember, you may not get that sprinkled dust straight away. It’s something where you build that new catalog that does work. Results have been quite fast because I kept at it and you will, I can’t say, you'll get the same if not similar results that I was getting because what it all sold for us—that’s just kind of the odd part of things, Jason. Our property to more people around the world in different that [...] the property. Rather than having to rely on people to come into a lock box or view the property physically, they may not have been the best quality tenant.
Rather than giving the best to the bad bunch, we’re able to give it to the best of everyone. Anyone who wants to see it within the markets to high-end income, at least they could go to relocation consultants that were actually being paid by people to come into the country to show them properties. We were showing it to the people before they go to relocation agencies in the end. If they will apply, they would inquire, “Hi, Michael. I'm actually relocating from America or Europe. I'll be there next month, try to arrange a viewing.” I’ll send in the link. They view the property. They don’t need to worry about looking at 10 properties when they get here. We can do the process, we can get them out of Skype or Zoom.
At the end of the day, good tenants can go bad. Make sure you get landlord insurance if you can get that. We were so efficient with what we did and that’s probably for another conversation, but we got rent arrears to 0%. Not only will we have to get the best tenants in the marketplace, we get the best tenants that could afford to pay rent and not have any arrears and it solved a massive problem for us too. We are probably at about I think 3½ of rent arrears sometimes because people, they’re just lazy. By changing the type of tenants that we had, also made all the knock on effects that we had so that our arrears is 0% vacancy because we’re able to work credibly with our leases to make sure that longer leases we had better type of tenants.
We’re also able to mesh the type of tenants to the property. For example, if we have an application that was someone 50 years plus as opposed to 18-25 year olds. An 18-25 year old would be more transient and they wouldn’t stay on the property for a long period of time, maybe 12 months. But someone who’s older is typically settling down, they don’t want to be moving around everywhere. We have a bit of a tenant selection too.
Jason: I realized it might be a little different in Australia than here though.
Michael: Well, what we did inside the office, we can verbalize it to the people that apply.
Jason: Got it.
Michael: No one from Australia is watching this, yeah? No tenants that I had.
Jason: Right. This all makes a lot of sense. You have 0% vacancy rate. You’re renting out some of these places before they're even vacant because you're marketing them from the second there's a notice. You're getting people out of state or out of country that are able to look at it. I think it’s brilliant that you've got partnerships you've created in alignment with relocation agencies and relocation agents. I think that's sharp. All of this sounds really fascinating and this is something that anybody can do.
Michael: Anyone can do it. Even like staff members. You’ve got people who work for bosses, there's no reason why [...] to help automate your showing. If a virtual tour or a video, or someone contact you at 10:00 o’clock at night and you're this type of person that picks up the phone at 10:00 o’clock and tries to make a time, you can send them link that’ll pre-qualify them. The good thing about UVR, it shows you the room, the whole room. They can be looking at the whole kitchen. They can be looking at the whole bathroom for so many times you go online and you just see a corner of the bathroom which shows the tiles, the toilet, the shower, and the bath. It eradicates all of that, it’s gone.
I think I showed you too, when we got to the actual property, the other headache was, I'm not sure if my table would fit, or the fridge might fit in the cavity so then we included an incorporated AR, so the augmented reality which was just another boat. With the AR, you can record the screen, so you can be at the property while it’s taken and actually do a video recording of, “This is where your catch goes. This is where the fridge goes, and the TV goes,” and put the furniture down. Then you can send that video to people too when they inquire about, “Will it fit a king sofa bed, or what size is the fridge cavity?” Because people are visual, mostly.
Jason: How are you doing that? How are you putting in beds, virtual beds and things like this into a video?
Michael: The app that I use is a free app. I love this stuff. It isn’t going to cost anyone here. Housecraft. Now that’s free augmented reality application.
Jason: Housecraft, it sounds like witchcraft, it’s like magic. Housecraft, okay.
Michael: It is magic. Again, I have all these tools because they're objection handlers. I don't need to over complicate things because then it just starts making problems. These are free things that anyone can be using. Anyone can do anything that I've been doing. None of it is hard. It’s just I have a better use of my time.
Jason: Yeah. You’re using Housecraft, you're using Vieweet, you’ve got your Ricoh camera, are there any other technological tools that help you automate the showing thing?
Michael: Basically, how it would work for us was a tenant will give notice to vacate or we would have a brand new property come on. We would have the tour or take the tour. We would put that as a link on a description. A lot of the feedback I had from people around the world was, our property software, our showing software doesn't allow us to put a hyperlink in there.
We just put it in the ads, we put it in the ad there too. We had every second photo for us was, “Did you know this property is in virtual reality? Make sure you click on the link in the description.” When people are looking on their smart device, because most people are probably looking ad property searches from their mobiles, it’s important that we could grab their attention with a nice bit of photo, grab their attention saying, “Hey, we've got a virtual tour, or a video, make sure you look at it and prequalify.” Rather than coming to the property and saying it’s for them. If someone did call and inquire the questions was, “Great. Have you seen the virtual tour?” If it was no, it’s like, “Okay, here’s the virtual tour,” and they all had to see it. We would not go to a property unless the person had seen the virtual tour.
Jason: Right. Virtual tour first and then if you've watched that and it's still a go, then we will show you the property.
Michael: Correct. When we did that, when we went to the property, we knew that it was really just a case of them checking if there's a smell, just their general feel, their juju. It was basically they’re going to apply for the property. Typically, if I went to the property, there's a 93% chance they got the property, and it was 96% that they would apply or they’d rent the property.
Jason: Because the virtual tours have filtered out so much.
Michael: Prequalified.
Jason: Now, in the photos where you doing stuff like box brownie and like this kind of stuff or are we just getting photos?
Michael: We change it to make sure that the header photo, the main photo in this sort of style—we’d have a blue sky, green grass—it was just a nice attractive image so that people would click on that, like a clickbait basically. It'll look nice, they click on it, and then the next image was the virtual tour. They knew that there was a virtual tour there and then there are the other photos. They were the only photos that were relevant like the way you actually see the room. If you couldn’t see the room or it was cut off, we wouldn’t show it, because the virtual tour was going to show the property in its entirety.
This just meant that I would not put 20 photos up of a half-baked house when I can put three photos up, a virtual tour video, and a walkthrough video—far greater impact. That’s why we’re leasing properties four times faster than our competitors, and we were getting more than double the amount of views on all our properties according to realestate.com.au which is a massive property platform in Australia. What we were doing was, no major cost difference to competitors, but we were getting twice the people looking at our property, and four times faster with being leased.
Jason: Michael, this sounds really incredible. Having all these stuff in place, it sounds really low cost, and it sounds like it actually saves you a ton of time, and a ton of money to get these things implemented. Now, what I love to do is connect this to how is this helping you grow your business. Obviously, it’s reducing cost, it's reducing staff, but this sounds like a huge competitive advantage selling point when you're pitching to new owners to say, “We have zero vacancy rate. We’re managing hundreds of properties…” which is unheard of in our industry, “…and we can we can get this thing taken care of and lease it out really rapidly. I've got the cameras on me, I'm ready to go. Let’s do this.”
Michael: Correct. There’s a lot of white noise and noise generally in property management. When you're going to a listing presentation, it runs based on the same topics. “We collect rent. We have low vacancy. We are fantastic. We have good systems.” You can basically walk into a presentation and know verbatim what people are going to saying. If somebody inquired about renting out a property, they will get an email from me with our reviews, true statements, and things that we do differently.
When I would go to the appraisal, I wouldn't actually bring anything other than a set of virtual reality goggles. For me, I didn’t go in with a booklet. Everyone kind of expects you to walk in with a booklet and pamphlet like all your competitors do. But me, it’s straight away, “Let's work on that trust that rapport with the owner.” I would walk into the presentation, I put the virtual goggles down the table which is a gimmick, they're a gimmick, and then I put them on the table and then I say, “Mr. and Mrs. Landlord, so tell me, what do you love about your property? What are the tenants going to love about the property? What would you do differently to the property that tenants might also think that they wouldn’t want changed?” I get them speaking about it.
None of it is about my fees, none of it is about my service, none of it is about anything else about me, it’s just about them. Then it gets to the point where, “I can totally see why people fall in love in this property and it's so important that we show people what this property actually offers. Here are a couple of ways that we can do that.” Bear in mind, by the time they've already got to ask and called us, they've gone and seen our Google reviews. They've seen our social profile. They’ve already assessed us when they make the phone call.
Jason: Sure.
Michael: It’s so important that you’ve got some social proof and some history there. If you're just starting out as an agent, get reviews, get some social proof because you really are fantastic. As people, we’re fantastic, and there's so many great attributes. If you're starting fresh, you don't have to look fresh. Jason, you're helping build websites. You can make someone who's just starting out look as a major player in the marketplace.
Jason: Absolutely. I tell potential clients, there's no reason why a company with zero doors or even five doors has to look any different than a company with a 1000 doors. They can have just as good a branding, just as good of a website, and we can help them with the reputation stuff. We have our service gatherkudos.com for those listening that you can check out, which helps you facilitate or lubricate I guess if you will, that process of getting more reviews from clients.
Michael: There's no reason why you can’t. “I don’t have clients to get reviews.” “I'm sure you've done business with people before and they can leave you reviews.” That’s all you need, just that momentum. From the time that we’re meeting with them, they know a little bit about us. I'm not concerned about any other services because they all know that we collect rent, and we find tenants, and we manage maintenance, and we do all that stuff. It's going to the owners that we will love their property, and really focus on the things that they love also, and identify the weaknesses of the property too because it’s important for us at the start the owners to acknowledge their property may have some shortcomings.
They wouldn’t have to have that awkward conversation later. The prospective tenants said that, “I like the pink wall in the kitchen.” We get the owners to draw out what they think is needed in the start, and then it sets the time. Then I bring out the virtual goggles, and I say, “This is one way that people are really going to immerse themselves in your property from their own lounge room. We also had virtual goggles and Oculus Rift in our office, so when people came in and they want to get a rental list, we stop giving out paper and we would say, “What are you after? A three-bedroom, two-bedroom?” And give them the goggles, and show them a property.
We have far greater success than coming in, picking up some paper in the office, leaving, throwing it in the bin later on for one property they might be interested in. We cut down on paper too, Jason. That was a pretty good experience. We went paperless. For new owners, they could say that we were focused on serving the customer, rather than they burdened with admin and just a slow death in a real estate office. We could show them some of the other tours we've done. We were doing drone work too Jason, where we would showcase the aerial view of the property in proximity to shops because that was another question that people would say, “Probably looks great, but what's it near?” In Australia, with Google maps, sometimes, they hadn't caught up, so the area would look like just massive farmland, but actually, they’ve built up a state with shopping malls, and freeways going through it. We take aerial shot, and show it from what it was near. With owners, I think, I was at 140 doors and 141 appraisals.
Jason: You show up for these initial contacts at the property, or these appraisals, or whatever you're doing, and you would pull out virtual reality goggles, and set your camera there, and start describing what you do.
Michael: Correct. Now, fast forward a few more years, we didn’t have to go to the property anymore, because I had the virtual tours online, and people can see them, and it would tie on my websites, so people could see that too, and they got to the point where people would make an inquiry, and I will send them a video message. They're already seeing all the proof statements, and a video message to start the initial conversation. I didn't have to meet all these owners, I try to meet all the owners. Sometimes I make time for if they're interstate, they were overseas, whatever the reason. I found other ways to get inside the living room without being in their living room. You have the virtual tours, and then you get the video text messages, and a lot of people will say, “I’m too scared to do a video text message. What if I say the wrong thing?” I say, “It's easy, don’t send it. Just do it again.”
Jason: Right, re-record it.
Michael: If you're doing a video, you can edit it. If it’s not live, edit. If it’s live, I’d say laugh. So what? Make a mistake, we’re human. I will make the same mistake speaking with you, as I would do on a video. Recapping on it, our process was, every property had to have a virtual tour. When I had the staff, they weren't happy going out and taking a virtual tour, because it would take them between 15 minutes to 30 minutes, maybe depending on how many rooms there were. It's a very fast process to take photos and then you just copy them on to the Vieweet platform, and you put the hyperlinks, the hotspots, and the tour is done. The tour might take you 45 minutes to do.
For me, that's no problem at all, if it’s a big one. If it’s small one bedroom place, might take you five minutes to stitch it together. It just depends. The more you do it, the faster you become. Every property had the virtual tour, had the video, had some updated photos. It just meant that as a tenant, trying to select for the property, all the problems were answered. As an owner, we're now looking at other agents online who’s going to rent out their property, they can take the methodical process of photo, virtual tour, application form. That’s very simple process. We then are going to back it up with proof statements, like the rent is zero vacancy. All those other things that were important, because if you guys are doing an appraisal and start just reeling off everything you do, you're the same as everyone else, but if you can show proof statements, then it's 97% there.
Jason: Love it. You can easily send a video introducing yourself, and you can send them link to a page of video testimonials from clients. If you can give them all the social proof, and you say, “Look at how we market the properties.” Send them the link to your rental listings. “Here's an example. Here's a property similar to yours maybe.” Suddenly, they can imagine all of it, they can see it, and it becomes real to them. This becomes this huge competitive advantage in this huge differentiator between you, and other property management companies, and then it's allowing you to close more deals. I would imagine it facilitates word-of-mouth, because people are going to talk about you because they're probably impressed.
I would be impressive if somebody showed up with goggles, and camera, and show me tours, and sent me a video text message. I'd be like, “These guys are on top of things, and they're tech savvy, and they're going to take care of me out of the gate.”
Michael: I guess one of the great things is, I won't mention the exact pricing, but we were full fee. We weren’t competing with, “But that agent is offering a cheaper fee,” anymore. We’re full fee, we’re doing full leasing fee for management estate. In Australia, we can't charge as many fees as you can in America. I wish we could, but we were full fees. I was maximizing every potential fee that I could, so routine inspection fees, higher statement fees. We were full fees, we don’t have to compete with someone. I remember when I started, Jason, and I’m trying to get traction, I sent out a thousand flyers to people and offered a low management fee to people for three months. I got one person out of the thousand that I sent out, that was great, because there were multiple referring client. But starting out, thinking that I have to charge something low, so that I can get in front of more people was one of the biggest crazy thoughts that I had at the very start.
Jason: It's one of the most common beginner pitfalls is, “I need to be cheaper than everybody else to get started and to compete.”
Michael: Yeah. If I just realized back over 10 years ago that my value proposition had to change.
Jason: Yeah.
Michael: “Not with my fees but with my value proposition. How do I not complicate it? Now, I no longer have any other office. I work from a home office. I've restructured because I don’t want to have physical staff. I've got VAs that do all the menial tasks. All the properties that we have are on the virtual platform. I've got no properties arranged at the moment. No rent arrears. Last year, I was abroad seven months of the year. I was in Turkey for two months, Indonesia for two months, in and out of America, or like interstate. I traveled a lot.
This year, maybe four months of the year. If I get a new business, I will have someone go and do the virtual tool for me. I’ll train a simple person who doesn't want to do anything else if I'm not around. I enjoy going to the properties and checking them out. I'm a bit of a property nerd, I like checking them out, seeing how we can add value and connecting. The most important thing for me as an agency was to make sure that we have meaningful conversations, getting rid of all the clutter and all the noise. Instead, we will focus on the good happy goals, the meaningful connections, making sure that we can add value to our customers and our clients. That was our end result, to have that meaningful connection. The rest just all falls into place, it’s all systems.
Jason: You didn't go into it thinking, “I just want to automate everything to the nines.” Your core end goal was, “We want to have meaningful connections,” and then, “I want to have freedom as I'm doing this,” to just focus on that.
Michael: Yeah. Automating it just allows the opportunity to spend more time with people.
Jason: I love it.
Michael: It wasn't to make it so easy that I could travel a lot. It just meant that I need to get better connections. I pick up properties from going overseas. So many Americans travel. I've been in Europe and picked up a new management system [...] abroad. It gives me that flexibility. Also, you get to actually get new systems. People do things differently, so go out and see how other people are doing things to make their businesses better and how can you implement it in your business. It’s so important.
Jason: Yeah. I think I heard a quote the other day that was, “Travel is the language of peace.” The amount of tolerance, and learning, and growth that happens just from being in different environments and different cultures, I remember taking a trip to Israel and it just was so different than what I was used to in the US. Even the checkpoints where kids were holding machine guns. It was just all so different and it was just really eye opening. I've been in Mexico, very different.
You’ve been exposed to so many different cultures. You get to really fill your soul with having this variety in life. I think that's part of why a lot of people are in property management. They love that unique variety. There's all these different unique challenges that come with it. There’s all these unique opportunities to meet unique people. You really got to focus on the even best and highest portions of that by being able to treat that freedom.
Michael: Don't be scared of doing anything. Don’t be scared of making mistakes. Trial it. If it’s not 360 for someone, if it’s not video for someone. Go ahead and trial things and see how it can give you that freedom, but also to be able to engage with people, family, and friends. Imagine if you live in a suburb and you've got a sports club, a church, a local pub, or whatever you’ve got, all these meeting places but you never get to go there because you're so busy trying to do the admin. You're a local real estate agent and you're not even able to local. Flip that upside down. Imagine if you're a local real estate agent doing local things because you have all these other things automated and being done for you while you're networking, and meeting, and engaging with people in your area. Imagine for a second how different that looks.
Jason: Yeah, I love it. I think, Michael, everybody listening has probably by now hopefully felt a little bit inspired that there's this possibility that you've painted for them that is probably for a lot of property manager still outside the current world view. I think that's exciting. I appreciate you coming on the show. How can people get in touch with you and what sort of take away would you want to leave them with?
Michael: Well, if you’ve got any questions about anything we've spoken about today, just hit me up on Facebook and send me a message and I'll respond that way. It’s probably the easiest way rather than giving you a cell number or an email, just go to Facebook, we can connect there. I'm on messenger, it’s the simplest way. Again, I guess the constant message that we've been discussing today is try it; don’t give up, try new things that may automate your business and give you more time tomorrow even though you’re spending more time today to get it done.
Jason: Perfect. This is an episode I will hope that people will listen to more than once. Michael, I appreciate you coming on the show.
Michael: You're welcome.
Jason: I think you gave a lot of value. I'm grateful to you. Thanks for being here and sharing so many ideas.
Michael: Thank you.
Jason: Alright, cool. That was really fun for me as a nerd to have Michael on. Message him through Facebook. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, as I said in the intro, then you should be a part of our community. You would love it in there. Make sure you join the DoorGrow Club. You can get into that by going to doorgrowclub.com.
Our Facebook group, there's really cool people in there like Michael, and there's just some phenomenal helpful property managers. People that buy into this vision that good property management can change the world. That what the industry needs here, especially in the US is collaboration over competition. These are people that are willing to collaborate, willing to help, willing to support you.
Make sure you get inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group and check it out. If you join that group, if you apply and join that group, it's free, but you have to apply. We will give you some free gifts including a fee bible and some other really cool takeaways and gifts over the next few days after we welcome you to the group, just to welcome you aboard, part of our Facebook group. Check that out at doorgrowclub.com. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everybody.
The American dream no longer represents home ownership. Whether you’re looking to rent or buy, everyone wants the same thing: A place they call, “home.” Not a house, but a home. There is a difference.
Today, I am talking with Chris Litster, CEO of Buildium, which helps property managers handle properties, leases, tenants, and units. Chris shares how property management firms should focus on customer service, relationships, and reputation.
[06:53] Service Oriented, Relationship Focused: Avoid treating residents, owners, or vendors adversarially, if you want to be a successful property management firm.
[07:43] Millennial and Baby Boomer generations view home ownership as a burden. When things change, personally or professionally, they want to be able to move.
[09:25] One reason to rent is to avoid dealing with and doing maintenance. Time is better spent focusing on other priorities.
[11:19] Multiple generations want technology from property management companies to automate payments, submit maintenance request, and perform other tasks.
[12:04] People demand a strong relationship with their property management “firm.” Their moving away from using the term, “Landlord,” because of the baggage it brings.
[12:25] Property managers should make their language more friendly and appealing.
[15:50] Property management firms should shift their mindset to be service-oriented and understanding to have stronger relationships and less resident turnover.
[17:40] Property managers have a massive network and influence with owners, tenants, potential residents, and others. They can cause a ripple effect and change the world.
[19:50] Every property manager says they’re the only good ones. All others are terrible. A mindset of scarcity has been falsely created in the industry.
[20:50] Low levels of awareness and perception impact a business’s ability to grow.
The industry needs collaboration over competition.
[22:41] Buildium believes, knows, and has evidence that service orientation and relationships matter.
[25:38] Core principle and goal of technology is to take care of customers and solve their problems efficiently.
[28:53] Strategic vs. Tactical Timing: Expanding and growing a business takes time and effort. Automating processes gives you time to think strategically.
[30:57] SEO Lottery Addiction: Spending revenue on SEO won’t generate ROI.
[37:21] Ladder of Autonomy: Companies that understand their business, customers, message, and differentiator are at the top level and benefit everyone involved.
[38:43] Fundamental Funnel Basics: Brand, pricing, reputation, Website, sales process.
American dream no longer represents home ownership.
Landlord Stereotype: Evil person who collects your rent, but doesn’t take care of things.
Low levels of awareness and perception impact a business’s ability to grow.
The industry needs collaboration over competition.
All Property Management - a Buildium Company
DGS 3: Buildium’s 2015 State of Property Management Report – Part 1
DGS 3: Buildium’s 2015 State of Property Management Report – Part 2
National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM)
DoorGrowClub Facebook Group
Jason: All right, we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.
DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.
Today, I have a special guest. I am here hanging out with Chris Litster, the CEO of Buildium. Chris, welcome to the DoorGrow Show.
Chris: Hey, Jason. How are you? Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I’m just flabbergasted by that opening. The energy, I could already feel it. It’s going to be a great hour.
Jason: Yeah. I put quite a bit of thought into that little intro.
Chris: It’s great. It’s fantastic.
Jason: Yeah. We’re pretty passionate about this and we want to champion a cause here. Chris, I’m really excited to have you on. I love to get a little bit of background on you and how you got connected to Buildium. Give us a little history here.
Chris: Sure. I’ve been with Buildium now for just over a little bit of 2½ years. I have been in the SMB or the small- and medium-sized business market space for probably 15–20 years. I’ve been in tech for a lot longer than that. I was with IBM for a while, a couple of other tech companies, then I landed at Constant Contact in 2006. It was an email marketing firm for small businesses like MailChimp and a couple of other players in that space.
I was with Constant Contact for 10 years, started with them, they’re pretty small, and that when we grew them and scaled with a great team at Constant Contact. Ultimately, ended up selling them three years ago, selling Constant Contact. Took a year off to reacquaint myself with my wife and three boys. During that 10 years they have the short end of the stick as we’re building Constant Contact.
During that time off, I had the opportunity, through different acquaintances and such, to meet the former CEO and one of the founders of Buildium, Michael Monteiro, who I know that you had on this show. Michael, at that point, was interested in just talking with folks who had scaled companies before. Buildium was on the verge of that inflection point of really scaling and revenue growth was starting to really accelerate. Michael and the team at that time over the past 12 years or so, had grown Buildium to where it was. Now, because of our great product, great team, and great customers, we are ready to go to the next level.
We started talking and it took three times of meeting each other. Finally, it was either he or maybe it was I who had said, “Hey, wait a minute. Do you want me here and did you say, ‘Hey, would you want to join us?’” I wasn’t really ready to jump back into the space yet but there’s so many great things going on here at Buildium that I decided to. The fact that Buildium again was focused of small and medium business was something that really attracted me because this is where I get my passion from the small business folk. The fact that it was then focused on one vertical instead of hundreds, that being property management on the residential side, I jumped in.
I joined a couple of years ago as the Chief Customer Officer and for that, I was responsible for sales, marketing, partners, support, and success. I did that for the next year, year-and-a-half or so. Around that time, Michael and I started talking about Michael looking to transition out of the CEO role. He’s been the CEO since founding—that was 12 years or so—and we started talking. Last July, we went through the transition. I have now been the CEO since last July and I’m loving every minute of it.
Jason: Cool and what’s he up to now?
Chris: Michael and Dimitris, our other founder, are both advisers here at Buildium. Dimitris has a couple of things going on but he’s here a couple of days a week helping us out with some of the larger initiatives that we have going on. Michael’s here a couple of days a week advising me, the rest of the exec team. They’re both active board members for Buildium. It’s just great having them both here because it just adds to that continuity, builds on the history. I can turn to him and say, “Hey, this customer that’s been around for 10 years. How did we get them and what were the things that they were looking to do 10 years ago?” so that when I go and meet them, I know the history that they’ve had with Buildium and how we’ve helped them grow.
Jason: Great. The topic that we had discussed or that we had down is homes, not houses. Let’s get into that. What do you mean by homes, not houses?
Chris: Great question. I’m sure, as many people know, Buildium is in the residential space, as far as helping property managers with our platform to manage their properties, manage their leases, tenants, and units. Also on the accounting side. We have 16,000 customers, we’re managing on the platform about 1.8 million units, and through that, we have the ability to not only talk and speak with our customers in the residence, but also because of our partnership with NARPM and a few other things, we do a ton of research.
We have most certainly seen over the past couple of years, this trend where the idea of the importance of relationships between the property management firm and their residents has really taken on a new and different light where relationships have become so important. As part of that, the realization that regardless of if you rent or if you buy a home, everyone is looking for the same thing. Even when you are a renter, you are actually looking for a place that you can call home. The idea of referring to this as a rental property or a rental unit, in the minds of the resident, they’re really looking to understand and get that feeling of, “Hey, I’m going to call this home.”
Why are they doing that? Because frankly, there’s many trends that are going on, both at, let’s say, the millennial segment as well as in the upper segments of the baby boomers, where this idea of the American Dream where it used to represent home ownership no longer really stands for that. It’s the whole idea of that, ‘I just want to find a home.’ By calling it a home and not a house, what we’re trying to do is bring that idea of belonging and bring that idea of where can I put my roots down. Just for the fact that I didn’t sign a mortgage and I have a rental agreement, doesn’t mean that my aspirations are different somehow.
Because of that, property management firms should really take that idea really as far down the road as they can and understand that they have to be service-oriented. They have to be relationship-focused. This idea sometimes of looking at residents or your owners or your vendors in somewhat of an adversarial way, is no longer something that you can do if you really want to be a successful 21st century property management firm.
Jason: That makes a lot of sense. I think part of the challenge is that nowadays, millennials and the younger generation, a lot of them see home ownership as a burden. They see it as a tether in a lot of situations. We live in a day and age in which people can work from coffee shops, they can have freedom, they can travel, and jobs change. It’s no longer the day and age where people will stay in the same career sometimes for just 20 years. When things are changing, they want to be able to move.
I think also, one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed renting was I didn’t have to do the maintenance stuff. I do want to have to deal with that. I either have to hire a house manager to manage the property for me or have a property manager that helps manage those things for me. I don’t want to have to deal with that. My time is far better spent on my business, with my family, those kind of things, and that’s not just a priority for me. I don’t have any sort of kick out of doing that stuff.
Chris: Exactly and that’s not only. So, 100% on the millennial side. The idea that even though they may only be a resident for a year or two years, again, they still want to have that strong feeling of being able to call this their home. The same thing, for different reasons, is on the baby boomer generation. Here we now have this generation who are quickly becoming empty nesters left, right, and center, and they now have really no more great use for the large house that they have in the suburbs. They have all this space, again to your point, they no longer want to have to clean in every week and they no longer want to maintain this beautiful house. So, what they’re doing is actually selling their houses.
We’re seeing a big trend of, for example, there’s a brand new neighborhood here in Boston that has just grown over the past decade or so called the Seaport. Many empty nesters are moving into the Seaport and renting. Actually, they’re renting it with some of the leases are almost renting at will, a three-month lease, a half year lease, for the same reasons that you talked about. They want to now travel. They want to have that flexibility that, should they want to pick up and explore another part of the country or another country altogether, they don’t want to be burdened, like you said, tethered down by the fact that they’re carrying this mortgage. That is changing on the top end as well.
The interesting thing that binds these two segments together, these two parts of our industry together, is they’re both asking for technology. They’re both asking for technology with their property management companies for automation of payments, understanding, “Hey, if I have burst pipe, I don’t want to have to call but rather perhaps tell Alexa that there’s a burst pipe or you log into the portal to put in there maintenance request.
Even though many people look at millennials and baby boomers as quite different—in many cases they are—there’s a huge intersection in the property management space that both of these segments share. The largest one that we’re seeing, there’s two. One, again is around technology and the other one is demanding a really strong relationship with their property management firm and actually moving away from even using the word ‘landlord’ because there’s just so much baggage in that word. But saying, “My property management company,” or, “My property manager,” it really works to strike in the relationship that they’re looking to have.
Jason: Let’s talk a little bit about the language then because I think that does matter. I think you’re right. The word ‘landlord’ is always been displayed or the archetype of the landlord is this sort of evil person that you have to pay rent to and that doesn’t take care of things. This is what you’ll see in shows. They’re often this great antagonist in virtually any show.
Because we’re talking about homes, not houses, what sort of language should a property manager be using? How should we be rephrasing this to make things a bit more tenant-friendly and shifting towards being more appealing towards residents?
Chris: That’s it. That last word you just used. We strain and really speak with our property management customers about the idea of resident versus tenant. There’s just a deeper meaning around resident as opposed to lacking emotion the word tenant. As the title of what we’re talking about here today, wherever you have that opportunity, use the word home as opposed to unit. Unit is so devoid of any emotion. Even if it’s a rental apartment or even if it’s a multifamily property, when you’re talking with the residents, talk it in a sense of their home.
And the idea of partnership. We talked about looking for a deeper relationship amongst all of the different constituents that our property management company works with. Instead of looking at it as us and them, you talk about the partnerships. The partnership that you have together with your vendors, the maintenance vendor or your service partners. The partnership that you have with your owner. So really, getting away from, again, that adversarial type of thing and being deliberate about using this language and taking the time to check yourself as a property management firm, to make sure that you’re using that language that holds your constituents or your partners in, as opposed to setting up that wall between you and your resident, you and your vendor, or you and your owner.
Jason: Got it. I’ve heard some property managers joke that calling your clients your owners has this psychological negative impact. If you call somebody your owner, they own you. You’re like a slave to them.
Chris: Yeah. You reminded me of another one. Definitely that idea of client versus owner, tenant versus resident, service partners instead of, “This is my landscaper or roofer.”
Jason: I like the idea of service partners instead of just vendors. The latter sounds pretty cold. All right, we’ve addressed several target audiences here that are connected to property management. Tenants instead of our residents, owners instead of our clients, vendors instead of service partners. Are there any other groups we’re missing here?
Chris: No. I think, yes, it’s language but if you look at the property management firm itself, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen. It’s that idea of being service-oriented and being understanding that if you get that service-orientation, you’re going to have stronger relationships and you’re going to then hopefully have residents who stay in your properties longer, so then not having to deal with your turnover expense, the constant ins and outs, and just building those bonds.
Ultimately, again, building the language with that mind shift. We have customers that are just living into this idea. Not only are they growing, they start to get a reputation for this. We know in our space, word of mouth is so important that they’re seeing people coming to them and saying, “Hey, I’ve heard that you really are doing something different and you really are looking to help with the service perspective. And on top of that, you’re using some cool technology that helps build on the relationships.”
This idea of technology taking out the human factor is not what we’re talking about. Being a technology vendor, some people are somewhat surprised to hear that. We look at technology being the enabler, to help firms become more efficient so that they then have the time to be able to focus on building these relationships, making sure they’re service-oriented, and making sure frankly that they’re differentiating themselves from everybody else in the pack.
Jason: I think that’s a really important distinction. Going back to what you’re talking about, you’re talking about with residents, with clients, service partners, you’re talking about just in general being a more respectful company honoring other people, caring about other people. I really believe that property managers have a massive network. They have a massive ripple effect between all the owners, all the tenants, all the different people that they connect with, even potential residents, they are able to have quite a big influence. It can be a bunch of little micro interactions that are negative, and it can be lots of micro interactions that are positive. That little shift, even in language and little things. This is what gets me excited about our company, DoorGrow, and impact that we get to have through our clients. But I really believe that good property management can change the world.
Chris: I completely believe that. I’m with you 100%. That’s so great.
Jason: So, good property management can change the world. Bad property management [...] industry and it can have a massive ripple effect either way.
Chris: Well, think about this. To you’re point, driving and if you’re commuting somewhere, we know that property management firms love to have the banners, love to have the advertising, “This building is managed by so-and-so.” If they have a bad reputation, people that are two, three, or four degrees away from that actual company, there’s a good change that they know of that reputation. So, even though I’m not directly involved in XYZ property management firm, when I drive into Boston every morning, I know of folks, those that aren’t even our customers, I know the reputation that they have. I think that’s a good example of that ripple effect. They’re always out there. You can’t miss those banners. There’s just this constant on of this advertising for these property management firms, that if they don’t have that great reputation to back it up, like you said, it can impact them pretty directly.
Jason: I think it’s even bigger than that and I want everyone listening to realize this. A lot of property managers I talk to, they say, “Well, we started our company because there weren’t any good companies in our market,” or they tell me, “We’re the only good ones. All the other ones are terrible.” But everyone says that.
What’s interesting is I think some people have this mindset of scarcity that I think has been falsely created in this industry. In single family residential, according to Iceberg Group, we’ve got about 70% that are self-managing. There’s tons of blue ocean, tons of available potential market share, and yet everybody’s been fighting over the coldest, worst, most difficult leads.
I think the thing to realize is that there really isn’t scarcity right now in the US. There really is not and the thing that I really want listeners to pay attention to is that the companies that have bad reputations in your market are hurting your ability to grow your company because of that. The awareness level is low and the perception level is low. Those two things are impacting your ability to grow.
I think what the industry needs right now is collaboration over competition. Collaboration allows you to feel safe helping your competitors. A rising tide raises all ships is sort of true but it sinks some because the tide is low in the industry as a whole. Some of those ships are not seaworthy and they’ll sink. But I think if you can lift up the ones that are seaworthy, there’s going to be a lot more business to go around. The ones that are at the top promoting the industry are going to be the ones that win.
Anytime there’s a new business category in the US, the person that builds the category instead of their own individual brand is the winner. Google built the category of internet search. Now we google everything. Whether you’re on any other search engine, “I’m going to google it.” Kleenex built the category of disposable paper facial tissue. Everyone was using handkerchiefs before that. So now, Kleenex is synonymous with any tissue. “Give me Kleenex.”
Property management has been held back, I believe, and has a huge opportunity to grow. It’s been around for decades but the problem is the awareness level is on par with brand new industries. I don’t even know of any other new industries that exist in the US that are as young in reputation, perception, and that sort of infancy other than maybe marijuana, vaping and these kind of things. Property management can be as big, I think, as the real estate industry. It has that potential. We barely scratched the surface.
Chris: I completely agree. It’s funny that you used the all the boats rising because we talk about that all the time here at Buildium. We talk about the idea that this industry is ripe for so many things as far as growth and a little bit of disruption, as far as technology adoption, and it’s all for the idea of introducing the true human element into the industry. Further, this idea that everyone who really buys into that is then going to rise up because as you said, I think there’s enough pie for everybody.
It’s really interesting when we’re at either some of our meetups or we’re at NARPM, there is a real camaraderie around those folks. You can almost tell those folks that have really been successful around this idea of understanding, it’s the strength of relationships that count. Why? They’re not threatened by the other property management firms because they know that their relationships are solid, that their residents, their clients, their service partners are going to stay with them, because they know the reason that they’re going to stay with them. They don’t mind talking with other PMCs because they know that they’re solid in their business.
What really working here to try to bring that element, obviously in addition to the technology. But there is a change that needs to happen and frankly, it’s not just a, “Hey, we think you should change.” What we’re saying is, “We 100% believe, know, and have evidence that people who take this idea of service orientation, this idea of relationships matter, and using technology to get to those, we know it works.”
Again, 16,000 customers and we have so many of them that are successful, who have bought into that entire idea. What do they have? They have happy long-term residents, they have happy clients, and they have happy service partners that aren’t going to go anywhere else because they know they’re in it together. That’s what we’re looking to really continue to help and help the entire industry here, which is really exciting.
To your point, there’s an opportunity here that not too many industries have. We have seen research that says that the property management industry is the third highest industry in interaction with constituents, let’s say, because they have to deal with residents, they have to deal with their clients. That idea of total interaction and ongoing interaction with people, it’s the third highest. What are the other two? Hospitality and retail. That’s pretty good company that they’re in and hospitality and retail understand that relationships matter. Now, it’s time for the third person or the third set in this industry to realize that.
Jason: That’s really an interesting little factoid right there. Let’s go back to what you mentioned earlier. You’re talking about tech enables you to spend more time on relationships. I think there is this mythical creature that everybody’s chasing after that looks like this robot that will run their business for them. They can cut out relationships and they can have this business that runs itself. It could be super easy. I think when we chase that mythical creature, we end up chasing a pipe dream. It becomes really difficult and we alienate ourselves from our customer base.
I think that’s an important thing to point out what you’ve mentioned earlier. I love technology. I’m a total nerd, I love it, I love automation, I love geeking out on this stuff. But the whole goal of all of it, everyone needs to remember the core principle that it’s about your customer. It’s all about giving your customer more depth. I think instead of trying to hit more people, more superficially, more quickly, we need to figure out how to go more deep, more personal, and connect more with more people. If that becomes the focus, then we can leverage technology and automation to take care of the mundane, while we focus on the relationships and getting us personal and as deep as possible.
I’ve noticed that a general rule I give to my team, that if any is a sticky or difficult communication, or situation, or somebody’s not happy, we want to go as personal as possible. The most personal would be in person. Second most would be a video call like this. Third would be maybe a phone call. But it needs to be as personal as possible because it just calms the situation down, it makes things easier, and really that’s what people want. People want to be taken cared of. A business only exist if it’s serving somebody and if it’s solving their problems and their pains. That’s only the reason a business exist. You cut yourself off from the customer, you’re really killing your ability to have a business.
Chris: Right. Do you want to come and do our copywriting? You’re hitting on every single thing that are just so fundamental to what we believe here at Buildium. The idea of using technology for technology’s sake is a non-starter. The idea of using technology, as you talked about, to serve something and what we truly believe, after talking with our customers and understanding the industry, that using technology leads to the greater efficiency that offers you the ability to then spend your time where you can and where you should from an important business perspective.
There are two things. The efficiency brings your ability to spend time with, again, your various partners or clients and your residents. So really, get to know them, to really understand them, to really interact with them because now you don’t have to be chasing them for, let’s say, the rent payment because that’s automated. You don’t have to be chasing them for understanding their tasks, their needs from a maintenance perspective because that’s automated.
Rather, what you need to talk with them about is, “Hey, am I meeting your expectations to help you build this home, this idea of a home?” “Hey, am I meeting your expectations as my client?” “Hey, how can we think of growing this business together?” That’s the second part.
The second part is how do I look to grow my business? If your goal as a property management firm is to continue to expand, that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of effort. You really need to understand what type of properties you’re really good at, what types of residents you really want to have, what type of clients you really want to get in business with. That’s not something you can just do haphazardly. You have to work at it. You have to plan at it.
If you’re not focused on, as you said, those things that can be repeated and processes that can be automated, that gives you the time to really think of you business strategically to continue to help grow. You are, in a directed fashion, going after and driving how you want to grow your business, so you’re growing your business and your business isn’t growing in spite of you or growing at you. You’re taking control of it and you’re working in a methodical way now to grow your business and become more efficient.
Jason: You mentioned something that stood out to me, talking about strategic timing. This is one of the first things we have clients do when they come aboard with us, is we have them do a time study to get really clear on how much strategic time they’re spending in the business and how much tactical time. Usually, their strategic and tactical ratio is almost 99% tactical. It’s like everything is completely tactical. You’re just doing work in the business. You’re handling emails. You’re doing phone calls. You’re dealing with your calendar. You’re just working. Business can’t grow if there isn’t strategic time. Strategic time is the time you spend to focus on growth. If that doesn’t exist, you won’t be growing.
I think another thing that’s important to point out is you talked about how customer service and relationships really matters. One thing to point out that I think a lot of property managers listening, I talked to hundreds of property management business owners that they want to do good customer service. They want to be the good company. I don’t think of of them wake up in the morning and say, “I want to be terrible to tenants, I want to be terrible to my owners, and fight terrible customer service.”
I think one of the big things holding them back is that the entire industry is addicted to the SEO lottery. The SEO lottery is a losing game for the majority but you get a few noisy winners that hit the jackpot. They tell everybody how they built their business and grew things, they get the top spot in Google, and everybody chases after this myth or this thing like they’re playing the slot machine in Vegas. It’s harmed the entire industry because if the company is spending their hard-earned revenue on SEO, pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, content marketing, social media marketing, and they’re not getting an ROI, then the first thing to go is customer service. They’re worst off than if they have just not spent the money in the first place because they didn’t get an ROI. So, then the first thing to go is that customer service. They’re not growing. There isn’t growth. There isn’t going to be customer service.
So, if anybody’s listening, shameless plug, talk to DoorGrow. We help people get out of that problem and then you can move. I find that when people solve that problem, the next thing they want to focus on is everything else. They want to focus on systems and processes, building a team, creating culture, focusing on the customer, and then they get in to making a difference. But when you’re starving, you’re not too focused on anybody else.
I think there’s a Chinese proverb that says, “Your own toothache is more important to you than a million people dying on the other side of the world,” or something like that.
Chris: I have not heard of that one. That’s pretty interesting.
Jason: I may have adapted it, but...
Chris: I agree with you. I agree, let’s say 99%, and the reason being is because we’re also, as part of the growth aspect of what we offer and what the industry likes is that we do have the whole property management side of our business. However, I’m going to caveat with that, there is a massive impact of relationship and reputation in that side of the business as well. Why? Because you have prospective clients going to that side and going that that marketplace, and ultimately being exposed to local property management firms because they’re interested in having a third party manage their properties for a myriad reasons as to why they no longer want to self-manage.
There is a reputation and relationship aspect that plays into that exposure as well, because again, it goes back to the banners on the side of the building ad that I’ve talked about. When you are exposed to potentially these three, four, whatever other property management firms, if you have a good reputation, I will contend that that owner probably has heard about you. If you have a bad reputation, they’ve probably have heard about you as well and they immediately are going to discount you. If you have a good reputation and they see that, “Okay, this property management firm has said, ‘Yes, I’m open to looking to get more greater properties under management,’” they’re going to turn to that, one that they have a little inkling as far as, “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that this is a good firm.”
I agree with you about the vast majority of what we’ve just talked about. However, reputation and relationships even matter in that space, too. What goes of value, of all the channels, it’s not binary. It’s not the idea of, “Oh, I can just,” to your point, “focus on this execution aspect and not stuff over here,” because this stuff over here is also going to matter in whatever marketing channel or marketing activity you use.
Jason: Absolutely. If somebody shores up all the major league should exist in the sales pipeline all the way from awareness to closing a contract, then it makes sense absolutely to do different advertising methods, all probably management. But if you have a massive leak where you have this horrible reputation online, or your website doesn’t create trust or convert or answer their core questions, or your pricing is off in your market, or your branding is off like they think you’re a real estate company or something generic with properties or they’re confused, there’s a lot of potential pitfalls.
If you have all those pitfalls, you can turn the spigot on full-blast and it’s not going to work very well. If you have those things tight, you can squeeze blood from a stone and you can use allpropertymanagement.com, you can do SEO services and focus on that, maybe get more business. But you need to make sure that you end up foundation of it, like you said, is word of mouth and reputation. That’s going to trump everything.
It’s like a clamp on the pipeline. You could have everything else in alignment but if you have really bad reputation, they’re going to check you out. Even if your website’s amazing, even if your advertising and copywriting are on point, they’re going to go check you out because they want to feel safe. If you’re a one-star company, they’re going to feel a little bit nervous talking to you, and then you’re going to have to figure out how to spin it. Like, “Oh, the tenants just hate us but the owners love us or something like that.
Chris: This is something from a small business perspective that it’s not only property management but it’s everywhere. It’s that idea and I think what you’re saying is shoring up your business model before you pour a ton of gas on the top of what we call a funnel. I can’t tell you the number of not only property management firms but owners from all different types of SMBs.
When you start to talk with them and they want to do that top of funnel stuff, they want to do all of that because sometimes that’s more attractive. It leaves a more sexy type of activities about growing your business. Then when you go, “Okay. Well, are you going to be able to keep that? Are you going to be able to get a response to that lead within a matter of minutes? Are you going to be able to service that prospect all the way through? And then are you going to be able to keep that prospect if they become a customer for a long time because you’re all service?” That’s when you start to see the whole, “No, I can’t do that. No, I can’t follow-up. I really don’t understand that. I don’t really have good service levels.”
It’s very hard for folks to say, “Wow, that would be a waste of money, actually, to really expand my top of funnel work until I get,” like you just said, “everything shored up.” When that happens, you know it.
For us here, we talk about the ladder of autonomy. It’s kind of a 50s phrase but companies that are just existing or at the bottom of the ladder. Customers have this level of autonomy because they have all their you-know-what together, they understand their business, they understand their customers, they understand their message, they understand the differentiator, they’re working on a completely different level than other folks in their industry, notably on the property management side.
Our whole goal is to get everybody up to that top level on the ladder so everyone, again, we think will benefit from it, the ripples, the network effect that you talked about is going to be there. Who’s going to benefit as well? Residents, clients, and service partners.
Jason: Yeah and that’s why at DoorGrow we shifted our focus just to help optimize that whole funnel so it makes sense. Once you have that dialed in, everything is more effective. [...] is more effective, Google Ads is more effective, everything becomes more effective when you take care of those things. I usually use the analogy, it’s like trying to do bodybuilding and you’re not eating food and sleeping but you take some really great supplements. Supplements are not going to cut it, but supplements can really help you get to the next level, probably, if you take care of the foundational basics.
Dialing your brand, your pricing, your reputation, your website, your sales process, all these things that are in the funnel, these are the basics. These are [...] any business, like you said.
Chris: It’s [...], Jason. I love that that’s your philosophy. It’s so important. And also, everyone here at Buildium is going to be psyched that I said the word funnel a number of times because I talk about [...] company.
Jason: I love the idea of a funnel. It’s a great metaphor as well. Is there anything else we should discuss here on this idea of homes, not houses? If not, let’s let you plug something.
Chris: I think we covered it. Again, the idea of more and more over the years, we think it’s going to become almost a requirement. Those folks that are grabbing on to it today, competition is there, things are hotter than ever, and it is not nice to have anymore. Other industries have been disrupted through this very same idea and now, we see evidence, we talk with our customers, we talk with general folks that aren’t even our customers in the industry, and we really see this big wave coming.
Luckily, it’s also a cool time because the technology is there to enable the way to become more efficient through those processes that you talked about that are more on the just everyday ongoing type of things. Technology is there now to really allow this to happen. It is an exciting time. It’s an exciting time to be a vendor, it’s an exciting time to be a service provider in this space as you guys are, to see where it really goes. Just the whole property management industry is pretty hot right now and I just like to be a part of it. It’s really exciting.
Jason: Chris, it’s been great having you on the show. I feel like we had a lot of synergy. I really like you. You strike me as a visionary entrepreneur, a decade building up Constant Contact, all this kind of stuff. Not every company is lead by a visionary. I always feel safer with a company that is led by a visionary entrepreneur. That’s why I use T-Mobile, that’s why I have Apple products. I feel like there’s always been these visionaries at the helm of these companies.
One thing I want to point out, to plug Buildium or make them look maybe even better, is we’ve been talking all about being focused on the customer, being focused on your customer, serving your customer. We’ve been talking about that for property management companies, but I’m getting the sense that this is how you and your company view dealing with your own constituents, your own customers, that you want to serve their needs, make a difference for them, and not just squeeze dollar out of them.
Chris: 100%.
Jason: And to that point, some companies are focused primarily, first and foremost, as to serve investors. There’s a different focus there instead of serving their constituents. I think there’s been a lot of talk about this and a lot of pain by people in some other property management software and it’s really difficult to switch.
So, maybe you can touch on that difference a little bit with Buildium and maybe you can tell us how does somebody switch this? Somebody listening might be like, “Hey, maybe I like this guy Chris. I’d rather have him at the helm where I’m tethering my whole business to.”
Chris: Yeah. I hope there’s a lot of people that have that reaction. It is a core, foundational reality that we love here at Buildium. It’s something that Michael and Dimitris started years ago. It’s something that I 100% believe in. I think that’s why Michael and I hit it off so well so quickly. It’s actually the core essence of every single Buildium and there’s more than 200 of us now that believes in. We do not believe that we’re going to be a 100-year company who changes the face of property management if that’s not at our core and it is.
There’s a reason why we believe that customer success and customer support is not a function in a company but it’s everybody. There’s also a reason to believe that we’ll stay on the phone with customers for however long they need it. Again, property management on the accounting side is pretty involved. We’re not talking about accountants. We will stay on the phone and we will ride out the basic T account and say, “Here’s your debit, where’s the credit?” and we will walk them through that. Why? Because it leads to that relationship and then it leads to that idea that our customers are going to stay with us longer, they’re not going to think about jumping even if there’s a cheaper price or less expensive offering, and they’re going to tell their friends. Word of mouth in this space is so important as it is for our customers. It’s so important for us.
This is not corporate baloney that we’re talking about. It is something that we talk at every single company meeting, we talk about every single functional meeting. We have people listening to our phone calls all the time. We have people out in the field, employees are out in the field meeting with customers. You got to fly to California? Go fly to California. It’s going to pay off with the lifetime relationship that we end up with our customers.
How can people switch and if they are interested in getting to know me? cmlitster@buildium.com. Just email me. We have our standard customer success or support line. It’s on buildium.com. I have literally dozens, hundreds even, customers that I know personally, that the rest of my executive team, leadership team, and all of the Buildians. We know these customers. Just because we’re 16,000 strong doesn’t mean that you’re just a number. We will be here for anything that you need.
We just had customers up here the other day. We have a brand new office, which is great because we grew out of our other one and we spent the whole day with these customers just answering whatever questions in doing whatever we tend to do. It is a core element of what makes Buildium, Buildium and to your point, we 100% believe it. It sets us apart from the pack. It creates space between us and other folks. Frankly, we’re only going to build on it and we’re all going to make it better so that space is just going to get bigger and bigger.
Again, thank you for the visionary aspect. I think also, other folks are focused on just the technology, all product. We have a very good to great product that already throws a ton of value at our customers, that is only continuing to get better. We’re investing heavily in it but we’re also investing heavily in the relationship side. It is something that we have the ability to continue to grow and make even stronger. It’s not something that’s going to go away as we continue to expand.
I’ll also say, we have investors, too, and those investors couldn’t be more supportive of our vision, our mission, and the alignment we have around the idea that is the customer’s first always. It makes my job easier from a board perspective because they’re actually pushing me probably even more to make sure we don’t lose that, which is fantastic. I will always be. A hundred years from now, I won’t be here but I know the idea of customer’s first and always at Buildium will be.
Jason: Love it. Chris, really excited to connect, get to know you a little bit better, and hear a little more about Buildium.
Chris: Thank you so much.
Jason: And I appreciate you coming on the show. Where can people find Buildium?
Chris: buildium.com and they can find me at cmlitster@buildium.com.
Jason: Perfect. All right. Chris, thanks so much for coming out.
Chris: Jason, I want to have you come out to Boston and see our nice new offices and spend some time with us.
Jason: Yeah, you’ll have to have me come out. I’ll check it out.
Chris: Love it.
Jason: We’ll hang out.
Chris: Yeah. It will be great.
Jason: We’ll talk shop. All right. Cool, Chris. Thanks for coming on.
Chris: Thanks. I’ll talk to you.
Jason: All right, great. It’s great having Chris on. So, if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, and you want to make a difference, and some of the things in the show hit a pain point for you, then make sure to reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to connect with you. We also have a really clear vision that we want to transform this industry and make a difference. It’s not just hype for us. That’s what gets me fired up and excited. The clients that are closest to me know that. That’s why I do what I do. It’s super rewarding and fun for me to hang out with other entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed doing this conversation with Chris.
Make sure to check us out at DoorGrow. If you are not in our Facebook group and you want to be a part of a community where the tide is raising all the ships, make sure you get into the DoorGrow Club. Go to doorgrowclub.com. It’s a Facebook group. It will redirect into Facebook. doorgrowclub.com and it is free but it’s only for property management entrepreneurs. If you’re an entrepreneur in this space, you’re a business owner, you have a company, or you’re looking to start one, make sure you join our group and start getting [...] in.
Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.