Managing 360 Doors with No Employees (using AI) with Matt Luke

AI agents let one operator run 360 rental units

Matt Luke manages about 360 rental units, roughly half of them for other owners, without a single employee. AppFolio is the hub, LeadSimple runs the move-in and delinquency processes, Property Meld handles maintenance, and Haven.ai agents take leasing and maintenance calls for a dollar per unit. Luke also sells asset management as wealth advice on top of property management.

Takeaways

• Luke runs 360 units with no employees. About half of the roughly 360 units are his own and the rest belong to third-party owners. His team page lists family and two independent-contractor realtors, and his daughter does about an hour a day as a virtual assistant.
• AI agents answer leasing and maintenance calls. Haven.ai costs $1 per unit for leasing and $1 for maintenance. Callers navigate a phone tree, then the AI leasing agent Serena handles 100 calls a week, schedules showings and follows up by text. The maintenance agent Max saves ten to fifteen hours a week.
• LeadSimple runs the move-in process automatically. Added about two years ago on Lohmann's recommendation, it saves more than twenty hours a week. Applications are screened by NTN and scored in LeadSimple, whose conditional logic approves or denies them. Luke keeps the system to nine processes to avoid complexity.
• Luke leases units before tenants move out. He shows properties up to 90 days before move-out and targets a new tenant ten days after the old one leaves, and says paying someone to show a property early is worth the investment.
• Back-office work is outsourced, not hired. APM Help does daily bank reconciliations and QuickBooks handles corporate accounting. Luke outsources screening to NTN, and Lohmann notes an hour or two of screening costs more than paying a company $75. Vendors must upload bills into Property Meld, which syncs them to AppFolio.
• Asset management is sold as wealth advice. An add-on percentage on top of the property management fee covers mortgages, taxes, insurance, LLCs and refinancing, and about 10% of clients buy it. Luke moved those clients from AppFolio's property manager to its investor manager tool.

Delinquency and turnover pipeline

1. At day five, LeadSimple emails the local attorney, who posts a three-day quit or vacate notice and hires the process server.
2. The same attorney coordinates the lockout vendor if the case reaches eviction, an arrangement Lohmann says no Columbus attorney would match.
3. Turnovers run as a Property Meld project assigning several vendors at once, with work orders out two or three days before move-out and an inspector photographing the unit before and after.