Unfiltered by PropertyManagement.com
00:10:52 · Dylan Scroggins, Josh Sterling
[00:10:52] S1: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. They're good people. They had a booth at Broker Owner. I got a chance to hang out with their founder there, and they seem like they're building something strong. They got great scores on the vendor performance index too. [00:11:03] S0: Yeah. The... I'll tell you what. I'll speak to their... You know, as a very new client with them. We've been onboarding all week this week, and they're very responsive. Not even responsive to questions, which are great. But when there's actual tweaks to the system, they're they're quick. They're not bureaucrats. So they've made some tweaks with, like, twenty four hours notice that fit our operation. I thought it was impressive. Cool. Cool. That... That's where I think the industry is going. [00:11:26] S1: So you said that you were implementing RentEngine and building alongside it. Tell me more there.
00:11:32 · Josh Sterling
[00:11:32] S0: So... Well, no. Not really what we built and what's been our our, you know, secret sauce, if you will, the last few years is a a custom back office software. So what I realized pretty early on, I'm a I'm a very systematic thinker. That's... I don't know if it's the airline industry or what, but, you know, so everything I've always run has been checklist driven, SOP driven, you know, down to every granular aspect of the business. I wanna document it that any person can step in and do this in theory. So what we found is as we got a little bit bigger, you know, again, I started with one door. As I got to maybe about 300 units, I found that it was a major plateau. And when I looked at why that was, I think the structure of property management, again, scattered site property management specifically, there's so many moving parts. It's the most dynamic business I've ever heard of, and I've been in several different businesses now. And there's so many moving parts that we had all these systems built for it, but they all filtered to basically the guy at the top, right, which was me. And it's very hard to scale yourself out of that when you don't have the massive revenue and the and the potential profitability to do so. So we had all these different softwares. We were using a checklist app here and maybe a shared note here and a shared iPhone calendar and, like, scheduling maintenance text would be, you know, 15 different colors on our... Or at that time, four different colors on a Google Calendar. And it was just a mess. That was the initial software that we built was to tie all these subsystems together. So it would flow, you know, let's say, a turnover, for example. If you... That ball for us has to volley back and forth between seven different phases as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So we built this software that allowed notifications and automations back way before AI, and it allowed us to streamline that that operation. Otherwise, without it, we would have a unit that we, let's say, finished maintenance on three days ago that nobody told the next person to send the cleaners. And if it's manual, it doesn't flow. So that's a, you know, very high level explanation of it, but but something that's that's really been the backbone of our operation.
00:13:26 · Dylan Scroggins
[00:13:26] S1: Have you... Do you have any other PM groups using that software?
00:13:29 · Josh Sterling
[00:13:29] S0: No. You know, when we first built it, it was it was really... We needed something, and and it's really what gave us the clarity and the efficiency to be able to grow beyond that plateau of around 300 doors for us. I thought about licensing it to others because I think that every property management company has this issue if you're running scattered site. It's super hard. Like, I'll give you a a real life example real quick. This might illustrate it better. So let's say that back in the day before we had this software, we would print off... We... You know, a bunch of maintenance techs scatter into the field. Right? We would print off maybe six or eight or 10 work orders per tech for that day and say, okay. Go bang out these work orders. Right? And they'd go off and do their work and come back to the the mothership at, you know, five, 05:30 at night, and they'd throw all these work orders in a in a bin, and they would... They write on there, okay. It's complete or it's incomplete or whatever. Right? And then the next day, by maybe noon, we would get done processing them all manually and and try to figure out where one was. Well... So what our new... What our software allows us to do is, let's say that one of those work orders was a turnover of a unit. And let's say it was a quick easy one or there's only item or two left, and that maintenance tech got done at, you know, 10:15AM today. Well, all of those old paper work orders, those are all on iPads now. And so we can see each box box is checked off, photos, notes, everything in real time. And the second he hits complete on that work order, if it's designated as, in this case, a turnover, there's a couple options for this. It sends a notification to that project manager immediately who's overseeing 1,600 doors. So he he can't be looking through each one all day. It sends him a notification. It can be email, text, dashboard on on the desktop. That says, hey. This unit's ready for cleaning. And he can go, oh, it's 10:30AM. Well, I got a cleaner that is finishing up at noon. I'm gonna send a cleaner today. And we kick it through that next phase of the turnover instead of not even finding out what happened for the next twenty four hours. That's taken our turnover time and cut it almost in half of what we could realistically accomplish because of that. That's just one simple automation there. Right?
00:15:27 · Josh Sterling, Dylan Scroggins
There's all kinds of other stuff like a single family house. You... Someone moves out. You need to cut the grass. It's it's basic. We add it to an Excel sheet. Right? That's human error. Someone forgets to add it. They don't save it right. They forget to take it off once we sign the lease. So we've automated all those processes, you know, just another small thing. And there's thousands of little fixes and tweaks that we've done like that to to the process so that we can operate this crazy business at scale. And I think most operators don't get to that, and they end up trying to remember what they're supposed to do all day long. And that's what caps PropertyManagement and Growth on on the scattered site. [00:16:03] S1: Yeah. I've... I have three kids under four, so I can barely remember what I had for lunch, much less what work orders do. So I think I need that myself. We got connected through Chuck and Matt, and they're like, hey, man. You gotta talk to Josh. He's doing some really interesting stuff. And I'm coming a little bit blind, and I like that. Right? I like talking live about these convos. [00:16:20] S0: Yeah. [00:16:20] S1: Is what you're sharing now, what you've been working on with them... And I'm not asking you to share everything you're doing, but from the AI agent standpoint, from this custom back end software, what are some other things that the mad scientist is tinkering with in the background?
00:16:35 · Josh Sterling
[00:16:35] S0: Yeah. Mean, our our custom software is really... That's our backbone. So we look at it this way. I don't wanna reinvent. We're building them on the front end. You know, at Ridgeline, it's where we signed up fifteen years ago, and they've they've done a good job. I'm I'm not unhappy with them. We're not trying to reinvent that wheel. This custom back office software has truly been our baby, and everything comes into that. So it's it's truly the operation of the business. I mean, we can track down the maintenance tech efficiency in a fifteen minute increment. We have a daily checklist for everybody at the company that, you know, if you do everything on your checklist for that day, you've succeeded. It's like flying an airplane. If I don't do everything on that checklist, I might land with the wheels up. No. That's not a win. So that's that's our our theory, and all of this is built on to this software. The the funny part was that I'm sure... I know you guys are software guys at some point here. When I first built this, I think my initial framework, maybe I spent $250 or so. And I thought, hey. I spent $250. I've got custom software. I'm good to go. Like, I had no idea that the massive investment was the never ending investment, where I'm... I don't even wanna know how many hours of my own time are in working with the developers, but we're constantly adding on new modules. Like, we recently brought our leasing flow into our custom software. So we can... It it works awesome. It's, you know, just little stuff like that we're constantly bolting on. And that's really where the nucleus of the operation is.