Beyond Rent: Exploring Property Management
00:00:02 · S0, S1, Nik Boone
[00:00:02] S0: Welcome to Beyond Rent, the property management podcast brought to you by Rent Manager. Each episode, we talk with industry experts about market trends and practical strategies for property management professionals. Now let's get to the conversation and go beyond rent. [00:00:31] S1: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Beyond Rent. Today, have the pleasure of having Nik Boone of Ascend Real Estate and Property Management joining us. We're gonna dive into his successful business based out of Bakersfield, California and learn some of the strategies that he's used along the way. Nik, welcome to Beyond Rent. [00:00:48] S2: Thank you. Happy to be here. [00:00:49] S1: Yeah. Really excited to learn more about what you're doing out there in California and how you're growing your business over numerous years that you've been executing out there. But before we dive into some of those strategies and initiatives and operational things that you have in place, I'd love to learn a little bit more about who you are. So go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us what you're all about.
00:01:09 · Nik Boone
[00:01:09] S2: It's a loaded question. Yeah. So I'm 34. I've had the business since inception, which was 2014. I got licensed in 2010 to sell real estate and then got my broker's license in 2014 and then opened the property management side, which I'm sure will go crazy in-depth too. I have a wife of nine years, I think? Yeah, nine years, nine years this year. And we have three, kids: a boy that's seven, a girl that's that'll be five in a couple weeks, and then another girl that's 2.5. So, I get to leave the chaos and then come to the office chaos, and then I get to leave the office chaos and go to the home chaos. I had a, somebody interviewed me a while back, and I told them, It's great because I get to go home, and they're either screaming like, Dad, dad, I get, you know, We get to see you! Or they're screaming because they're upset. But regardless of what it is, when I walk in, they're screaming to be had. So it's either good screaming or bad screaming, but, and then I'm super active, so, you know, like, big lifestyle guy. Like I do wakeboarding, snowboarding, play volleyball once a week, I golf, all the all the stuff that is wrecking my body now as I'm getting a little bit older, but, pretty active. So, yeah, that's me.
00:02:28 · S1, Nik Boone
[00:02:28] S1: Thanks for the introduction, because I think it really sets the stage well that you are a busy, busy person. Right? Obviously, you're running this business. You're scaling this business. All along the way, you're getting married, having a family, and then you love to throw in there that you have, it sounds like, five or six different hobbies that you like to keep up with as well, which some of those are pretty time consuming. So you've got a lot going on, which means you have to be efficient in all aspects of your life. And I think that's a lot of what we'll talk about, right, is how to grow a business and how to be successful and how to have a full life all at the same time. [00:03:02] S2: Yeah, I mean, hasn't always been, you know, able to have any hobbies. So I get to now I'm at the point where I get to have hobbies and I get to have a little bit more fun and flexibility. But my schedule is what I want it to be, so, you know, I'm not dealing with the daily fires anymore. I'm not dealing with, know, other than the occasional lawsuit that comes from a tenant, which I don't know if you guys have it as bad outside of California, but it is the first person people hit you with. It's a, yeah, it's a pretty chill life at this point now, but hasn't always been there. So
00:03:02 · Nik Boone, S1
[00:03:02] S2: Yeah, I mean, hasn't always been, you know, able to have any hobbies. So I get to now I'm at the point where I get to have hobbies and I get to have a little bit more fun and flexibility. But my schedule is what I want it to be, so, you know, I'm not dealing with the daily fires anymore. I'm not dealing with, know, other than the occasional lawsuit that comes from a tenant, which I don't know if you guys have it as bad outside of California, but it is the first person people hit you with. It's a, yeah, it's a pretty chill life at this point now, but hasn't always been there. So [00:03:36] S1: Yeah. Well, let's, maybe start diving into some of the topics that we want to cover today because I think that's the evolution we wanna hear about, right, is how you kind of grew this and where you're at today versus where you started. So as we think about growth, which is something you've experienced, how do you define your approach to growth? Like, what is it the different channels that you focus on? What are the different strategies that you had in place to ensure that you were able to grow the company to the to the size it is today to give you the flexible lifestyle that you you wanna have?
00:04:08 · Nik Boone
[00:04:08] S2: Yeah, the very first growth thing I did was, and now that I'm in my mid-30s, it sounds weird to say things that aren't applicable anymore, but this was before Google reviews was a hot thing. Like this was, like it had kind of just come out, people really didn't understand SEO, it wasn't, you know, again, and I sound like a dinosaur now, but I really saw that when it came out and I always say I have the benefit of being really dumb. Like, I thought, What would I do if I had no connection to anybody but needed a property manager? And I would go to Google and I would look at reviews and I would see who the best was. And I was like, That's what we need to hammer. Like that's, you know, for people that have a connection or like they have another friend or so and so, we're not going to hit them. Like we're young, we're a baby company, we're not that big, we're not that great, like we still have to kind of earn our licks, so to speak. And so we just hammered reviews. So we would just, every client we could, every vendor we had, like we were hammering reviews. So that was our very first growth channel where it's like, Oh, saw you on Google. Was like, Hey, this is working, like this is nice. So we grew basically 100 doors per year for the first few years. So we started with 50, we grew 150, two fifty, and then every year it was almost consistently like, we have another 100 doors that we have now.' So, and that's kind of been true over the years until, you know, the scale... Economies of scale now were growing faster than the 100 per year, but that's how it started. Yeah. That was the very first channel.
00:05:46 · S1, Nik Boone
[00:05:46] S1: Yeah. And what's really great about that, I love how you explained it, you know, the simplicity behind that. Right? You didn't overthink this strategy. You didn't say we need to invest all of these dollars in different places or we need to have the right connections in the right... In... With the right people. You just said, well, if I were sitting down to find a property management company, what... Where would I go? What would I do if I didn't know what else to do? And I think oftentimes the most simple strategy, when executed well, can seem like the most brilliant thing in the world. And I think that's what you stumbled across. [00:06:22] S2: I agree. And I still do that to this day. Like anything where I'm like, Is that solving the simple issue they have? You know, because I have a marketing team now and they, Let's add this and do this. And I'm like, of that solves this person's problem. Like, really boil it down to the bare bones, you know, and hammer that. And so I think that's been an asset. My dumbness has been a really big asset to the company. But yeah, keep it simple and just execute really well. [00:06:53] S1: Where does that mentality come from? Is that something you learned through experience or something you picked up through education, this idea of keeping it simple and not overthinking the solution?