Peter Lohmann's Podcast
00:31:13 · Dan French, Peter Lohmann
[00:31:13] S1: The way I look at it and what what we're currently building is, like, I I I view the platform as a... The horizontal enabling layer. Like, this is this is all your back office stuff that that every every division or segment's gonna draw from. So for example, there will be a leasing call center or mechanism. There'll be marketing. There'll be, of course, accounting, HR systems. They're not gonna have to... They're they're gonna draw upon all those shared resources, executive leadership, business development, you know, these these things play across all the segments. And then when you get down to the nitty gritty, like, think over time, you'll iterate and emerge. It'll be emergent what you build in terms of like, the leasing flow in a BTR deal is going to look a little bit different than the leasing flow in a pure scatter site portfolio. So how they pull down services from that that shared horizontal enabling layer, it will be different. It'll be bespoke over time. But I think that the true secret sauce there, and I'm just... There's no... There's... Yeah. It's you can share ideas all day. Like, people can go go grab our ideas. Like, it's all by execution. This is very hard to execute. It's not hard to ID. [00:32:22] S0: I'll say.
00:32:22 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
[00:32:22] S0: I'll say. [00:32:22] S1: In my opinion, it's super hard to execute. But over time, these segments, the main thing is that they're single-minded. They wake up every day, you know, like, I'm a BTR property property manager, I serve BTR owners. So I'm going to be best in class at BTR. Same thing in the other segment. I'm a small multifamily expert. I'm going to be best in class for these owners that I serve. Or I'm scattered site at SFH, single family homes. I'm going to wake up and I know I know the routing, I know that system. So I become real deep. And and I I become obsessed almost with how to serve owners only in that segment. That's where excellence is is unlocked is through focus. [00:33:01] S0: The property manager who's... Who has these institutional customers, are they also physically going to the property to do leasing tours? [00:33:14] S1: Define institutional like BTR or small multi [00:33:17] S0: Like, BTR in your example. Yeah. Like, BTR. This is your property manager in Ohio who's responsible for the BTR customers here. Are they also going to the property and and doing tours? Are they responsible for rent collection? Are they handling the maintenance requests?
00:33:17 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
[00:33:17] S0: Like, BTR in your example. Yeah. Like, BTR. This is your property manager in Ohio who's responsible for the BTR customers here. Are they also going to the property and and doing tours? Are they responsible for rent collection? Are they handling the maintenance requests? [00:33:33] S1: Well, it depends on the scale of the asset. So we we might find ourselves get pulled into larger scale assets that we we think sub 100 units is where we wanna stay, but I'm pretty certain that people are gonna pull us into a 150 unit deals, then we'll have to make the determination like, alright, that's actually an on-site property property manager, and it's a pass through cost that's paid at the asset level. And that'll that'll that'll have a different fee structure and different systems. So even within the segment, it's actually there's a lot of different ways you have to build it out, because then you have a BTR person who might have two fifty unit properties. So they're not there every single day. But their their... The expectation is that they're in market, you know, they're tasting the soup, that's what I call it, or inspect what you what you expect or whatever that phrase is. You know? Like, go go there very frequently as much as you have to and make sure all the systems are working correctly. There's no there's no trash on the property.
00:34:28 · Peter Lohmann
[00:34:28] S0: This episode is sponsored by Haven AI. I've been hearing a lot of great things about Haven AI recently. Couple weeks ago, I was on a webinar panel about AI and property management, and Evernest talked about how Haven's AI agent transformed their leasing operation, handling most of their top of funnel leasing interactions across text and email. And you might have heard Haven mentioned on a recent episode of my podcast where one of their customers, Matt Luke, told me about how he's managing 350 doors with no w two employees. That's not a typo or a misspeak. Zero w twos. He's using Haven's AI agents for maintenance and leasing to make that work. There's no shortage of AI hype in property management right now. Everybody's got an AI something. But what caught my attention with Haven is that it's not just a chatbot bolted onto your website. It's a platform of configurable AI agents that plugs into your existing software and actually takes action. We're talking creating work orders, dispatching vendors from your preferred vendor list, triaging emergencies, qualifying leads, scheduling tours, and following up with prospects across phone, text, and email around the clock. They're Y Combinator backed and were just named one of the top 50 AI startups in real estate. The operators I've talked to who are using it seem genuinely impressed, which in our industry is not easy to earn. If you wanna see what the buzz is about, book a demo at usehaven.ai. And thanks again to Haven AI for sponsoring this episode. What I'm trying to tease out is, like, just take my company for example. Like, we we specialize in SFR and small multi. We've never done a BTR. Our whole... We have a leasing team, and they do all of our lease ups for every single property. So every single property enters like a leasing machine. Picture a big black box. It's a leasing machine. Vacant properties enter the box. Occupied properties drop out the bottom. We have property managers in our new setup, which is going live, like, this week. We have property managers who are assigned to owners. So each property manager has, like, a 100 owners that they... They're the single point of contact for that owner. If we were to... And and the property managers don't actually do the leasing. The leasing is handled by the black box. Right?
00:36:37 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
But the but the property managers know what's happening in leasing and talk to their owners about, you know, the leasing status of their property. What I'm trying to unpack or tease out here is, like, if we stood up a BTR division at my company, which we're not going to, but if we did and we hired a new property manager and we said, okay, property manager, your customers are all BTR. What I'm trying to unpack is, like, does that property manager use that same leasing machine that we've already developed, or are they gonna now go and do their own leasing because it's different when you're leasing up a BTR community? [00:37:13] S1: The default is that they would use the the existing leasing machine. [00:37:17] S0: Yep. [00:37:18] S1: And and that's beacon... And the reason why I think we're gonna... All SFR, and I don't even care if many of us, right, all all went together. But that's how I look at SFR. Right? It's like, dude, if we all rise up, like, I don't care if FNS gets huge, you know, Ash Ash, I'm really happy about that. HRT, get big guys. Like, let's all get big together, because it's all gonna pull each other up, you know? So I'm owner obsessed. I'm not competitor obsessed. But the way I look at BTR, that channel is, like, leasing. [00:37:49] S0: They would still use the existing leasing platform that we have. [00:37:52] S1: Exactly. You still use that that existing leasing platform.
00:37:52 · Dan French, Peter Lohmann
[00:37:52] S1: Exactly. You still use that that existing leasing platform. [00:37:55] S0: But what happens if you find out after doing this for a year that BTR requires its own nuance with leasing. Signs is different enough that you can't run it through your normal machine. This is where I get... This is what keeps me up at night. What do you do then? Do you create a separate leasing just for BTR? And now, like, your company's getting all fragmented and, like, your best practices aren't being shared between those two. I don't know. I I I... [00:38:23] S1: Yeah. Okay. That that... When I lost my train, I thought that's what I gonna say. Leasing, we we have a thesis that leasing in coming up channel from SFR scatter site leasing is actually more... It's more in tune with how BTR deals lease, like at least traditional BTR deals, because it's... It should be leased like, you know, home by home. Yep. Instead, when a multifamily operator comes down or down, quote unquote, to like this mid thing where I I look at BTR, it's like mid between [00:38:51] S0: Yep. [00:38:52] S1: SFR and multi. They they kind of would just operate it like it's an apartment home leasing. They'll just throw in our apartments.com, and they'll use the same ILS systems, and they'll just expect the same renter kind of demographic to just find a BTR style home and just be like, oh, well, whatever. No, I think it's a completely different renter, Needs to be leased one by one. So it's much more akin to how we already do scatter site asset single family homes [00:39:17] S0: Yeah.