Peter Lohmann's Podcast
00:55:52 · Peter Lohmann
When we when when we look at the PM trends report, we see that property owners have very high expectations of their property management company in terms of the phone and email response times and things like that. And my my thesis is that if you assign all of your customers a specific property manager and you give them their number, you're gonna get way more grace on everything from phone response times to turn costs to problems with rent collection. Because just like you said, the owner gets this relationship, and they're like, this person is working for me. They're trying to make me successful. They're doing their best. Right? They're calling me back nights, weekends occasionally. Like, I know a little bit about them. They don't care at all about my company. My owners do not care about RL Property Management. They don't care about my journey. They don't care about my background. They don't care about our story. They don't care about our values. They do not care about any of that. They just don't. And they don't care about how great our systems are and all the things that we're doing and all of our insurance to protect them. None of that. But if somebody named Sally is their property manager and they know that Sally was at their property the other weekend and noticed that the window was a little sticky and they took care of it for me, Suddenly, everything's right in the world. This company is amazing. Sally's the best. Oh, no problem, Sally. Call me back tomorrow. No rush. Right? So there... I don't know how to exactly boil what I just said down into, like, the direction of the industry or what you guys are doing, but it's something I'm starting to really form a strong opinion about.
00:57:27 · Dan French, Peter Lohmann
[00:57:27] S1: Yeah. That's a great reflection. It's it's kind of this similar to the the hospital and the doctor. Exactly. They they don't care about the hosp... Well, they don't even know the administration of the hospital. What... Who's the administrator? They don't... They just know how they got treated in the moment with their doctor when they were sick or their their their loved one was dying. That's it. You know? Yeah. So it's so true, and it just goes to how you hire. It goes to, I think leadership because leadership, right, is just trickles down. So what we talk about, our team will focus on. So we're talking about owner obsession, we're talking about being reliable, trustworthy, economically aligned, you know, being there for owners and responsive. I think that's gonna trickle down. But then, of course, you have to hire very people with high character, high integrity. You you really just can't train those things. You have to just hire for them and and do a good job. [00:58:16] S0: Yep. Totally agree. So I wanna ask you about your experiences in Crane. So you're you're a Crane member and you... Did you join in the fall? I can't remember exactly when [00:58:26] S1: you Well... [00:58:27] S0: Jumped in. [00:58:27] S1: Actually, so one of the LP First teammates joined. [00:58:32] S0: Thomas. Yep. [00:58:33] S1: Yeah. I think it was IO, actually. [00:58:34] S0: Well, Thomas IO. Yeah. They kind of... [00:58:36] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:58:36] S0: That's right. Yep.
00:58:36 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
[00:58:36] S0: That's right. Yep. [00:58:37] S1: Yeah. They they... I don't think, honestly, they're they're just very... They're amazing. I I love partnering with them, by the way, but they were just so busy that they didn't really utilize the the Crane stuff. So I took it over from him maybe two months ago. And I'm super excited, Peter, to meet some of the Crane folks in the off-site we're having next week, get some FaceTime with you. But, yeah, I've I've been on all the the, you know, the email chat... What do you call that? The the circle inside there? [00:59:04] S0: Yeah. Inside circle. Yeah. The online community. Yep. [00:59:07] S1: Yep. It's been super helpful. It's been it's been great. I love what you built. [00:59:11] S0: Yeah. It's fun. You know, you mentioned that multifamily is super competitive, and I'm wondering if we're gonna start to see that dynamic enter our space. So far, it's very collaborative, and a lot of people who enter our industry from other industries remark on how collaborative and friendly everybody is, not just Crane, but the conferences and NARPM and everything. So I hope we can keep that going because it's... It it does make it fun to work in our space, I think.
00:59:37 · Dan French, Peter Lohmann
[00:59:37] S1: I'd love to, you know, I I... Exactly right. I wanna keep that going too, because I've I've received, like, a very warm welcome from SFR type folks. And it feels like much more like a like a community, like, it's smaller. And I would love to con... You know, see us continue that. And what I mean by competitive, I I don't even mean like, you know, we're shooting at each other, like in multifamily, people shoot at each other. It's just like, for these owners of large assets, they have such, you know, knowable such knowable options that are out there in the markets, like very noble, like Greystar, asset living, RPM, and then whoever's good in the local market, you know, so that's where the kind of like, well, within it, it's kind of friendly. You know, it's like, whatever, know, we're friendly, we can share ideas and share whatever. But with, but the owners know they have such, like, liquidity of options is what I would call it. Like, there's options everywhere. You want expertise, you want boutique. Good. You got that in every market. If you want, like, large scale, good. They're everywhere. If you want whatever, just a local player. Cool. You have that. That's what I mean by competitive. [01:00:44] S0: So competitive... So the the multifamily property management companies, it's competitive, like, it's hard doing business, and it's competitive, like, there's a lot of good options for your customers to choose from. [01:00:58] S1: Got it. But but human to human, it still feel... It feels collaborative. [01:01:02] S0: That's good to know.
01:01:02 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
[01:01:02] S0: That's good to know. [01:01:03] S1: Yeah. And So different different spin on the word. [01:01:06] S0: Does that competitiveness... I mean, that must result in in downward pressure on pricing. Right? Because you gotta win these deals. That's... I mean, that must be how it shows up, I would imagine. [01:01:17] S1: Look, I think at some level, management overall is commoditized. Unfortunately or unfortunately, that's just that's just how it is. A lot of people are selecting on price or more evenly you're saying. Yeah. Multi. I mean, I think to some extent in SFR, or they're trying to they're trying to get you down in pricing because they they view you as commodity. Yeah. Like Totally. You know? So that's where if you can escape that commoditization, and you can build, like, something that's hard to get somewhere else, I think you can go really win scale. [01:01:51] S0: Would you would you agree with the characterization of property management as commoditized? Or or if so, like, how are you combating that? [01:02:02] S1: I don't... Yeah. I... Well, the reason... One of the reasons why I joined Northpoint is because I think we're gonna escape that that commoditization. [01:02:09] S0: Well, every... Everyone says that about their own company. We're we're nothing like that. Course. Right? Yeah. They don't know what they're doing. Of course. I mean, we've got a whole system here. You you wouldn't know. Exactly.
01:02:09 · Peter Lohmann, Dan French
[01:02:09] S0: Well, every... Everyone says that about their own company. We're we're nothing like that. Course. Right? Yeah. They don't know what they're doing. Of course. I mean, we've got a whole system here. You you wouldn't know. Exactly. [01:02:19] S1: We're using AI in ways you never thought of. Yeah. Like, wow, no, forget that. But we do we do think that long term, if we change some of the fee structure to make it much more aligned with owners, that's something we're already experimenting with. We've we've taken that to market a couple times, and it's been very well received. But just like an NOI based property management, incentivized structure, I think things like that, that really can stand out, you break away from the commodity stack, I think. But yeah, because look, at the end of the day, everyone has access to AI workflows, offshore team, great, you're gonna do something cool. I'll do it tomorrow. You know, so it's more about like, you know, what kind of people do you have? What is your talent bar? What is your talent acquisition machine look like? And then can you actually escape via new pricing models to be more owner aligned? That's something where we were really thinking deeply about that. Now how how do you price differently in SFR?