Peter Lohmann's Podcast
00:02:17 · Adam Willis, Peter Lohmann
[00:02:17] S0: Yeah. [00:02:18] S1: Alright. We're gonna jump right into it. We're skipping all your background, your bio, all of that. First of all, no one cares. Second of all, if they do, they can go listen to the first episode you were on. So I wanna check back in on your current status of, like, a couple different things that we talked about in the first episode with you. One of them is using self help portals. So you were the first one that showed me your setup of how you created, like, knowledge bases for your tenants and for your owners to try and reduce kind of the support workload as it were for your team. So my question is, are you still doing that? How is it working? And what software do you use for that these days? [00:03:03] S0: Oh, man. Alright. That's fun. Yes. The the knowledge bases and the self help, the self soothing portals, whatever. [00:03:10] S1: Soothing. I mean That's like a skill you treat to a baby or you just feel like
00:03:15 · Adam Willis
[00:03:15] S0: a toddler. Here's a binky. Yeah. You know? Like, oh my goodness. That's what it is. It's self soothing. I mean... And they wanna do it at 2AM, and I'm not I'm not gonna take their call at 2AM. So, yeah, fast forward to now, we... Ian, Joseph, and I are good friends, and he... And and Steven Glover and I are good friends. One of those two had recently said, hey. We're we're into client experiences. And so we have these knowledge bases. We have these wealth of knowledge, all of this public facing content. And we're like, I I don't think people wanna come to our websites anymore. I think in the near future, it will be... That we need to be creating experiences. And I can't remember if it was Ian or Cee that talked about that. We're we're all in on the experience. Right? Like, a lead simple task is is here's an email. Here's an email. Like, onboarding. Like, here's an email. Do this. Here... Here's how you set up your utilities. Here's how we get your banking information. Not an experience. So what we have shifted to is we have portals, like, truly homegrown portals where a tenant who wants to move in to our property is they can interact with us on an app. They can interact with us on a video. They can interact with us via text message. So think like Delta Airlines. It's like, you can go to their app and you can book a flight or report an issue or whatever, or you can just text message them. We are this close. Parts of it are already live. So we have these experiences where all of this knowledge is sitting on the back end, and we will walk someone through how to move entire rental from applying all the way to, you know, signing their move in acknowledgment in person, recording a video of the condition of their property, all homegrown. Pretty awesome. So, like, if I was talking to a tenant and they're like, I have an issue, and I'm like, I don't understand. I could click a button, say, video chat. Video chat pops up, and we can interact with the the people that way. And it's recorded, and it's chronologically... All the communication is chronologically organized Uh-huh. Because nobody's doing that very well. So experiences around communication and talking to them the way they wanna be talking to all in one house. It's crazy cool.
00:05:35 · Peter Lohmann, Adam Willis
[00:05:35] S1: So it sounds like you are moving away from, like, a self help knowledge base where you're, like, typing a keyword into, like, a search query and coming back with a list of articles to read. Moving away from that and more towards, like, hey, just text us, and we'll help you with whatever you need. [00:05:52] S0: Both will be an option. Right? [00:05:54] S1: Okay. [00:05:54] S0: Every... Everyone digests information a little bit easier or differently. Right? Like, you know, writer, audibly. We have all of those things. You know, you go to support.nestwell.com or whatever it is and go review and type stuff in. But, no, I I I don't think people wanna be coming to our sites for very much longer. In fact, I think their AI bot... Their ChatGPT is gonna be like, I wanna pay my rent. I wanna renew my lease, and it's gonna be talking to our systems. I know that's pretty, you know, foreign right now, but I think eventually we get to that.
00:06:27 · Peter Lohmann
[00:06:27] S1: Yeah. I do think there is something along those lines. I I always think about... I mean, the ideal situation for a tenant or an owner is they save a contact in their phone that says Nestwell. And that contact has one phone number and one email address. And anything they need at any time, they can text or email that one phone number and that one email address and get near instantaneous help from an ownership level of sophistication. Like, as if they were texting with you. Right? That's the dream. And it's like you said, I don't want your app. I don't want 15 different emails. I gotta remember which one to email. I don't wanna be getting phone calls and texts from three different phone numbers. You know, there's not three different phone numbers for Delta support. There's one. And in an even more ideal world, it would be blue bubbles with iMessage. So... And that should be true for maintenance requests, for, like, anything they need should... That that... This is the dream scenario. And I'm actually surprised that... I'm really surprised that no one is building that because that is so clearly where our... Where I would want... That's how I would want the experience to be as a tenant or as an owner. And it's very difficult to execute on for a bunch of different reasons, but that is clearly the right direction, I think.
00:07:53 · Adam Willis
[00:07:53] S0: Yeah. I... I'm super excited about it. So my business partner, Mark Cropper, he's, like, a vibe coder extraordinaire. He's kinda has a reputation here in the industry, but he'll be like, what do you want? I'm like, what's an ideal communication look like between me and my CPA or me and my dentist? You know? What do those relationships look like? I'm like, this is how I'd wanna communicate. And he's like, I think we can build that. And honing it around, like, speaking the way they wanna come into our world. If they're email champions, great. We can digest that. What happens on our side and the reason why no one is building it, in my opinion... I mean, I'm no expert, but because, like, the big players out there that are going to build it, they have to build it, you know, an agnostic way so it serves everyone, and then it gets diluted. When I'm building my own stuff the way I want it for my customers, I can build it one time my way, and we can tweak it and customize it. And that would... You couldn't do that two and a half years ago. Now we can. And so it's like Yeah. Possibilities are super fun saying, like, I like United Airlines communication tool. I like the way HelpScout integrates conversation. And so...
00:09:02 · Peter Lohmann
[00:09:02] S1: Like, I don't mind a vendor being opinionated about it. Like... Because most people aren't gonna vibe code a solution. Like, 99 of people aren't gonna do that. So I do think there's room for for a vendor to come in with an opinion and be like, this is the right way that this should be happening. And I left an important part out of my little rant a minute ago, which is same phone number that they could call. Right? So call or text and then email one contact on their phone. That... Like, how could you argue that that is not the right solution for the customer? So I think a vendor could get pretty far by taking taking a a strong position on communication, how communication should work at a property management company, and then building a product around that thesis. And I'm... I know that there's a bunch of players, including LeadSimple, working on, like, unified comms and streamlining communication, but I haven't seen anyone come out with that as the... As, like, a picture. It's, like, the first slide on a on a sales deck. It's like, this is how we think it should work. One phone number, one email address, whole company operates out of that streamlined experience for the customer.