
Building a self-running property management company @rlpmg and a community for PM biz owners @join_crane. PM email newsletter (25,000 readers) ⬇️
Columbus, Ohio
Joined December 2008
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[How we use Notion at our small business]
As promised - here is the 12 minute video!
loom.com/share/908c0b49d3ea4…
Rob shared that Boom already has an MCP server live, along with a cloud connector, with more still to come. The goal is to let people build the workflows they actually want. As AI agents take on more work, I think property managers will need software partners that support open APIs, MCP, and agent-driven workflows.
Credit scores can be a useful tool for tenant screening, but they don’t tell the whole story. Rob explains that credit scores were originally built for consumer lending, with versions developed for specific uses like auto loans and rental housing. He sees value in using them, especially at the extremes, but warns against relying on a score alone. How much weight should credit scores carry in a rental application?
grok bot is adding features faster than i can keep up. i'm going to stop creating "workarounds" for stuff it can't do because it just adds them the very next week...
People are loving this but I always get confused. Like what are these W-2 people expecting? Who is selling them on the idea that owning a local services company is passive, truly? Why do they believe it? I find the whole thing baffling tbh.
It's 0900 on a Tuesday at your W-2.
Your quarterly review starts at 0930. You've got your wins on a sticky note under your monitor, because last quarter your boss said you "seemed checked out" and you've been on thin ice ever since.
Your phone buzzes. It's Maria, lead teacher at the daycare you bought in Houston.
"Kayla and Destiny both called out. I'm alone with 9 toddlers. Ratio is 4. What do you want me to do?"
You know what the rules say she has to do.
Call parents and send kids home. Every one of those parents has a job too. Some of them will pull their kid by Friday.
You sneak to the bathroom so you can text the sub list again.
Two numbers are disconnected. One says she found a full-time job. One answers: "$35/hr, can be there at 11."
That’s $15 an hour more than what the old owner paid.
You say yes. What the fuck else are you going to do?
At 9:08 the front desk texts a photo. A little boy's forearm with a ring of purple teeth marks. "Mom is here. She says this happened yesterday and nobody told her. She's asking for the owner and won’t leave until she talks to you ."
You text Maria. Maria is alone with nine toddlers.
At 9:14 the mom emails you directly. She's polite. She asks which child bit her son, whether it's happened before, and how she contacts licensing. You can't tell her which child. You don't know if it's happened before. You know exactly how she contacts licensing, and so does she.
You think about the savings you put down. The personally guaranteed debt.
You think about the night you showed your wife the listing and said "trained staff in place, it basically runs itself."
That was the last real conversation you two had; now you pass each other in the kitchen like roommates, and you can't remember the last time you asked about her day.
If she doesn’t start taking more hours at work A- you’re going to need to move in with her parents.
At 9:24 Maria texts again. "Destiny says she's not coming back. She got an offer at Primrose."
At 9:28 your boss pings. "Ready when you are."
You look at the sticky note. You look at your phone.
The bite mark photo is still open.
You join the call and smile.
I'm still angry about the 2007 change they made to Daylight Saving Time (made it a full month longer).
It's the majority of the year now. It's stupid in the first place, but if we're going to do it, it should be true to the original idea: Summer Time.
Peter Lohmann retweeted
re: airbnb discourse
in college I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse. we had a few different steak sauces that were made from scratch daily. they were expensive to make, and less than half of the customers that ordered steak wanted sauce, so the restaurant charged $3 for it
we got complaints constantly. just at my own tables, half a dozen times a week I'd get complaints about being "nickel and dimed" for $3 of sauce on a $70 steak. a few times a month someone would mention it in an angry online review, or ask to speak to a manager and demand that it be removed from the bill because "who the hell charges for condiments?"
after several years of this, finally management had enough. they raised the price of every steak by $3, and now complimentary sauce was included with each steak on request. want to hazard a guess about how many customers complained about the $3 price increase on steak? essentially zero.
it was great, from the restaurants perspective! no more complaints, and instead of making $3 on 40% of steak orderers, they made $3 on all of them. and the customers were much happier, despite this deal being absolutely, unequivocally worse for them.
consumers are not rational agents from microeconomics textbooks. very often the *feeling* of what they're being charged for matters way more than the absolute value of what they're being charged. I think that's more or less what happening with airbnb. people don't want to be charged a cleaning fee and then also told they have to clean, even if in the counterfactual world the additional cleaning fee is more than they'd be willing to pay someone to do the required cleaning. a $100 cleaning fee *feels* better than a $50 cleaning fee + "load the dishwasher and take the trash out to the dumpster", even though most people would not pay $50 to not have to do that.
Replying to @heatherpedia
I think a lot of you are misunderstanding the frustration. what's annoying is paying a cleaning fee and then being asked to clean. it feels like double dipping. it may be illogical, but you'd get less complaints about "$100 fee but you don't have to do anything" versus "$50 fee + load the dishwasher"
What if renters only had to fill out one application, and every listing on Zillow accepted it? I’d make Zillow’s application cover what property managers need to know, then require participating property managers to accept it. That would make the process simpler for residents and save them from filling out a new application for every property they want to rent.
We don't actually know how to screen tenants as well as we think we do. Nobody's testing screening criteria against a huge pool of residents to see what actually predicts on-time payments and evictions. Yet ask ten property managers about income requirements, and most will say three times the rent. Why exactly 3.0? Why not 2.9 or 3.1?
Peter Lohmann retweeted
The lowest water usage across our apartment buildings is on a building where all the tenants are on RUBS, (Ratio Utility Billing System).
RUBS allows landlords to pass utility costs on to tenants in buildings where there is one meter for the entire property.
Of course, RUBS is now under pressure from LA politicians and the Housing Department because they claim it's unfair to tenants.
IT IS THE REASON we do not have water wasted at that property, because tenants know if something is leaking or a toilet is constantly running they will get charged for that water waste.
Now take another building we own with 21 RSO units where tenants don't pay for water.
We recently had an enormous spike in water usage. We went into all 21 apartments and found one toilet continuously running and two showers dripping even when not in use.
Not one of these tenants had reported the issues to us. Because they don't pay for water. It's not their problem and they have no responsibility for the cost of the waste.
If you want to save water, which all these Politicians claim they do, they should be making it easier not harder to pass utility costs on those who actually use it.
Peter Lohmann retweeted
i regret t o inform you that economists have waded into the airbnb discourse (but he's right)
Maintenance is so hard to standardize because every property, market, and situation comes with different variables. Mark compares it to the challenge of standardizing property management metrics and asks a bigger question: without a clearly defined end state, are we just working on maintenance until nobody’s really angry? What should success in maintenance actually look like?
I’ve fixed serious maintenance problems, documented the solutions, and watched the same problems come back years later. We cut turn costs with ten specific changes, only to get complaints about expensive turns again a few years later because eight of those ten changes had fallen apart. It’s embarrassing and frustrating to keep solving the same problem when I’d rather be solving new ones.
Peter Lohmann retweeted
The factoid that '50% of marriages end in divorce' was kinda true decades ago.
But the divorce rate peaked in 1980.
Now, less than 40% of all marriages since 2000 end in divorce.
For college graduates, it's under 30%.
For college graduates who get married after age 25, and who don't have any kids before marriage, it's under 20%.
Anybody promoting the outdated, deceptive 50% rate has some kind of anti-marriage or anti-natalist agenda.
It scares young people away from getting married and having kids. That is their goal.
Peter Lohmann retweeted
A mill owner ran the finest factory in the valley. At its heart sat a great steam engine, and from it ran one long iron shaft down the length of the building, with belts dropping to every machine. Because every machine had to hang off that one shaft, the whole factory was built around it: tall, narrow, dark, and arranged not by how the work should flow, but by where the belts could reach.
One day a stranger arrived carrying a small humming box. "I sell electricity," he said. "Power you can send anywhere, through a wire."
The owner's eyes lit up. "Wonderful! It's so dark in here. We'll hang light bulbs over the workers."
So they did. The lights glowed. The owner told everyone at the guild dinner, "We use electricity now." WE ARE ELECTRICITY FORWARD AT THIS COMPANY!
Later he went further. He tore out the steam engine and put one giant electric motor in its place, spinning the same old shaft, turning the same old belts, in the same dark building. The work went exactly as fast as before, and he wondered what all the fuss had been about.
Across the river, a younger rival bought the same electricity. But he asked a different question: "If power can go anywhere, why is my factory shaped around a shaft?"
So he knocked the building down. He built it low, wide, and full of windows. He gave every machine its own small motor and arranged the floor in the order the work actually moved. When one machine stopped, the rest kept running.
Within a few years his factory made three times as much with half the people. The old mill owner, standing under his light bulbs, never understood how he'd beaten him.
After all, they both used electricity, right?
A new power poured into an old design will only reveal up your old mistakes.
At Sagan, we’ve been calling this “paving the cow paths” (google it).
When factories electrified in the 1890s, most did exactly what the mill owner did, swapping the steam engine for one big motor. The economist Paul David found the real productivity boom didn't arrive until the 1920s, roughly 30 years later, once a new generation redesigned factories from scratch around electric power.
After building hundreds of agents for small, medium , and very large businesses - I am now of the belief that most businesses are hanging light bulbs - and I’m not going to enable it anymore.
If we aren’t redesigning the plant from the ground up… it is not worth the opportunity cost of our very very capable/fast/cost effective AI Engineers.
Fortunately for you dear reader… I have a plan.
If this final plan doesn’t work, and work very well, I plan to stop selling lightbulbs to factory owners… and I’ll just go start launching factories to eat the lunch of the dinosaurs electrifying their steam factories.
Mark asked his maintenance AI the questions an experienced landlord would ask about a water leak: Is the source fixed? Is it still leaking? What’s being done to prevent more damage? The AI had the details, including when the floors were tested and when the AC was shut off. Would your property manager have all that information at their fingertips?
I had AI test live versions of property management APIs, with customers volunteering access to their own systems. The AI followed standardized instructions to probe each API, collect the results, and grade them. It wasn’t a survey, and I tried to make the process as objective as possible. Mark called it an “API pop quiz.”
Maintenance is a recurring thorn in the side of property management business owners, and there's a reason for that. Leasing problems have a relatively short list of possible fixes. Maintenance has countless possible problems and solutions, which makes it much harder to build clear policies and repeatable processes. How do you make maintenance easier to manage?











