Are you looking for a more efficient way to manage your property? If so, you may want to consider using artificial intelligence. AI can help you automate many tasks, such as tenant screening and rent collection. In this episode to learn more about the benefits of using AI for property management.
Matt Speer, Founder and CEO at Property Management Advisory joins Brad live at PMMCON 2023 to talk about how his company is using AI to help property owners and managers. He shares his insights on the current state of AI in the industry, as well as how he sees it changing over time. Tune in to find out if this could be the answer you’ve been looking for!
Visit Property Management Advisory to see how they can help you achieve your goals and use AI to make your life easier.
Brad Larsen: Hey everybody. On today's episode we'll be talking about chatgpt. All kinds of interesting stuff with artificial intelligence. You're going to learn quite a bit from this episode. You got to listen in.
Commercial: Welcome to the Property Management Mastermind show with your host, Brad Larsen. Brad owns one of the fastest growing property management companies in San Antonio, Texas. This podcast is for property Managers Buy property managers. You'll hear from industry leading professionals on best practices, new ideas, success stories and lessons learned. This is your opportunity to learn about the latest industry buzz surrounding property management, as well as tips and strategies to improve your business.
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Brad Larsen: Welcome, everybody, to another edition of the Property Management Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Brad Larsen, live and in person here at PMMCON 2023 here in Nashville, Tennessee. This is our fourth iteration of PMMCON, and I just bumped into Matt and we are going to talk about what he does. And he was trying to tell me outside in the hallway and I'm like, Dude, just stop right there. Let's go do a podcast because I am very interested in what you're going to tell us about what he's offering in his product. I'm not going to try to butcher his introduction, get his name wrong, get his company wrong. I'm going to more like just throw it out there and you and I are going to chat like I just met you off the street. The beautiful thing about this podcast is it is like a secret shopper type of a scenario where you're going to start from zero and introduce me to everything in your business. We've got his website open, so we're going to talk through it and really just have a really good conversation about what you guys are doing. Number one, thank you for being a sponsor of the PMMCON Yeah, Thanks for being here. Absolutely. And so, I'm going to turn the mic over to you and do what I do very poorly at, and that's. Shut up. Go ahead.
Matt Speer: Yeah. And for some context, too.
Matt Speer: So I'm you know, I started my career in software sales. I got involved in real estate investing, jumped into that full time, needed to build a property management business to support that. And so I started as a property manager. I'm coming full circle back into into the tech scene. We we grew from about 100 doors in my business live Indy in Indianapolis, up to over 350 doors in about a 12 month span. And we did that using a lot of these tools that we're now providing to our customers through my business property management advisory.
Brad Larsen: Nice, nice. That's a good mouthful. Good intro, because there's so many things to unpack about that. And really we need to go to your website because you had a couple of different offerings that we probably want to touch on just to really give some context because you talked about, All right, go to the product page. And so I'm hovering over that and you have things that are called smart referral, smart mail, smart content and smart site, great terms, by the way. And so I want to kind of maybe unpack some of those and really dive in deep. Now, is there one that you want to talk about right away that's kind of like your bread and butter?
Matt Speer: Yeah, I think the bread and butter is really. So we started the company to help property management, you know, property management owners grow their business. And so what we found was that time was the most valuable resource for a property manager juggling balls, putting fires out, whatever analogy you want to use. It's a tough business to operate. And so if you can grow your business with tools that are automated, that are consistent, it's going to really allow you to control your growth. And so I think our smart referral, our smart mail tool or two ways that anyone can get involved right away, leverage them and we're not reinventing the wheel smart referral. For example, if you're getting referrals from realtors, from clients, you can take that to the next level with our tracking, real time tracking and have a dashboard to see, see and manage and cultivate those relationships with smart, with smart referral, I really say it's you put the work up front, I say, Hey, add 10 to 12 referral partners, put it into the system. In the first three months, you'll reap the passive results back in terms of adding doors with smart mail, we've taken this very difficult. Have you ever sent direct mail before? Of course. And so if you if you realize that it's this process, you have to get your data clean the data you have to design a mailer, design that strategy. Who's who's going to send the postcard? Are you going to be packing it yourself? You're going to hire a company. And then once you send the mail out, do you have tracking set up? What's the conversion like? It's a really difficult process that within our tool you could send a thousand targeted mailers once a month for seven months, all tracked in real time with personalized URLs and some really cool tech. And you can do that with an order probably next 30 seconds. You could complete that order right now.
Brad Larsen: Does it even track like the bounces, the postcards or the mailers that come back?
Matt Speer: Yeah, it does. And so the coolest thing about the tracking is we have because we also do the smart sites with this website infrastructure, we're that opens the door for a lot of tracking analytics. And so by having these personalized URLs, imagine if you wanted to track, let's say you wanted to send a thousand mailers to you're in San Antonio, right? Right. 1000 mailers. What would be like your target neighborhood or is it more general.
Brad Larsen: Let's say Stone oak, for example? And you know, that's a neighborhood inside of North San Antonio and it's a giant area. But let's say you want to target not on non-owner occupied out of state owners. Yep. Right. And so you go through the tax rolls and you can identify who's got an address that's different from the address of the home. The home is one, two, three Maple, San Antonio. And then you look for, you know, somebody at four, five, six Smith Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And oh, great. They're an out of state owner. I'm going to send them a mailer. Exactly. We've had lists of like 20,000, you know, those types of names. And then you filter it down to like areas that you want by zip code. Or whatever else it may be. This is where you help out.
Matt Speer: Yeah. And so we've we've taken that whole process and we when we first started, you could have called us a data company. That's really where when I was at Live Indy and in the trenches kind of running the day to day there with the property management business, I had this crazy idea and I said, What if we could find? What if I knew every professionally managed or self managed property in Indianapolis and I knew who managed it, who the owner was and what their contact info was. And so we took that at a large scale and we produced our own mine data. And so the cool thing about this is for our customers, you don't have to worry about any of that, but you're targeting some of your criteria was interesting. What was the neighborhood again?
Brad Larsen: Just call it Stone Oak, which is a giant area.
Matt Speer: Yeah. So imagine in Stone Oak you could say, Hey, I want to send a thousand mailers to investment property owners, what we call an investor, which is 2 to 6 doors. And you want to send a rent range between 1800 and 2500. I don't know if that would be right.
Brad Larsen: You can get that deep into it. You can get that deep.
Matt Speer: And then when they send when they get the mail, each individual mailer is attached to a personalized URL to that specific person, say, John Smith. When John Smith gets that mailer to six by nine card, we call it our color, our current templates, colorful characters. It really stands out. It's going to get you to really interact. It's very vibrant. You're going to scan the QR code. Ideally if they don't fill that form out and become a lead. What's cool is you're going to know that John Smith scan that form and has six properties and here's the addresses. No. So what can you do then with that data? Right. And so it really opens the door for a lot more potent marketing. That's kind of the the automation piece we were talking about before.
Brad Larsen: Yeah, the challenge with any growth obviously is just trying to get people to talk to, trying to get leads right. And so leads are generated in 100 different ways. This could be one more arrow in the quiver, if you would, to potentially generate leads. The smart mail is fun. One of the questions I would have like I've sent out mailers before with their letters, does your system do with like, Hey, I'm going to send you a PDF two page letter? Do you have a way to print and stuff an envelope?
Matt Speer: Yeah, so we've simplified the process where that could be something we do down the road, but we've threw a lot of testing research. The best way to convert doors with our data is the six by nine flashy postcard. Okay. In terms of ROI, because we don't really think about how many leads are you getting, we really think about what your cost per door. And so what we've seen, depending on market, we're looking at 3 to $500 cost per door. But the cool thing about the smart mail is put the money in, get the doors back. It really is passive because the leads are going to come through and you know, you might have a you know, we had a lead the other day was 15 doors next next day we're doing a skinny guy that runs our day to day and Kenny Hall in Indianapolis. He runs our day to day with live Indy. He walked all the properties the following day and had a contract out to him by the weekend. And so it can really turn around that quickly where you can free up that time.
Brad Larsen: That's pretty interesting. How does that incorporate into any other sort of CRM? Is this is this platform that you're showing me now, property management advisory? Is it something to the effect of that? I mean, I'm just trying to track all that and see several different, you know, several different content things in here, smart content, smart site, smart mail, smart referral. We're just trying to understand how it all pieces together. Now in some of these questions are dumb. And because I don't know anything about anything you're trying to tell me about all this stuff and all I said, just let's just do it on a podcast because I really am starting from scratch wanting to learn what you do.
Matt Speer: Yeah. And so if you took all of our tools, there's a handful, right? And they're all, they're all very complimentary. And so if you took them all and you added up how many log ins that were eliminating because you're probably, you know, if you're a property management company owner listening to this, you're probably thinking, oh, no, not another.
Brad Larsen: Log tech stack on the tech stack that's already a giant molehill.
Matt Speer: But everyone, everyone that's listening to this has a website. And so when we started this, we didn't think, Hey, we're going to build property management company websites. But it's unbelievable how how many doors that opens up with some of these other tech tools that we provide when you start with the website. And so our websites are built as progressive web apps. It's kind of the latest and greatest tech, but it's also with a website as a service model. And so your website, all our websites are on one set of code. So if we have 10,000 customers and we make an update, say Google changes something. We can make the update for all 10,000 customers all at once. And so rather than paying a setup fee up front cost maybe two years down the road when your website gets worse over time and you have to reinvest, you'll never have to worry about that again. And so it starts with the website. Now, the content, I think this is maybe a good opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room. Chatgpt maybe.
Brad Larsen: Kind of. Yeah, because we saw a little bit this morning. For example, Cheryl Knowlton kicked off the conference with her presentation. I thought she did a great job. And, you know, part of that is she she brought up the Chatgpt app and she gave some she gave some great examples. One was she asked the Chatgpt app, what are some of the challenges in property management and gave like 20 lists of 20 things. Right. And she started to read them off. And some of it's pretty amazing. So I guess the question inside of this discussion is how should property managers apply that to their business and for what gain?
Matt Speer: Absolutely. So two really confusing topic. It's exciting. I think that it's as significant as the Internet coming out, the iPhone being created in terms of the disruption. And and I can give specific examples of that. So when you think about content, well, let's say first just time saving. What's something that we all do every day working in a business? I'll answer questions, answer questions, and maybe through email, right?
Brad Larsen: The FAQs, like what is your home cost? You know? Yeah, how do I apply for it? Because we we were talking about if you think chat, you think websites, you go to a website, let's say you want to go pay your water bill and up comes a chat on, you know, how do you I just want to pay my water bill, you know, where do I go? And that's what you're saying. These are going to answer for some of our clients and customers. Well, and.
Matt Speer: It can be an internal tool as well. So we have chatgpt plugged in via the API into our software. So all of our customers have access to the essentially the $20 per month pro plan is plugged right into our API. But the cool thing is we've trained it to be a professional with property management and to talk through that lens and it can actually even talk specifically about your company and your specific, you know, your lease parameters, your pricing. And it's educated on that information. But in terms of being a time saver, we call it Amy Chat I with Amy. I thought it was clever. But here's an example. We send emails every day. Yep. How many emails do you think you send each day?
Brad Larsen: Call it 25 for fun. And I'm on the low spectrum. Let's say our PMS might send out 100 a day.
Matt Speer: So the average I think is something like 124 is what I read. Okay. So on average, someone in a business property manager is going to spend somewhere around 11 hours a week in their email. Believe it. It's kind of crazy, right? It's like 25% of their time, 28%, somewhere in that range depending on what source in email. Yeah. So what if you could take an, you know, shave off 20% of that time? I shave off probably half of it using this chatgpt tool. Okay. But let's just say you could save 20% the average property management company, let's say seven team members adding remote team members, virtual assistants, that sort of thing in the mix as well. Two hours a day would be how much you could save. 20%. Two hours times seven staff members Over the course of a year, you're going to save almost, you know, saying it's like 728 hours a year, $20 an hour. That's $10,000 worth of or 15,000, I think, dollars of savings in terms of time. But here's the biggest impact for me. It's not about the time saving. It's about the the energy that you save, especially in property management, because anytime you're sending an email, it's an upset client. Potentially. It's an issue. It's a coordinating a rehab with the vendor and constantly send those emails. It drains your time.
Brad Larsen: One of the things that drains my time is all the spam. That's where I spend 20% of my time just unsubscribing to crap. Yep. So I don't know. Does your system help with any of that stuff?
Matt Speer: So it doesn't help with that. But a good use case, there could be a virtual team member could oversee your inbox and could write your drafts of all your emails using the Chatgpt tool and then all you'd have to do is, you know, they highlight ten a day, they're important, throw the rest out. You respond to those ten that they draft, make a couple quick little edits, hit send. Now you just went from 11 hours a week on your email or for you maybe just a few, but you probably cut that into a third.
Brad Larsen: That's interesting. And so where do you see the biggest play for Chatgpt in the PM space? Is it that email scenario?
Matt Speer: So that's a time saver. That's the easiest one to digest. But by far the biggest impact that this can have is on your blog content, your SEO strategy.
Brad Larsen: Okay. Okay. Now I did see an issue where or not an issue, a scenario where they're writing the content for multiple listing service or Zillow or whatever you advertise on your website and basically you spit it in there like three bedroom, two bath near a good school, you know, something very generic and that's what you verbally speak into the chatgpt or write it in there and then it produces like a 300 word description. Yep. You know, gorgeously elegant, beautiful, lavish, three bedroom home in an immaculate community with two fully scaled bathrooms. And it just it takes your your ten words and turns it into a 150. Exactly. And it's really kind of fascinating. So that's turning into a situation where, you know, PMS may not be the most creative in describing a home. Right. And especially realtors. You know, this is kind of a realtor PM thing because we have to put physical descriptions of the home in our marketing efforts at least some point, even if it's super stupid and dry like three bedroom, two bath, you know, 2000, 2000 a month, whatever.
Matt Speer: I pulled a prompt up here. That's an email. But in terms of I do that, our team does that every day. They're probably, you know, back in India, they've probably done it 2 or 3 times with our leasing season coming up and we would do, you know, 4415 Ralston $1,300 recently updated large backyard walkable to restaurants like just you know word vomit whatever's in your head what you need to include and then it's going to it's going to put a very you're going to go, why did I not do this every time? Yeah. And that's a ten, 15 minute saver, right? Yeah.
Brad Larsen: And it puts it very elegantly worded description in and I've seen it work and yeah, that's a time saver because to think of the genius that it creates that you need to create that nicely worded description. Yep. Even if you have, even if you're like William Shakespeare and you can write that and you type a thousand words a minute, it still takes time. You know, it's going to take ten, 15, 20, 30 minutes sometimes to go through that because of all the other distractions that are going on. I don't know. Have you ever sit down to do something? I'll hear pops up an email here, pops up a text message here, pops up a phone call, and that one thing takes forever. I can see Chatgpt being a really neat feature for that and an immediate something that we could take on at Rent works where we are and say, All right, how do we incorporate that into what we do with our descriptions? You know, we're releasing 30, 40 properties a month plus 30, 40 descriptions to get it right. You know, you do the math on the savings.
Matt Speer: Well, so the really cool thing, we're very early with developing the chatgpt for property management because that's really what we're trying to accomplish, because long term, you're not going to just go to the Chatgpt website and use the general service. You're going to use it for your specific industry or your specific use case. And so whatever you're inputting into the the content brief or the prompt, it really is that it's a prompt. And so what we do is we preload prompts for property description, email, Facebook, post, even blog sections. And so it's just very easy to pop in there, select email. I'm going to give it a couple of words like, I think this one says, Write an email to a client about a fence repair. $1,300 took too long, cost too much, right? In a professional and upbeat tone and use bullet points. That's what I've told it to do. And so you can give that a read and you don't need to read it to everyone here. It might have.
Brad Larsen: To just I mean, yeah. So you talk about his description and I'm going to read it out so you can understand it that he puts it in. It's now put into a very eloquent, succinct, precise email. I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to provide you with an update on the fence repair that we recently completed. While we're glad that the fence is now in good shape, we understand the repair process took longer than expected and ended up costing more than we originally quoted. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and would like to make it right. Here are some key details that you need to understand about the fence repair, total cost, time of completion, blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on and it's the best regards comma, you know, closes it out. So it took I don't know, let's call that 30 words and turned it into probably 250 words of very well written content That makes you sound super professional. I guess that's a part of it is a lot of folks that we work with in the industry, they don't have a lot of formal education. We hope they write and read well, but they may not, but they could be very well organized. They could be good employees. They show up on time. They do the right thing. But you can't expect people to be wordsmith Shakespearean writers. Right.
Matt Speer: And you could actually have it write it in a Shakespearean tone if you wanted, which is it's pretty funny. It'll say Hath thee and doth hear ye, hear ye. It is pretty hilarious. But I'd mess around with maybe a little too much. And just to take it to a next level here because it's meant to be very creative. Whatever you tell to do, it will do. And you can think of any use case. I told it rewrite the rewrite the email that that Brad you just read and I said write it more concise. And so, you know, you don't need to read it out loud again, but it cut it in half. Probably in half. Yeah, it did. Right. And so you, you can take multiple attempts at it. You can, you know, the whole idea is save time, save that mental energy, let it do the work, let it, you know, let the computer compute and save your mental energy.
Brad Larsen: How does that tie into getting it onto the market? So let's talk through this. People are using different softwares out there. You name the 510 different softwares that are out on the market for management. That description at some point has to be cut and paste For that example, email is one thing that could be cut and paste and put into an outlook or a Gmail and send. Okay. Is there any way to integrate that into a software?
Matt Speer: Absolutely. That that I think is the future. We're really scratching the surface with this. We have an integrated, plugged in, accessible to use our customers that have websites with us. You can use our smart mail, our smart referral, some of those growth tools. We have a rent estimate that's dynamic, some really cool stuff really that's, you know, within our starter package, 279 a month. You know, I'm not going to sell here too much, but we want you to.
Brad Larsen: Because this is part of why I had you on. I told you to go through the entire thing to include how we get in touch with you and what do you charge and what's it cost and all that. I'd rather you say that versus just call me for a quote. I hate that stuff. You guys know me on this where you call me up a management company. Hey, what do you charge for management? Well, it depends. That drives me insane. No, we charge X, We do Y. Exactly. Here's full disclosure. So keep.
Matt Speer: Going. Yeah. So you can get started with these growth tools. 279 a month. Pay to play with the smart mail. We don't make any money on the referral tool, although it's probably one of the most powerful tools we have. You get access to the chat, the chat, GPT, AI assistant. If you have a website with us, that's when it really unlocks a lot of power because Chat GPT will be on the front end of our customers websites likely probably first to market with that tool. That is going to be an absolute game changer because you can turn this AI assistant the power of its read every book. It knows everything about property management, but we can train it on your documents, your lease, your company, your pricing. So think of a scenario a tenant lands on the front end of your site. You've got the chat, it looks like a normal chat, and they say, you know, how many times do you get those emails where it's like, you know, somebody inquired on your website, Well.
Brad Larsen: Really, it's a pet policy. It would be a great one. A lot of questions about that. Can you tell me your pet policy at Rent Works? And she would give.
Matt Speer: It we could train it to give only bullet points, 3 to 5 bullet points. And so we could train it on what those bullet points are for your specific PET policy.
Brad Larsen: That would come straight out of your screening criteria and or your tenant handbook. Yep. And so it would not be pull it right.
Matt Speer: From the header, their pet screening. Yeah. And then it could say if that doesn't help download this document that you know, gives you everything you need but then it wouldn't stop there. It's a sales assistant at this point as well it might say. Um, are you looking to apply for a property or, you know, are you looking to view a property? Right. Where are they at in the stage? It can kind of pick up on those cues because, you know, we just did the email prompt. Imagine telling it. We train it to say. Respond in a respond like a salesperson for a residential property management company. Be more aggressive but professional like something like that, where it's going to it's going to do that the best it can.
Brad Larsen: It'll answer the question. Okay, here's the question. Would you like me to send you a link to apply? Please provide me your phone number or a text message or an email or whatever the system sets up at. And so and.
Matt Speer: So that's a time.
Brad Larsen: Saving phrase.
Matt Speer: It'll, it'll, it'll turn the, turn the corner. It'll close for you, It'll, it'll sell for you, It'll save a lot of your, your team's time and so I is not I is not going to eliminate you know company make it obsolete. But the companies that lean into it and use it, they're going to be more efficient. They're going to save more time. They're going to have that time freed up to do to do some more things. It's just a competitive advantage. I think, though, that another immediate benefit is the content on your site, your blogs. We're our customers. Our site, Lavinda, is starting to move up the ranks on Google. We relaunched the site in December. I think we've had 12 to 15 leads or so just in this past like ten day span. And so it's really ramping up. And we're posting AI powered SEO powered blog content where you can produce a blog right now in 3 to 5 minutes, a virtual team member could be trained with one video, maybe two videos, you know, have it a basic and advanced to post all of your blog content with SEO science in play to your website, completely eliminating the need for, you know, the content. Right?
Brad Larsen: How long is that going to last, you think, before Google gets like wise to that? And they say, Oh, we recognize this as like a it's not fraudulent, but it's not authentic written by a human.
Matt Speer: Yeah. So when you write a blog like a human writes a blog, you know, it could be a marketing. Someone majored in marketing in college graduates and is their job is content writing. When they write content, let's say it's for a property manager, maybe it's what's the property management cost structure, you know, something that's going to rank well, they're searching for something transactional. What research does that person do? And they structure the blog. They're going to go to Google and look look at a couple. You know, they'll hopefully be professionals in property management and won't be their first rodeo, but they're essentially regurgitating what is what is on the Internet and formatting it in a way that's compelling to the reader. The AI has read every book, every word on the Internet, and so what it does a really good job of it creates an outline. It can actually create the outline and the sections, but the human touch is really important. We would be posting the blogs instantaneously if we just let the AI post it. That 4 to 5 minutes is the revision, the human touch editing, couple changes and then you hit go because. Here's something interesting. I'm curious your take on this. Do people read your blogs on your website?
Brad Larsen: Doubtful. And everything that we have out there has typically been written, you know, in answering a question. Yep. The blogging, of course, that some of it comes from the podcasting. Right? You can you can take an audio, you've got.
Matt Speer: Some good SEO juice with that.
Brad Larsen: And you turn it into a podcast and you can apply that to your management company. But just writing straight up blogs, I don't think a lot of people do that. Yep. Meaning they just don't. They hire content writers because writing a blog again is like it takes a bit of time. I mean, to get all my designations through. Narkom you had to write articles? Well, I physically wrote those articles to be published in the magazine, and you know, I'd rather do two hours of that time to earn X number of points to get the designation. Because I'm a good writer, I'm a good bser on paper. I'm just blessed with that capability. And how do you think I got through college? It wasn't it wasn't for my good looks. It was because I can be on paper pretty well and write decent articles. But that's not a common trait. You know, we are very busy and to do that, it takes a lot of focus, right? You understand you got to clean your plate of everything going on and say, I'm going to write this blog article. You know, a guy like Scott Brady, he can he can spit one out in 15 minutes. I mean, he's a genius like that. I don't have that capability. It takes me a bit more. So I guess where I'm going with this is my fear is that those blogs are going to be not flagged, but like get in line with all the others because it's all chat. Gpt So is it is the original blog writing going to be identified as like, this is a written by a human because it's full of mistakes and errors.
Matt Speer: So technically that's a great question. I think that's top of mind for a lot of people. Right now. Google. You'll read some stuff that says Google can detect content. That's completely not true. What they can detect is spammy content, which then they would associate potentially to AI writing. Okay. And so but the AI, the AI content writing and advancing so rapidly that we read an email out loud to everyone, it sounded like, you know, Human maybe wrote that, especially if you throw a couple edits in, right? And so the human touch is important. What's really interesting, you can you can when we do this, you can take write the article, you could send it into an AI tool and say, rewrite, rephrase this article to be not detectable by AI to show up as human. There's tools. You can post a blog, post any content, and it'll tell you the percentage likelihood, likelihood because it's just text on a screen. Google. It's not like coded or flagged a different way. And so they can say, Hey, 98% human. What we do with all of our blog posts, we we make sure there are at least a 70% human rating within that internal process that we follow.
Brad Larsen: Does it have a translation feature because we use a lot of remote team members, right? We have a lot of remote teams in Mexico. And I yelled at him just yesterday because we were organizing PMMCon and they were speaking in Spanish and I said Spanish and I was swearing at him for fun. And they're like, Oh, it's just easier. I'm like, I get it. I'm not giving you a hard time. Just just picking on you a little bit for fun. But I'm really thinking, though, for my team because we have 17 or 18 remote team members, I always forget, but could they dictate something in Spanish? And it comes out in English like a super well worded professional email. Absolutely. That's amazing. That's a really good thing.
Matt Speer: They could ask it to write code in Spanish and input it like that's how powerful the tool is. But we have to think about how can we and I love that use case because I think that there's a lot of people that are listening that will have that.
Brad Larsen: Because we know they speak good English. Like a lot of my RTMs grew up in the States, they spent time in the States, but they're not I'm not expecting them to be college graduates in English. I mean, jeez, it's hard enough to speak in one language, right? Very well. Trying to speak and write in 2 or 3 is super difficult. So I think what we don't want as a company, one of our fears is to be embarrassed by an RTM sending out an email that looks like it was written by a monkey in crayon. Right? You know, and it's just awful reading and it's embarrassment to our company. So a tool like this would help clean that up. And I'd rather see I'd rather see it look more robotic than the other side of that spectrum. Looks like it was written by a two year old on cocaine or something. You know, just it's just we want that to be clean. And it's no knock on them. Don't ask me to write. And so you want it to be.
Matt Speer: You want it to be consistent, too. And I think that's that's a, you know, a benefit of using a tool that's a programmed, you know, a computer type tool. It's going to be very consistent with the messaging.
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Brad Larsen: We got to tie that all together. We talked a lot, okay. About kind of what is out there in the chat. Gpt kind of maybe go again about what you are offering, what it is in a pitch and just give me the elevator version, right? Yeah, because we kind of talked a lot about stuff and yeah, we want the I want the listener to be very clear about who you are, what you're offering.
Matt Speer: Yeah. So and we've got a lot of tools. It's definitely very cohesive when you kind of see it in one pitch and one presentation, which I'll do here in a moment. Go to property management page, look at our product section. You're going to see it'll be very clear it's going to resonate because again, I'm a property manager. I built these tools, you know, to make my life easier. And I think they're going to make your life easier, too, too. So the pitch is you go to our pricing section. I think that's where we really stand out with our growth package. $795 a month. You get a world class website that you will never have to invest in again. It will improve over time and will always stay at a world class level. Reach out to us. We'll run a report on your current site, you know, compare it to ours and you'll have some pretty objective stats to look through. As far as the site goes. You'll also get access to the smart content. You can potentially eliminate the need for the professional blogs, or you could invite your professional blog company into the environment to write the blogs within, you know your site. You have the smart referral, the smart mail tool accessible. You'll have the AI chat chatgpt for property management, plugged right in, unlimited use, and then you have a dynamic rental estimate tool that you can actually share. You can share a link, you can make a recommendation instead of it being a static PDF. It's this interactive tool really, really accurate because again, I kind of started things off by saying we actually started as a data company, which is really helped us with with that rent estimate tool.
Brad Larsen: So the rent estimate tool in itself is probably the number one lead generating source for most property manager websites. Absolutely. Is it okay, I was kind of shooting from the hip there.
Matt Speer: But I think it is if you think about like, you know, all the branding on somebody's site, it's always about that conversion of free rental analysis. When someone reaches out to you as a property manager, they likely have some kind of pain. You need to unpack. Why are they reaching out?
Brad Larsen: And it gives them a reason to go there, right?
Matt Speer: And it's all they have a subject property in most cases. So you say, Hey, here's a link. I've included some comps, I have a recommended rent, you'll see the range. And then they can they can interact with that report and they could give feedback back, share that link back with you. But, you know, it sounds like it's a nuanced little thing being a link that's shareable at the web page instead of a PDF. But it is crazy to me. When we built that rent estimate tool, we didn't realize there'd be it'd be so sticky. When a customer uses it for the first time on average, they begin using it over the course of two weeks, ten times a day per team member. And so, so it's really cool to see that. But again, all these tools are all packed within one your website with a login and all these tools are in the back end. It integrates with lead, simple be able to plug all the if you use lead simple we could hook it in with with a zap. If you use something else I use lead simple. It plugs right in to your different workflow has the lead segmenting and we're just getting started too with you know we're really sounds like a lot a lot of things going on there but really it's it's pretty tight A lot of it's automation, especially like the smart mail, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, you put the money in, you get the doors back. I think a lot of people wish that was the case with, you know, some of the lead providers they might be working with right now. At least that was for me.
Brad Larsen: It's pretty interesting stuff, actually, because I'm very curious to see how it works. See, on your website you have a really good scheduling tool as well. I always thought that was a good thing for property managers to have some sort of like scheduling. Calendly I don't know what software you're tied into there, but you know, a way to say, I want to, I want somebody to call me tomorrow at 430 and talk to me about whatever. So are you a big believer in that kind of give me your your philosophy.
Matt Speer: Yeah. So we have that's a really good question. It's very on topic with something our team was discussing recently. Previously we used Calendly links with our customers on the conversion on their sites, on their websites. We changed that because putting the Calendly plug in into the site actually degraded the performance of the website a little bit. And so it hurt us a bit on, on SEO and best practices and some things that affected our traffic and lead flow conversion rate.
Brad Larsen: Because they're talking about load times, load load.
Matt Speer: Times, you're taking this other technology and you're trying to kind of plug it into this existing infrastructure. But if you go to our if you go to our website property management page, we built our tech company website on the exact same infrastructure that we built all of our customer sites. And so it's really dynamic. You'll have a lot of editing capabilities from that back end and it's all really intended to Don't worry about your website, don't worry about your it's all. A compliant to it is all ADA compliant and it stays ADA compliant. That will always be ADA compliant because we'll be monitoring that on a on a weekly and monthly basis.
Brad Larsen: That's always the crazy thing because that's scary stuff. It is. All of a sudden you're not. Ada compliant. And here comes a lawsuit and you're like, It's just a website.
Matt Speer: Or here comes an update to your site. You're like, We got to reinvest in the site again. Or it crashes or it crashes you as a property manager, we don't have time for that, that kind of stuff, right? We need to focus on our team, building out our systems, our operations. It's funny when we because we are property management advisory, we're not the, you know, the sexy tech company name with an X and we're specifically property management advisory. And that advisory is important for us to be a really good community of property management, company owners that, you know, can lean on each other with best practices, what's working, what's not working. And I think that's a valuable piece. We talk a lot with our customers about operations, sharing ideas. I think on my way here I got an email from someone, one of our customers in Austin, Texas. He said, you know, Hey, I need I'm doing a I'm doing a presentation for an HOA community. I'm just now getting into that market. I don't have a sample. Do you have one text texted one of my other clients. He sent me his sample he uses fired it off to him, you know, And now he's benefiting, benefiting from that that community we've created.
Brad Larsen: That's good stuff because that's, you know, there's nothing original. We're here. We are at the mastermind conference. And that's kind of the spirit of sharing. And it's interesting because in real estate world, right, real estate agents and sales and brokers and all that, they don't share anything. They are like, It's all mine. I'm not sharing anything. Go away. Don't talk to me or I'll share something with you. But you got to pay me for it, right? But yeah, it's always.
Matt Speer: Pretty. Quid pro quo.
Brad Larsen: Very much so on that. But in the management world, it's very much a open book and we share and rip off and make our own and we're happy with that. Like people always ask me, Hey, what do you do here? I'm like, Well, send me an email. I'll just send you a word document. You can change a header and use it forever. You want good, right? Right. And it could have taken me hours to write and perfect, but I'm happy to share it. It's just kind of how I feel in my philosophy. So the one more thing about what we want to talk about. So did we cover all the smart referrals, smart, smart mail, smart content, smart site on what you're offering here for property management advisory.
Matt Speer: I think I could touch just really quickly on the smart referrals. So the smart referral, it's I encourage anyone could get started. $279. You've got access to a handful of these tools, smart referral. You have the control to have immediate ROI. If you're not getting, you know, 5 to 10 leads a month right now from your referral partners, you need to focus on building out that program. Whether you use our tool or not. There's not really a whole lot of organizational tools for a referral program. That's why it's kind of a unique tool.
Brad Larsen: It is. That's the first time I've really seen it. I mean, in theory, you could use any CRM, you could use a yellow pad, you could use lead. Simple. Yep. But I think the smart referral is a better way to potentially track it because I'm assuming you have it to where we get a referral in and there's going to be some sort of way to track and update those referral centers.
Matt Speer: Yep. So you can see this dashboard here on my little, my little laptop monitor, but you can go in and you add a partner name, email company info.
Brad Larsen: That's a realtor, and the realtor sent you a referral.
Matt Speer: And, and where we're where we're unique here is we offer a pay per click and pay per form fill model in addition to the traditional pay per closed door that a lot of people do. Now, think about your realtor friends that, you know, maybe they have, you know, they're all good people, maybe a little stronger ego sometimes where they have their sphere of influence, they're really, you know, on social media kind of yelling from the rooftops. They're in real estate. They love the pay per click. They love that because they could post on Instagram, Facebook, you know, private Facebook group, whatever groups they're a part of, they can post their unique referral code, put it on their website, share it on their podcast, put it they can put it out and about and they can get paid when people interact and click it, Oh, that's cool. And so you get this, you get this natural branding that's happening. But here's here's a secret benefit to this backlinks. The SEO. Yes, the referral network through the affiliate. It's affiliate marketing. It's, you know, tried and true process. Through that affiliate marketing, those backlinks being all over the Internet, your website is getting boosted and you're going to get more traffic and leads to your site. Why have our smart site? Because we have all that data and that information so we can get really, really targeted and potent.
Brad Larsen: So that influencer just promotes your your website, especially that free market estimate, whatever you call that. I'm assuming an influencer like a realtor, like you said, can say, go here to this website and click on this link and you'll be able to get exactly what your your rental is going to rent for per month. And that would come through as a price per click and you would potentially compensate that influencer. Yeah.
Matt Speer: So you're seeing Tyler lingle.com. He's going to get a nice shout out here. He's one of Levendis referral partners. So what he did, we added him in as a referral partner and then he's got a really nice website. He I think he did, I don't know, something crazy like $20 million in sales, almost all with investors in this last year sent us a lot of business. Sounds like it but he he created a landing page a a web page on his site that's a shout out to live Indy saying hey there my preferred property management company and it says get started with live Indy links a podcast episode that he had with co-founder Kenny. But this is his referral link. So he's getting he's getting, you know, not only are we getting the benefit of the SEO of that backlink, but he's getting paid every time people come to that site.
Brad Larsen: So that I cost them, I cost you $10. If I click that link right now, I think.
Matt Speer: Only a buck. I think we're right. The bucks not bad. He gets paid well he does a lot of business though but you can see that now once you fill this form out, you've got the dashboard. You can. It's real time. So, you know, I'm going to just try to impress you. I know you're tough to impress, so.
Brad Larsen: I was going to beat you up on is. Okay. Do you have a way to track your cost per client, customer cost, client, whatever term that is? So I'm going to fake.
Matt Speer: You're seeing me fake a bunch of clicks here on this custom landing page, which is meant just to be a conversion page. I'll put test so my my CTO and co-founder doesn't get mad at me, so it's going to revert back to the site, which is nice. So we're going to pop back in. You're going to see the demo account has 94 and eight right now. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and refresh it. You can see it's 102 and nine, so it's real time and it totals out based on what you agreed to pay them per click, per lead form, and then per closed door, it totals it out and lets you track it. And so it's going to have that all in real time. You can pay them. They always ask to use the rent estimate tool.
Brad Larsen: Does that mean do you have can you set a ceiling for this?
Matt Speer: Yeah. You control you control the cost. Our average cost right now per door added through the referral program is 165, $170.
Brad Larsen: That's what I needed to understand because that's your cost per conversion ratio.
Matt Speer: Everything we talk about in PMA is cost per door added, all the cost per lead. It's a waste of time. It's all about cost per door. The referral, I push it, I push it hard. It does take the effort up front. You get the passive return back. But with $106,570 cost per door ten referral partners, can you find ten agents that can give you a door every other month if you if you can. That's 60 doors a year passively. Once you build build the.
Brad Larsen: Network all track tool a lot. Now does this can this be tied into a rent buying type software or a lead simple type software to kind of work it on both sides? Definitely. Absolutely. That's really exciting because, you know, I was going at it is this if you can understand your client acquisition cost, I remembered the acronym. Now after we're talking your CAC, the rule of thumb has always been 500, 700 per client.
Matt Speer: Knaapen says something seven, 750 something like that.
Brad Larsen: Yeah. So we try.
Matt Speer: To stay around 500 or less.
Brad Larsen: In India, if you're below that, you're doing good. You know, if it costs me 500 and again that's subject because do you add in your pens and your pencils and your gas and your car? You know what I mean? It's a fuzzy math.
Matt Speer: You want to add in that. You want to add in our software costs because it's a growth it's a growth tool segment off. If you've got a website, you could maybe pull a bit of that out. If you've got a BDM, you want to.
Brad Larsen: Add that in, you add that cost in for them their commissions. Yep, Yeah. All of their.
Matt Speer: Va, that's sales focused.
Brad Larsen: Client acquisition costs. So the client acquisition cost is almost a derivative of a profit and loss that's almost sectioned off just for business development.
Matt Speer: Right, right. And if you're and then you want to look at your lifetime value, right? If you're able to produce a door for $500 and let's say depending on your rent, you know, I'll just throw out $300 a month of income on a unit that's probably pretty wide net of people listening here. You're going to break even at throw in all your additional costs that we talked about, your BDM, some of those things that a lot of people don't like to add in because they don't like to see the number. Yeah, let's say it really does put them about the average at 700. Well, man, I wish I wish software sales had a break even at three months. I'll tell you that. Breaking even at three months, if you have them longer than three months, it's pure profit. Yeah. For us, I think our lifetime value is, you know, 24, 36 months.
Brad Larsen: Is a lot of people don't want to admit exactly what's going in to make the sausage. They just they just want to say, oh, my client acquisition cost is only $166 because that's how many clicks I had to pay for through your software tracking mechanism. No, no, no, no, no. Wait a minute. You got to throw in all the stuff. Yep. And it is kind of baked into your office as a whole. So it's the client acquisition cost is a very fuzzy figure to me, but conceptually, you want to keep it within reason. And me personally, it could be 1000, it could be 1500. I'm fine with that because I understand the capital value. You're going to make your money back within a year or six months and then you keep doing the right thing. You keep that home underneath your management wing. You sell their home later on for them, you sell them another home. It's just impossible to measure the client lifetime value. Yeah.
Matt Speer: It's a lot of a lot of assumptions unless you've been around for 20 plus years and it's you know, even then, though, business is changing.
Brad Larsen: Things change. Gurus are trying to what's your client lifetime value like? They're super smart about it. Like it's like it's so cut and dry. It's not cut and dry.
Matt Speer: And let's be let's be honest here. Let's be real. Property managers don't have time to dig in. I haven't met one property manager. That's like, hold on top of mind right now. I'm going to pull my books out. Let's go through and look through our quick books. And, you know, they're focused on so many different things, so many people, processes, and then you throw in growth to the mix, too. We always pitch that with what our service, the whole intent is to supercharge growth for property managers, but it's something that you can control. It's consistent. And so if you've got just a couple core processes like your referral network, you send mail consistently, you maybe have an acquisitions team on the sales side, the tighter you can get that your SEO, your website, that's kind of the icing on the cake. And a lot of cases keep those pieces really tight and don't go wide with pay for this lead, pay for that lead. When you do that, it's just going to be, you know, a hornet's nest. It's going to be impossible.
Brad Larsen: Interesting with this, do you understand the APM model, the all property management lead source? I do, yeah. Okay. Is there anything that ties in to what you're offering here to to maybe improve that interaction with those particular clients.
Matt Speer: In terms of like the all property management leads coming through and how it would maybe play into this.
Brad Larsen: Process? You can drive them to the free market estimate. That's a pretty easy. Yeah.
Matt Speer: So I think the best. So all property management, you're going to be competing with a couple other companies, right?
Brad Larsen: It's one if they click on if you're you're basically one of six. Yep. Right. Competing entities and then it's a race to the phone.
Matt Speer: So it's speed.
Brad Larsen: Speed, speed is the only way to win in that regard.
Matt Speer: And if you're if you've got a good speed to lead, it can be a pretty valuable resource. If not, it's you're kind of, you know, lighting cash on fire in a dumpster if you don't. And that's with anything, let's say what's an address in San Antonio? You know the rent pretty well. Oh.
Brad Larsen: I couldn't even give you one. I don't know. Make one up. You have to skip.
Matt Speer: I'll do. I'll do one in Indy, one of my rentals, 908 East 46th. All right. Send the Sobro neighborhood. Anybody in Indy listening to this will know what I'm talking about. So it's going to come back with a report. So let's say an all property management lead came through what's a really compelling way to stand out? If maybe you say, hey, they want a report on 946, I'm going to jump in. I'm going to make a couple a quick recommendation. I'm going to go in here. You can see me updating a recommended rent. So it gives you the range. It gives you some info. You can even change the bed space if it's not, you know, not up to date. And that'll reflect the report. I'm going to change it back to a two bed and then I can click, click share link. You saw a fast just yeah, I did that pretty quick now boom, they've got that right in front of them. That'll be their experience. They'll see calculating your branded report. Now you just call them. Yeah. Hey, so I want you to pull up the report I just sent you on your phone. This is going to be my recommendation. So that's a way you could really.
Brad Larsen: Follow up because it gives them a low range of 800, a recommended rent of 1400 and a high range of 1.15. And you can.
Matt Speer: Text that too, right? Because it's not a PDF, it's a link, Right. And they've given you their, their phone, their email, You know, you want to fire that off quickly, get that in their hands. That's the talking point. That's how you're going to close them. I think the.
Brad Larsen: Texting is is kind of the next level rounding out. Yeah emails nowadays are white noise like you talked about earlier, how much spam I get every damn day. It's just white noise. If it's super important or something I need to understand or get, it's coming through a text message. Absolutely. So I think that's that's where everything's going. That's really neat stuff. Yeah, I.
Matt Speer: Listen, I love the voicemails. When we we do some cold calling every once in a while you get to keep things sharp. I love the property management company owners that say, yeah don't don't leave a voicemail. You can if you want, but just send me a text. I'm going to follow up a lot faster. Yeah. And I think that's just the world we live in. People are on the go. They're on their phones, you know, and speed quality, lean forward into the tech, simplify things. You're going to see some good results.
Brad Larsen: I think companies like Apple and whomever makes phones, they're going to create a feature that that sa