Robert Dell'Osso, CEO and Broker/Owner at MasterKey Property Management in Cary, North Carolina and Vice Chair for the NARPM Capitol Summit, joins Andrew to talk all things legislation. From lead-based paint to fee disclosures and affordable housing, Robert covers a lot of ground and provides actionable tips to protect your business.
Have questions? Email us at triplewin@secondnature.com
Network with professional property managers in our private group, https://facebook.com/groups/triplewinpropertymanagers
Visit our events page https://www.secondnature.com/events
Follow the Triple Win Property Management podcast by Second Nature and never miss an episode!
Season 6 Episode 2 features Robert Dell'Osso, CEO and Broker/Owner of MasterKey Property Management.
The Triple Win Property Management Podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature.
Andrew Smallwood
Hello, professional property managers. Andrew Smallwood here. I'm the host of the Triple Win Podcast, and I'm joined by my friend, broker, owner of MasterKey Property Management, Robert Dell’Osso, whose name you might recognize because we did a session earlier this year talking about profitability in your business with Profit Coach that was well received.
Great reviews. And you may also know Robert as the chair of the government affairs committee for NARPM. He's very involved in the Raleigh triangle, but he's also been the vice chair for the NARPM Capitol Summit and involved in NARPM at the national level. I know our general counsel, Kim Godsey, joined him and a number of folks in D.C. earlier this year for the Capitol Summit event.
And so that's kind of what we're here to talk about a little bit more is what's happening in the regulatory world for property managers. And, Robert, I guess I want to kick off by just saying welcome to the podcast, and thanks for joining us today.
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. Great to be on with you again. Thanks for having me.
Andrew Smallwood
Absolutely. Okay. So what are we going to get into today? We're going to cover a little bit of ground because we are in an election year in 2026. If you're listening to this in the year that we recorded, it’s an election year, and people can feel that there's a lot going on in the world.
You know? And we probably won't comment on everything macro, but specifically honing in on what's happening in the world of property managers and people who are running property management businesses.
You know, what's happening in the regulatory landscape and how can property managers stay in tune with that? What are some of the decisions to be thinking of now, and, again, paying attention to in the months ahead?
And, you know, I kind of noticed this, Robert, where affordability is a word that democrats and republicans are both hitting on a lot because, you know, everybody's been feeling rising costs, inflation, etcetera, over the past few years. And housing prices, you know, over the last few years is certainly something people have really felt. And so there's a lot of political concern around what do we do about the price of housing and the affordability and how that's been rising compared to wages and everything else. And people are coming at that maybe different ways, but it's kind of an issue that's, you know, you could say one of the top political issues that's being talked about a lot right now. What do you kind of see in the political conversations? And as you were in D.C., you know, how people are kind of thinking about housing and approaching that problem from a political perspective?
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. It's definitely a buzzword affordability right now. That's right. The last few years we had inflationary pressures.
They're still kind of lingering. We'll have to see how they shake out for this year. But on both sides of the aisle, everyone is talking about affordable housing. And I think part of it is due to the rise of the institutional investor in the housing market.
They now view what we've always known is a great investment, which is housing. Rental properties are a great investment long term. So you're seeing more and more get into that. So there's some concern amongst people in D.C. and across the country that that's driving up the cost of housing for people and making it harder to get people into purchasing a home. Or it's pushing them out of the game because they can come in with seemingly unlimited amounts of cash and buy houses and drive up the price of everything. And then they hold them and they rent them out for some amount of time.
So we're seeing that a lot. Even at the local level where I'm at, at the state level, they talk about it. Of course, at the national level.
And they're trying to come up with solutions or create solutions.
You always have to have some level of concern when the government gets involved to create a blanket solution for everyone. Because as you know, others may not know that housing can be very regional specific. So our housing market in North Carolina can be vastly different than what it is in Colorado or California or New York.
So blanket solutions can be challenging to come up with and implement.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. I mean, historically, housing has always felt very local, and regulation has generally been more at the state and the local level, but there is some interesting federal kind of, like, level topics or potential proposals, right, that are being thrown out and refined right now.
You know, just a couple months ago, president Trump was tweeting about this. You mentioned institutional investors and the Trump administration providing, you know, some more guidance and clarity on what they define as an institutional investor. And, you know, certainly, there's been an attempt of, like, hey, is that really helping us or or hurting us? And is there a way we need to regulate this kind of activity or purchasing behavior from these types of entities to get the outcomes, you know, that that we want? I guess, like, what's what's your kind of perspective on some of the prescribed solutions, you know, that are are coming through and, you know, some some of the pain points that, you know, you think, you know, we should be be looking at and how we how we might address it.
Robert Dell’Osso
I always have concern when the government wants to come out with new regulation for any industry because the regulation they come up with today probably won't be the same, you know, a year from now, two years, five years, ten years. They're going to continually change and it's usually not for the better.
So they also need to take into account how that affects owners of rental properties currently, whether they're mom and pops with one landlord or people who have been able to grow their portfolio to say one hundred doors or two hundred doors, right? And they're not taking institutional money doing that.
Or the operators of property management companies like us, right? And there's also downstream effects on that. Right? We use vendors throughout the space. And as we get more regulated, it can affect our use of those vendors. So they need to remember that regulation, while it may sound good for political reasons, can have real world effects on small businesses and jobs.
I think the vast majority of the jobs in the US are provided by small businesses, or at least half or something like that. So it's important to take that into account because you don't want to adversely affect those companies.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. There a lot of times, there can be unintended consequences, right, when, when this kind of regulation can come through.
And certainly housing and investors putting money into rehabilitating houses, etcetera, there can be a lot of good work done and certainly a lot of local small businesses, right, who are supported, through that work. I guess, you know, a couple of things that I thought were interesting seeing some of the conversation online about this is people will commonly hear institutional Wall Street landlords buying up every house everywhere, so to speak. And then you kind of hear the counter narrative to that, which is, hey, they own less than one percent of the total housing stock.
If you start to focus that in on single family rentals, I think that percentage goes up to three to four percent, so to speak. If, you know, if you tighten it up into, okay, they're not buying a lot of homes in Wyoming, and then you start to look in places like North Carolina, right, where you are, you know, Atlanta, Georgia, some other markets, that percentage of three bed, two bath houses starts to go up a little bit more. But largely, it's still a minority. Like, you know, you're going to it's still a pretty competitive market is generally what we've seen.
And I know there's some concern around particularly the build to rent aspect of this, which is a lot of these owner operators and other folks trying to get in to create more supply, which is actually another approach to how can we drive more affordability, right, you know, in the marketplace is if you can increase the supply of homes, you know, presumably, would drive more competition for potential buyers or potential renters alike, you know, in the in the market.
I guess, how do you think we're doing on that front as far as making progress on that front of increasing supply or some of the risks that you see there?
Robert Dell’Osso
I think there's still a lot of challenges around that because there's still a lot of faults that have been driven up. The purchase of the raw land and getting through the zoning and permitting process. All those steps they have to take before they can actually start pouring foundations and putting up walls is extremely expensive. I'm not saying get rid of it or anything, but you have to look at it as part of any solution you're trying to create.
So the more regulatory hurdles you have in place before they could even start building factors into the cost that they're going to rent a home at or sell a home at. So it's not just the cost of the building materials and the labor to put up the home. There's other stuff involved in that. So I know of a local builder in our area who's building some townhomes to sell, a few dozen or so, whatever.
And they've been running portable power generators to build these things. But the last pictures I saw, the walls are up, the windows are in, the doors are in, the drywall. These houses, they have been waiting six months for power. And it's a small family building operation.
The company is actually called Family Building Company.
So they're not huge, deep pocketed people. They're just a father son who's trying to grow this business, but they don't have any pull to get Duke Power to say, hey, why don't you run our power now? We've been waiting six months. We need these powers so we can't sell a home until we know we have power there.
So there's other things we need to look at, but that's driving their costs up, because they have to factor in their carrying costs on these homes and lending costs on these homes to hold them longer if they're not going to get power for six, nine, or twelve months.
And some people say, oh, well, don't start until you have power. Well, then they've got carrying costs on the land because they use a note to buy the land to hold it to build these homes. So there's still costs. It's not that anybody just gave them land.
You know, they're paying taxes on this land as well. There's insurance costs, building bonds and stuff like that they have.
It's definitely, it's a problem, right? But I don't think anybody's really looking at the solution other than what looks good politically. Oh, we can say we're going to kick out institutional investors. Yay, we're looking out for you.
But does that really solve the problem? I don't think it does.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. Another approach to the affordability problem, which has has never really been a federal thing, but certainly at the local level, you've seen rent control, right, proposals come about. And also some of those policies applied in certain states. There's other things, right, people are seeing kind of pointing at this affordability challenge. I imagine, Robert, as we take a step back, if I'm listening to this and I'm hearing, okay. Institutional investors, it's a headline. It's something that's talked about a lot.
You know, maybe if I'm a local property management business and I've got institutional investors as part of my client base, maybe I'm concerned about that or what implications that has for my business. But in a lot of cases, it doesn't feel as direct. I guess, like, for you and operating your business, is there anything there that you feel like, hey. I'm interested in this as somebody who's understanding the regulatory landscape, but are are there applications for how you build your business, what clients you focus on, or, you know, what you're thinking about, you know, that you might be putting out there as as thoughts for people to think about as they're looking at some of the the regulation that's coming through on the institutional side or, rent control side or other aspects of this that are pointed, at affordability?
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. I mean, from a business standpoint, I would love the opportunity to manage a build to rent community, to be honest with you, because I feel like I have the processes and procedures and efficiencies in place where I could keep the cost low for both the principal and the management company.
And, yeah, they're in it to make money, but maybe they wouldn't have to do as large of an annual rent increase. Right? Or they could keep it pretty close to flat year over year in some cases because they've got scale to be able to do that. So if you're one person, you have a house, moved out of maybe you're an accidental landlord, you moved out of a house that you originally paid seven hundred thousand dollars for, your return's not going to be that great. So maybe you're keeping it because you got a really low mortgage rate, in the mid-2s or something, the great rates.
But you're not going to get four thousand or five thousand dollars a month for that house, especially not in our market. You might get in the mid to upper $2000s a month. But if you can do things at scale, you can get those efficiencies at scale. So that can kind of keep costs down for people.
They're not always a negative. Build to rent communities aren't a negative. Some of these even the big private equity owners aren't necessarily a negative because they're doing things at scale. They're there to make money, I guarantee you that.
And they're always looking at costs. So if they can drive efficiencies and drive down their costs, they're going to want to do that in their operations.
And we even have some banks. We have a bank in our state, State Employees Credit Union you may have heard of.
They actually have their own real estate arm. So for houses that they've had to, as I understand it, unfortunately, take back through foreclosure, they'll typically hold on to those and they just start renting them out.
Their staff I've met several times and the head of that division at NARPM Events, he's a really nice guy. He's great. So they're involved in NARPM too, right? So they're trying to be good landlords. They rent them out. And they are able to do it at scale across the state and keep costs down so they can keep the impact to the actual renters down.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. You know, something I've seen, whether it's Home Advocacy groups or National Rental Home Council or other folks talking about advocating for choice, right, for American consumers. And, hey. To have a brand new house, does that mean you have to purchase a mortgage, right, as an example versus, hey. There's providers who are providing that home for rent and saying, hey. To get a new home in a nice neighborhood, in a school zone, etcetera, you're providing access in a way people can afford, especially where rates have been bringing more choice, right, more supply for people to choose from.
Robert Dell’Osso
Right. Look at some of these big companies that are able to buy the land that's in some of those great areas, maybe they're building a build to rent community.
Look at the overall community. There's one not far from where I live. It's a great area. It's near a lot of good stuff. And maybe that provided the opportunity for some people to be in that area, and it's worked out really well for them.
Some people look at it as negative to not own a home. I don't know why. Like, there's a lot of reasons why people don't own a home. You know, some people don't want to own a home, right?
They'd rather rent. They just don't want to deal with the home maintenance, whatever. You know, it's okay to be a renter. It shouldn't have a stigma of like any sort of a negative.
So, what? You know, they pick an area of the part of town they want to live in for whatever reasons and if we can provide that means for them to get into that part of town, that area, and that state, great. Why not? Right?
It's not that I don't think you can have a functioning economy where every single person owns a home unless the government buys all the homes and sells it to them in nominal amounts or gives it to people.
And I don't think that our country would ever do that either. So I don't think that's worked out for countries in the past.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. So taking a little different topic because there's a couple other things of kind of interest going on here in the regulatory world. I want to talk about the FTC and transparency because, again, that's kind of like a national broad item. Maybe we could talk about lead based pain in assistance animals too if we have a little bit of time.
But coming to this FTC item, you know, I know this is a topic at the Capitol Summit and in the months following that and really dating back a year or two. If you date back to some of the big settlement orders, etcetera, this has been a topic kind of across administrations and one that property managers are paying close attention to. And I'm just wondering if maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of, hey. Here's what you're seeing, your thoughts about it.
And if you're a property manager listening to this, what do you need to be paying attention to, and what do you need to make sure that you're doing right now?
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. So if you follow an NARPM or you're a member, you get, you know, on listservs from NARPM, you'll know that the FTC put out a notice of rulemaking around rental property industry fees. So they intend to update the rules around that. And NARPM wants people to go in and give comments, feedback on that, because that's how they update the rule based on what public feedback they get. But it's really around transparency of fees is where it starts.
NARPM's position is always a belief in transparency. So be transparent with your fees. We don't want to be like the Ticketmasters, where your fifty dollars ticket ends up costing one hundred and five dollars and you don't know that until right when you hit submit to hire. So we want to be transparent in all aspects of our company with fees. So for instance, in our company, and I know a lot of others do, in our listing, we list out our fees, like the all in costs. We say Master Key believes in transparency.
Total rent is one thousand dollars That's nine hundred dollars and something for your rent, whatever your resident benefits package is. And then we can put a line that says pet fees, if applicable or extra, right? Because it depends how many pets they have, right? But we do put a separate line item for if you have an approved pet, this is the move in pet fee, this is the monthly pet rent, that kind of thing. It's all about transparency.
And some other companies I know have gone so far as to list they have a whole page on their website of any potential behavioral fees that are out there.
It's very important to not say, hey, the rent's $1,500 a month, and then they go to sign the lease, and the total all in cost is going to be $1,750 a month. People are going to be like, hey, where did this other $250 come from? We put in our application.
There are required fees in our application. You have to acknowledge this before you submit the application. Because I want to be able to say, well, we put it on the listing. We disclosed in our application, and it's also in our lease. We put it out in front of you three times before you even got the lease. So when we approve an application, we send over like, hey, based on your requested move in date, here's your breakdown of fees. Do you still want to move forward?
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. I think this is really important. Obviously, Second Nature's been paying close attention to this as well and providing advice and guidance for clients, right, who are reaching out about it. And we'll make sure we put in some of the articles linked.
Like Chris Masterson, Kim, our legal team, etcetera, have worked on and putting out so people can see, you know, here's some of the best practices. But what you described is, you know, what we're seeing in advising clients to do as well, which is be transparent at every step from listing all the way to the lease.
Nobody wants a surprise, and I would go beyond even somebody signing their lease. If a resident's looking at their ledger, right, and seeing something they didn't expect there, Right. That's probably, like, the worst worst case scenario and agreed somebody signing their lease, you know, being surprised at that point. Nobody wants that. So being transparent, being consistent, and not just disclosing the price, but also making sure you're communicating the values so that people understand what they're getting.
Another trend that we've seen is, you know, more and more because that's the case, there can be this line item fatigue, right, type of effect. And so we're seeing just more and more bundling and kind of, like, simplified presentation to residents. Because you could imagine if there's separate line items for filters and insurance and credit and Internet and right? It starts to add up and just feel like, okay. There's a lot going on here, which, yes yes, there is a lot going on, and there's a lot of good service and products being provided. But simplifying that process of communicating, hey. Here's everything that your lease requires, right, at a cost effective and convenient price, lower than you pay retail.
You know, getting better at marketing and communicating those kind of things is something we're seeing a lot of people focus on right now.
I guess one other thing, Robert, I'll add there is lease cover pages is another thing that we're seeing lots of property managers do. That just right on that first page of the lease, presenting here's all the fees. So it's not buried in addenda, you know, sixteen pages in paragraph two, so to speak.
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. I've seen a couple of those as well. We don't do those ourselves, but we do get the email confirmation before the lease comes out, broken down line by line. You know, here's your rent.
Here's your resident benefits package. If you have a pet fee, here's this, like, any applicable fees lined out for them and they need to confirm that, you know, they agree and still want to move forward. So, that way, we have that and we have it captured in an Email that's as part of their, you know, future tenant record as well. So, it is important however you do it to just be transparent.
Don't, you know, advertise a house for fifteen hundred a month and then send them over a lease. It's nineteen hundred a month. Like, even when you set them up as a tenant with your general ledger codes, I believe in breaking them down. Rent, resident benefits package, pet fee.
If you've got fees for something else, whether it's internet or lawn care, trash service or something like that. Break it out line by line so people see it and they can always see it at any point.
Andrew Smallwood
Yep. Yep.
And the importance of especially required fees being disclosed. And you talked about all in pricing. Right? Here's the base rent. Right? You saw that base rent, rents rent. Right? Here's any required fees or things that are required by the lease versus, you know, optional items or, other.
It can still be good to be clear and show a schedule of that kind of thing, but that all in price of the total total monthly amount and obligation, being cleared each phase and stage, really important.
Robert, the other thing I'll add here is, you know, I think if we rewind back to transparency is kind of like the big topic, right, and the big focus in being compliant there. But, you know, dating back to junk fees, which was kind of like, hey. Is there a surprise fee or something not properly disclosed? That was part of that. The other aspect to that was, is there something that's that's low value, you know, or, you know, not really clear apparent value? And I kind of pick on January fees, right, was, like, one of the things that got written up in one of the original memo of it's the month of January. And so, hey, we just we charge a fee for the month of January that doesn't have clear or obvious apparent value.
Robert Dell’Osso
A new year fee.
Andrew Smallwood
That's right. But there's been other things in the industry, and most of us, you know, dating back a few years ago as this was newer of somebody charging a technology fee, you know, purely for an online portal that that, you know, has pretty negligible cost, but it's, you know, a forty five dollar a month fee or a one and a half percent, you know, of rent as an example being charged for that. How do you think about that for your business of, you know, kind of thinking about, hey. This is what we want to be charging for residents and, you know, potentially critique out there of things that may be, you know, lower value to the resident.
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. I do. I you know, I have no problem charging fees for services provided. Right? My RBP, I think, provides a great service to protect the tenant, the owner, the property, the mechanical systems through like HVAC or pest control, that kind of thing. That's important to have, right?
Same with pet fees. That is important because pets can have an impact on a property, right? So you need to financially account for that.
Are such things such as behavioral fees that I think are important. We personally don't charge them much, but we have them listed out there on the lease more as a deterrent. Like, hey, if you do this, this is what you get charged to stay compliant. And the goal is to keep them compliant.
I like to say the best tenant is one who pays rent every month, stays for three or four or five years, and we rarely hear from. We have an annual periodic inspection. Everything looks great. They're taking care of the house, and there's low maintenance versus the ones that are kind of the eightytwenty rule.
Well, they've been there less than a year and they're eighty percent of my time is talking to them and dealing with them like, hey, a light bulb burned out. Come change it. Well, no, it's in your lease. You have to change it and stuff like that.
That drives a lot of your behavioral fees that you have to put in leases, right? If they're not all perfect tenants. So I also don't want to– I'm big focused as a business owner on profitability, revenue and profitability, but I have to look at the long term picture. I don't want to charge so much where we end up with things like the FTC looking at fees.
And, you know, in certain states, they're like, oh, an RBP is optional. Right? You can't charge that or you can't charge a pet fee or you can't charge a late fee or any of that stuff. I'm like, think that's going overboard.
So there's got to be a balance in some way.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. That's right. And, you know, you could just imagine, hey. You could have something that's high value, but if you if you and let's say it's it's you know, we often see people pricing all resident benefits packages in the thirty dollar, fifty dollar, you know, sixty dollar a month type range. But somebody who's offering the same products and sets of services, two hundred fifty dollars a month. Right?
Then it'd be easy to see how that would be perceived, right, as low value.
And so representing pricing that's fair and and reasonable and allows the business to recoup their administrative costs. Right? And, obviously, business in you know, should be able to make money. But the point is, you know, seeing that there's going to be, you know, increased scrutiny on that over time, making sure we're being thoughtful, you know, about how we do that is going to be really important. So I like your advice there.
Robert Dell’Osso
Real quick.
I think everybody most people are generally okay with you because you had a good statement that it's okay for businesses to make money. Right? That's why we got into business. I started a company to be able to make money and be my own boss.
Right? And just being transparent about it, I'll hit back on that. For instance, we put our RBP flyer with our listing pictures. It lists out everything they get for the price that they pay.
Nobody's wondering, oh, what do I get with this? It's on your pictures.
A version of that is part of our, for instance, our RBP addendum. So we keep reiterating through transparency, and there's no trying to sneak things in. I've never had a tenant come to me and say, I didn't know I had to pay this RBP. Why are you charging me this? Because we've been transparent upfront about it since the beginning.
Andrew Smallwood
That it. I think you nailed it. Like, what we see across our customer base generally is that property managers are increasing revenue, which is great, but they're also increasing retention. And they're, you know, improving their reputation, right, in the market because they're delivering a high quality level of service and a better experience, a convenient experience, a cost effective experience for the renters versus paying appreciably more to go duplicate all the same products and services on their own.
You know? And so, you know, that's really the triple win, right, that we talk about is, like, hey. This can be good for residents. Right?
Good for investors to protect their assets and good and make sense for the business as well. And when you're doing those three things, you're going to improve revenue retention and your reputation as opposed to trading one for the other. And I think you cautioned against that earlier. If you go a little too wild or too crazy on one, you really may be undercutting the best answer there. So it's something to always pay attention to.
We got a couple minutes left here, Robert. I just want to give you a few minutes of just lead based paint. You know, support animals is always a topic that I think, or service animals is one that property managers are always looking for guidance and clarity, you know, from HUD and other entities on. And just curious what you can share with us the latest there and what you're seeing on that front.
Robert Dell’Osso
Sure. So last fall, HUD withdrew their guidance around assistance animals. They had not put out new guidance yet. We had some HUD undersecretary speakers at the Capitol Summit in February.
They didn't give us any nuggets or hints, but they reminded us that the guidance was withdrawn.
And what that means is they will come up with new guidance.
Think at the time, the conventional wisdom is that would happen sometime late spring, maybe early summer. So we're hopeful that they put out guidance because it is important to have guidance instead of withdrawing completely and doing nothing. Then I think that creates a lot of confusion and uncertainty around assistance animals and what you can and can't do. So it is important if you're going to have a regulation to have some guidance around it.
Again, they didn't hint at what that guidance will say.
Obviously, it's going to change. Otherwise, they wouldn't have withdrawn the guidance. I know some people think, well, they're going to say we can charge for assistance animals. They may. I don't know. I have no insight at all.
I know there was the case in Louisiana around that, but that was specific to that one particular district in Louisiana. And if you talk to Monica Gilroy, NARPM’s outside counsel who's an expert in the federal space, she'll say, my legal guidance to you is do not charge for assistance animals. That is one case specific to that district in, I think, the New Orleans area, Louisiana.
It'd probably go through an appeals process.
She said if it had gone, been filed in a district around, say, the Mid-Atlantic or something, or the West Coast, where you'd gotten a more widely accepted case law precedent appeals court and it goes to that, then that'd be a different ballgame. But for now, they're saying don't charge for assistance animals. Wait, see what HUD says, follow their guidance.
So we'll see what happens with that. And then around lead based paint, yes, this we still have the requirement that property managers need to be certified for lead based paint renovation, repair, RRP program, right? So go take the class. It's a one day class. It's easy. And it's not just taking class, take the class and then register yourself with the EPA or your state agency if they administer on behalf of the EPA and pay them their fee. It's a few hundred bucks a year in North Carolina.
And then follow the requirements around that. So a lot of people still don't realize that you have to be certified as a property manager in lead based paint, renovation, repair.
And there's significant fines that can be imposed as a result of not being certified, not giving out proper notifications or following procedures, and not using other certified vendors.
So it's important to keep doing that. And I don't think it's going to vastly change. So they're negotiating with the EPA. Maybe we won't have to be certified, but we'll still have to follow all the other regulations.
But for now we still have to be certified and the EPA is still actively out there auditing firms. So go do it. You don't want to get a fine that's in the thirty five thousand to forty thousand dollars range. Cause it's like thirty to forty thousand per occurrence per day.
So if they come in and audit you and find oh you had these three occurrences and it's lasted for three weeks, you know, you're talking well into the six figures.
And then you've got legal costs because you're going to have to hire an attorney like a Monica Gilroy to go fight on your behalf and negotiate that fine down if you can't if we can. Right?
So yeah, the consequences are severe. So really staying on top of it.
Andrew Smallwood
That's great and relevant to share. Robert. You know, we covered some good ground here from affordability, institutional, you know, again, transparency, ancillary products and revenue to, again, assistance animals and lead vein here lead vein at the end. There's a lot to keep track of. You know? And, again, a lot of that's kind of, like, broad and national. Again, there's more happening at state and local levels in a lot of these same directions.
What resources do you recommend for people to keep on top of this, to stay on top of this and implementing what they need to be implementing in their business?
Robert Dell’Osso
Yeah. The best thing you can do is go sign up for NARPM so you get the emails every week from them.
You know, you = get the the newsletter around regulations, the If there's updates from the government affairs staff on something like proposed bills that are out there, and they'll put them out on proposed bills at the state level and things that local municipalities are doing that you may not have heard about just because don't have any communication channels from anybody sending you stuff. There's a huge benefit for the cost of membership in NARPM. It's not a lot cost wise and the benefits you get out of it are massive in my opinion. On Friday, I get these emails, I can read through and see what's happening from a regulatory standpoint. Learned about, I didn't know, I think it was an appellate court of the Supreme Court in the state of New York struck down a rent control law.
That's huge. I mean, New York's one of those states known for rent control. Where do they go next on that, right? I don't know all the specifics of it, but when you see things like that, you're like, never where would I read about that? Right? It's news to us in our industry, but it's not necessarily something that's going to make your CNN or NBC or Fox News reports.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that's a good tip. If you're not a member of NARPM, definitely recommend checking that out. I'm sure we'll get that in the show notes and make sure you're subscribed to the updates.
There's other newsletters out there people put out that are really good on the private side of things. Peter Lohmann's newsletter, Todd Ortscheid’s newsletters, they both have a lot of really good content and it's frequently stuff around regulations. So if you go check those out as well, they're really good.
The content in them is phenomenal.
I read both of those. I think Peter's comes out twice a week now, and Todd puts out a newsletter once or twice a week as well. And they're really good content. So I would highly recommend checking those out as well to get different perspectives.
Robert Dell’Osso
Yep. Plus one for Peter and Todd. I think there's some great free resources and some some good paid content as well if you want to get more out of that, which is great.
Andrew Smallwood
You mentioned Monica Gilroy, who a lot of people can find ways to connect with Monica directly and her new relationship with NARPM. I think that's really, really great to see. Harry Heist is another name I hear of.
Robert Dell’Osso
A lot of folks worth following and staying in touch with because a lot of what he shares applies just beyond just Florida where his practice is. And we get some really good content from Second Nature.
Right? From your general counsel and giving talks at different NARPM events like Capitol Summit and stuff. And, you know, as a as a vendor in the space, it's important to y'all as a company to stay on top of this stuff. So you have some really good resources that are looking into this and researching it and putting out some really good information as well.
So it's important to keep an eye on that. You know, I'll plug y'all all day long, right? You can sign up, get that triple win newsletter, whether it's Facebook posts or a listserv through email or blog posts or podcasts. You've got to immerse yourself in as much content as possible, especially when it comes to regulations.
Andrew Smallwood
That's right. Well, yeah, we'll put some of those links and articles that Kim and our legal and compliance department has supported and put out. As you guys, if you're listening to this and you have interest in more topics or curious to learn more, feel free to reach out. Just shoot us an email at triplewin@secondnature.com. We can bring Robert back on, other folks back on, Kim and folks to provide information, guidance that you're looking for. And until then, keep stacking your triple wins and we'll catch you on the next one.
Robert Dell’Osso
Thanks for having me.
Andrew Smallwood
You bet. Take care, everybody.