In this episode, Peter Lohmann of RL Property Management and Crane joins to talk Zillow, AI, churn, and why having a strong community of like-minded PMs around you can help your business adapt and thrive. By sharing ideas with your community, you can develop a true competitive advantage and better leverage tools like AI when building your business.
Ready to talk to an RBP expert? https://www.secondnature.com/request-demo
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 5 Episode 11 features Peter Lohmann, Co-Founder and CXO of CXO Worx.
The Triple Win Property Management Podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature.
Andrew Smallwood
Hello, professional property managers! Andrew Smallwood here, Triple Win Podcast. I'm joined today by Peter Lohman. Many of you know Peter as owner of RL Property Management. Many of you know Peter because of his newsletter that he sends out, which I think just passed 20,000 readers, which is really exciting. Some of you were following Peter on Twitter, and now you're following him on LinkedIn or Facebook, and you're seeing the meme game really flourish recently.
And some of you… there's probably at least a couple hundred people out there who know Peter as one of the leaders and founders of Crane, with Wolfgang, so there's a lot of ways you could know Peter Lohmann. Peter, did I miss anything? You’ve always got some other exciting projects going on. Did I miss anything?
Peter Lohmann
That was a great overview. Thank you for having me. I've been on the show once or twice before, always have a great time. It's awesome to be back in conversation with you.
Andrew Smallwood
I saw our friend Dr. Ben Hardy put out a new book recently, so we may be reaching out, Peter.
Peter Lohmann
Oh!
Andrew Smallwood
Peter interviewed Ben previously for one of our Triple Win Leadership Exchanges, and did a fantastic job, so, yeah, we may be following up again soon. I'm sure this will not be your last time, Peter, that we're, that we're doing this.
Peter Lohmann
Great!
Andrew Smallwood
Okay, well, thanks for joining. I'd love to even just start, Peter, with, what's on your mind? Like, what are some of the things that you're noticing are happening in the property management industry right now that have your attention, and for other property management business leaders, you think are worthy of their attention? I want to start a little broad before we get in.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, that sounds awesome. So, a couple things came up for me right away that I've been thinking a lot about, and we can dive deeper into any of these or skip them, but the first one that really came up for me is Zillow. Zillow is where we get pretty much… I don't want to say all, but the vast majority of our renter leads that turn into leases.
And they've kind of quietly run away with that market. They've done a bunch of acquisitions and really worked on their product, which, frankly, is excellent for the renter side, such that that's just where people go to look for rental homes and apartments these days.
And so, there's a lot of implications of that that I've been thinking about and worrying about, actually, recently, so I've been thinking and talking a little bit about that.
I'll give you a couple more, and we can go talk about whichever one you want. I've been thinking a lot about outbound, so at RL Property Management, we get hundreds and hundreds of leads a year. And we're, you know, we're in a growth mode, so we're looking to continue to increase our lead flow. And we've been trying to do outbound, so we experimented with cold calls and cold emails and different components of an outbound campaign. We made hires specific to, you know, cold callers, appointment setters, and it just hasn't worked for us. And so I've got some thoughts there, which we could talk about.
And then, you know, I continue to think a lot about AI, and the implications for our industry, the implications for our software partners and vendors that we love. The implications for the competitive advantage that we have or don't have in the marketplace relative to our other local property managers and the national players as well.
So that's kind of where my mind has been when I'm not creating property management memes.
Andrew Smallwood
Which, we'll definitely get into that.
Peter Lohmann
There’s not a lot of time left over by the time I make all those memes, so…
Andrew Smallwood
Yes, the meme game is strong.
Let's start with Zillow, off the bat. This sounds like kind of a… what I'm hearing is really thinking about, the strategy of where things are playing, what's moving, etc, and what are the implications if ultimately there's a player like Zillow who's aggregating demand at the top of the funnel? What kind of… how does the leverage and the power dynamics of that change over time? What implications might that have for property managers? I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.
Peter Lohmann
To me, it's scary, because they're so dominant right now that to not list with Zillow in most marketplaces, there's a couple exceptions here and there, but in 98% of metro areas in the US,
if you were to not list with Zillow, not syndicate to Zillow and their platforms—they own a bunch of other platforms as well—you would be missing well over half of the potential owner leads, and I would argue that you would be violating your fiduciary duty to your property owner by not doing that, because you would essentially be lengthening the time of their vacancy, unnecessarily. And so, because they're so dominant they… and because they control the source of our demand for our product, so we have a supply of rental homes and apartments, and there's another side of that marketplace, which is the demand. It's a marketplace.
So there's actually two marketplaces in our world. There's the marketplace of owners selecting property management companies, so there's a demand of rental owners and a supply of property management companies, and then there's the demand for rental homes and the supply of rental homes. So, the fact that a single entity or player in the marketplace has aggregated the demand of those renter eyeballs, and controls them, puts us at a severe disadvantage.
And so, if Zillow… Zillow basically says jump, and we have to say how high. So, if they were to say, they could do a lot of scary things. They could mandate us to use their standard rental application. Because famously, Zillow is very consumer-friendly. The consumer is their North Star. That's, like, their mission statement.
And so, if they were to decide, like, hey, it's best for consumers if they have a single rental application, and we're going to require anyone who lists on our platform to use that.
We're now doing that. And that's not great.
They could do things like, say that you're not allowed to use credit score when screening tenants, because it's been shown to disproportionately affect minorities or other groups.
Now we just have to do that, we don't have a choice, and so there's a lot, and that's just… that's just the tip of the iceberg of how they could exert control, and we haven't even gotten to the fact that they could just charge whatever they want, essentially.
So, it's scary, and I actually had a really interesting conversation this morning with a pretty high up friendly face at Appartments.com, which is owned by CoStar, they also own Homes.com, and a couple other platforms. And they are making a hard push into SFR and small multifamily with a competitive product to Zillow. And I could not be more thrilled.
Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? And they hate Zillow, too. It's like, great! So, we're going to try and bring some balance to the force. I'm probably going to start paying them, and using them, and promoting them.
Because what we really want is those two duking it out, and competing for our business, and competing for renter eyeballs. That's the best solution for us as property managers, if we're not going to own and control our own rental listing platform, which was before my time, but I heard that NARPM did that, or tried to do that many years ago, and it just didn't take, so…
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. It's always challenging to get enough volume on the consumer side where, like, starting that and getting that, it's easy to see why people would be pessimistic about once Zillow's really, you know, run away with it, like, how easy is it for someone to enter the market and start to really compete there until they're over-monetizing or doing something that would create some kind of opportunity for somebody else, it would feel almost like their opportunity to lose, similar to how Google ran away with search, right?
Peter Lohmann
Exactly.
Andrew Smallwood
And so, you know, a question I have for you is… as you think about that, you know, the conversation in Zillow and real estate has always been on the sales side, right, and for sales agents. And I think there's a lot of people who predicted by this time that Zillow would be putting real estate, you know, agents out of business, right, so to speak, and it hasn't played out exactly that way. It sounds like you're less concerned that Zillow would kind of come down, you know, into property management, but maybe in this, like, screening and up space, they could exert such control and leverage that that could make things painful and difficult. Is that summarizing your position?
Peter Lohmann
Exactly. Yeah, they don't… they're never going to manage the property. What they're going to do is extract all the value by controlling the top of the funnel.
And they're just going to… they're going to control the tenant screening, they're going to control the rental listings, they're going to control the application, and perhaps all the way up to as far as the lease and the security deposit. That's what AirBnb does, by the way.
Exact same thing, just short-term rentals. And that's where they're going to stop. That's where AirBnb stopped.
You're still going to be responsible for the hard, low-margin part, which is physically maintaining the property, taking the tenant phone calls, and all the nitty-gritty tenants, termites, and trouble of property management.
But they're going to be getting rich off of the lead flow and, like, the software, fun, easy part, leaving us with just the worst of the worst parts of it. They're going to suck all the marrow right out of property management and keep that for themselves.
Andrew Smallwood
You know, one question I'm curious about, and this kind of maybe dovetails into AI, but do you see an opportunity for how consumers are searching and maybe engaging programs changing from the kind of, like, UI and UX that Zillow's providing to something different that could, be disruptive there? Or do you see, like, hey, in this context, this use case, like, that's less likely to happen, or Zillow seems to already be testing that, and kind of… I'm just curious how you see that.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, I mean, Zillow has announced some partnerships with some of these AI groups. I can't remember the details, but basically they want their listings to appear in AI search results up-to-date, like, up to the minute. That makes sense.
I think for now, my guess is the vast majority of consumers are still searching traditionally by just looking up homes for rent near me in Google, or probably one of Zillow's, you know, their marquee platform, or some of the other platforms they own.
It's hard to see that changing too much too soon, because when you are dealing with such a large purchase, like the… like a rental home that… with a lease that you're going to sign for a year, it's kind of like buying a car. Like, you really want to know the details and specifics from the first-party source, rather than just relying on some AI-translated, you know, other third-party website.
So I think there's… I don't know, like… there certainly was a huge shift from, like, desktop to mobile. That was a big change in how people searched. And… I guess I could easily see an AI shift.
I don't know, though. Like, it's… I'm getting old enough now, I just turned 40, that I don't feel as connected to the younger generation and what they're thinking about and how they're using technology. I used to feel very connected to that, and I don't anymore, so I don't know that I have good thoughts there. We probably need to bring on, like, a Gen Z, guests, and see how they found their last apartment, or…
Andrew Smallwood
Well, I'm probably with you that, like, in the weeks and months ahead, things are largely going to resemble what they are today, right? And I think that's probably true. You know, the thing that's interesting to me is thinking about… maybe it's less that, okay, would I be typing this into ChatGPT, but like, as you start to get agents doing more and more things, like, you could see people who are using those types of LLM tools on a daily basis. If there's an agent that's going out and aggregating search, et cetera, from different places, and pulling that back, and linking them appropriately based on your preferences, and your LLM's got that memory, and it really knows you, and what your preferences are.
I wonder if you could see something, you know, over the mid or longer term that moves things there. So, on this AI side, Peter, like, what are the things that you think are most interesting, and some of the implications for property managers that are a little more practical and, like, a little bit more right in front of us?
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, I… I gotta say, first, if you're feeling kind of guilty about not keeping up with AI, or trying AI tools, or integrating AI into your business, you're not alone. I feel that way, too. And everyone I talk to feels that way.
It's changing so fast, and my, at least for me, my business is at the size where I'm kind of, like, in a if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it mindset for a lot of the business, which was not true 5 years ago.
So it's been harder for me to really speak about the practical realities of AI, because in order to truly have expert commentary on that, I would have to be kind of ripping and replacing chunks of my business with these newer, relatively untested products.
And I'm wary to do that, both because it's very disruptive for the team, and also because, like I said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But there is definitely going to be a newer generation of property management companies coming up that are built with all these tools from day one. Just like I sort of picture… I view my company, RL Property Management, as being early on to be the sort of web-first, digital-first, paperless, (remember that when that was all the rage?) type of property management business in my area. Like, when I founded RL Property Management in 2013, you know, we were using Buildium, and that was, like, kind of new and hot, and we were… had an owner portal. That was crazy!
Everything was online, we had no paper in our office, we were scanning stuff when it came in. We had online rent payments, that was, like, blowing people's minds. We had all these tech for… you know, we had a Dropbox with all of our stuff in it, instead of, like, file cabinets. And at the time, that was a huge competitive advantage, because it allowed us to be fast, and nimble, and cheaper, and just more tech-forward than our competitors in the local marketplace here. And so I definitely think today, right now, probably in your market, there's probably one or two little groups of people that are doing the equivalent of that right now, but with AI.
And so that's going to look like some combination of AI-first vendors and products. Rent Engine comes to mind, just off the top of my head, and it's also going to look like their homebrew solutions built with AI agents and tools, like N8N, and ChatGPT, and all these other crazy, I mean, even, like, in Crane, Wolf is using lots of vibe coding tools to build out a whole member-facing piece of software that delivers little pieces and parts of functionality that aren't built into our community platform. So, in a similar way, I could see a younger more tech-forward property manager today, building something similar, basically their own owner portal, using AI. Filling in the bits and pieces and parts that the property management software does not on the owner portal.
I would absolutely be doing that if I was 10 years younger today. That would be, like, what I was doing all day, every day. It would be so fun. And so my vantage point, I think, is… is probably typical for a lot of listeners, but it's not the only way to think about what's happening with AI right now.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, it's easy to feel, as a property manager, with what's happened in rates, inflation, competition, AI, like, there's a lot of change happening on, like, some different vectors in a moment like this, and it can feel overwhelming, and it can feel difficult to keep up, or feel like you're keeping up.
And when the rate of change is faster outside your business versus inside your business, you know, that can be a challenging place to be.
And one of the interesting things is, like, I see, being in the Crane group, you know, I notice that these are people who are engaging with each other, and sharing, and, like, you see some of the experimentation of your peers in a more visible way, than you would elsewhere. And it just reminds me, like, how important having the peer group around you is, you know, and how influential that's going to be in, like, recognizing opportunities, getting what signal through a lot of the noise, and being able to really focus. So I'm curious, like, for your business right now, like, what are the things that RL is, like very focused on right now that you feel are making an impact, or what are the things you're seeing in the Crane group that you feel like people are focused on and it's having a big impact right now?
Peter Lohmann
AI-wise, or just in general?
Andrew Smallwood
I would say, in general.
Peter Lohmann
Okay.
So, at RL Property Management, we have been laser-focused on churn for, honestly, several years. And we finally cracked it. As of the last 6 months or so, our churn is half what it was at the peak, less than half. And our owners are sticking around.
We've got about 720 doors, and we are only losing 2 to 4 clients a month, which is about 1% churn when you look at our overall client. We have about 350 clients or so.
And so that works out to about 12% annual churn on clients, a little bit higher on units, and really happy with that.
So that's been my focus, and the team's focus, and they've really executed well.
What else am I thinking a lot about right now? .
Andrew Smallwood
Can I ask more about that, Peter?
Peter Lohmann
Yeah.
Andrew Smallwood
Because I think churn is on a lot of people's minds, and 12% churn, I think most would say, as a benchmark, right? Like, that's above average, right, in the industry. And you mentioned, like, before, it sounded like it was in the 20s, and, like, you guys have worked at this, like I feel like when I hear property managers talk about churn, there's so many, like, ways at coming at that, like, looking at what's the experience we're delivering, is our pricing right, what about, like, how specific we're being about the customers that we're bringing in?
How are we looking at the talent on our team, and obviously, how well are they executing against the processes that we have in place? I mean, there's a lot of ways to come at that, and so I'm just curious, like, how did you guys get focused on identifying, like, what are the things that are going to have a big impact, and ultimately what you put into place to drive that down?
Peter Lohmann
Oh, I tried so many things, Andrew. I really was banging my head against the wall for, like I said, years. I mean, let me just run you through some of the things I tried and did.
First thing I did was I went and looked at our reviews. Now, of course, you can go on Google, it's kind of a mess on there. I had much better success, so we, for years, have been… we've been surveying our owners and our tenants using an NPS survey, Net Promoter Score. We use a piece of software called Retently, but there's a million of them, it really doesn't matter which one you use.
And so, once every 3 or 4 months, an email would go out to all of our owners, asking them, how likely are you to rate RL Property Management– how likely are you to refer RL Property Management to a friend or colleague on a score 1 through 10?
And whatever the score they gave, they would be given the opportunity to leave a comment. Nice thing about this, by the way, is it heads off a lot of your bad Google reviews, because when people feel like they've been heard, they're less likely to go to a public place.
So, what I did was, when I first started looking at this churn problem, I got a data dump of all of the negative client NPS scores, so basically 0 through… or 1 through 7, anyone who scored 1 through 7, I grabbed all of their comments, and I fed it into, like, a word cloud analysis tool. This was, like, pre-AI. This was, like, 2 years ago, before I was really using ChatGPT.
And it showed me a word cloud of, like, what are the most common words that people use when leaving a negative comment about their experience with my company?
And the biggest word was maintenance.
And so when I dug into it, I found out that a lot of people were complaining about turn costs and maintenance costs. So that kicked off a huge effort at our company to figure out what's going on with our turn costs and our maintenance costs, and try and get those more under control, or loop owners into what was happening at the property earlier, so that they weren't surprised, even if they did have to spend a bunch of money.
So that was the first thing that we did.
Then, another thing that we noticed from those survey responses was people were talking about like, the length of the turn, and the overall length of how long the property was vacant. A lot of times, the owner would say something like, my property was vacant for 4 months, or, you know, stuff like that.
And so, we then tried to figure out how to measure our days vacant, like, from keys to keys, right? From the moment the tenant turns into keys till the new tenant moves in, what goes into that period of time, and how can we optimize it? So we kicked off a huge project to speed up our turns, and a separate huge project to speed up our leasing.
So that was a huge undertaking.
The next thing I did was I pulled some data on the owners that were actually churning, and I tried to break… I tried to segment this data. I tried to segment it in a couple different ways. I looked at are these homeowners, what we call accidental landlords or homeowners that are churning? And the way I defined that was, have they ever lived in the property before? That's how I would define that.
And then I looked at investors, intentional investors. So those two segments. Are homeowner accidental landlords churning at a higher rate relative to their base percentage of our overall clients? Are they churning at a higher rate compared to investors? And the answer was they were. We learned that accidental landlords, at least for our company, were churning at, like, double the rate of investor clients.
So, we took that and did a bunch of stuff to try and screen out ones that we would be more likely to churn, and we also did try to… we kicked off a huge education project to try and sort of turn these accidental landlords more into investors and help them think about the property, you know, more like an investor?
So that was one way we segmented the churn data. We also segmented it by property type.
Do single-family owners churn more than duplex owners? Do multi-unit owners, like an owner who owns 5 single-family homes, is he more likely to churn than someone who owns a 5-unit apartment building? I was trying to figure out, is there a specific property type or client type that we're not doing a good job for?
And one thing that came out of that is a property that has an interior hallway was highly likely to churn very quickly.
For some reason, we were just not doing a good job with those properties. And if you think about it, a property with an interior hallway presents a bunch of unique challenges. You can't really do self-showing, because there's exterior access problems.
The landscaping becomes more important at a property like that to, like, the perception of it. You've got that common space, the common hallway and steps and everything, who's making sure the light works? Who's making sure it's not dirty? Who's making sure there's not a homeless guy hanging out there?
How do the vendors get into the common hallway to access the unit? Like, so there's all these complications that come up when you have this interior access hallway. So we had to do some soul-searching to figure out, like, okay, do we just not want to manage these anymore, or do we want to figure out how to manage them really well?
So that was a whole other big thing. So, you know, and then I did a huge webinar more recently on the $300 pre-inspections that we do, and that has to do with top of funnel screening out bad-fit clients before they ever signed on, which is kind of a backdoor way of improving your churn, but a great way, and so that's some of what we attacked over the last… that… honestly, I just described, like, 2-3 years of work.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure people could hear any one of those things and be like, okay, that's my, like, that's my rock for this quarter, right? You start string those together, and then… but putting those things together, that's how you get from, you know, mid-20s to churn down to 12%, and it seems like your team's now got this real discipline and programmatic approach in place, probably, of, like, looking at what our survey results say, like, what's our next opportunity, and you've got a nice muscle built there, which is really great.
Peter Lohmann
The big challenge with that, though, is everything I just described, none of the data for any of that analysis was available through our property management software. Not the surveys, not the churn segmentation, not the owner type.
So, it was very, very manual, and pretty painful, because I'm not… I mean, I'm decent with Excel, but there's some serious data analysis in some of those pieces and parts, so that was hard, and one thing I didn't mention, which was another big project of ours, was just turning our company into a more customer service-oriented type of a business. The way our company was built originally, it was founded by myself and another engineer, two engineers.
We built everything for the convenience of us, the business, and the employees. For maximum efficiency and maximum, sort of, rational, logical structure.
And what I have now learned is that you need to give equal weight to the customer's experience of working with you. You can't just build your business for the convenience of the team and the owners. There has to be serious weight given to, what's it actually like to be a customer of ours? How easy is it? How fun is it? How does it make me feel? Do I feel like this company actually cares about me as a person?
Yes, they technically got the turn done quickly, and yes, they were technically right about this clause in the management agreement that I didn't read, but how did I feel after those interactions? That part of it was missing from my brain.
And so, when I brought in my VP of Ops, who had that part of his brain, he really has helped, and actually my COO, Kathy, before him, both really helped build up that cultural piece and part of our organization, which is now very strong, and comes through when owners speak with anyone on our team, and I love that for the owners and for the team, because it actually is a more enjoyable experience to work at a company that is thinking this way.
Andrew Smallwood
I think what you said is so important, because so many… a lot of the conversations I'm having, Peter, with property managers right now are actually, like, about this topic. And it's really, like, there's this problem of… everything's been kind of an efficiency trap, and like, how do we get incrementally a little bit faster, better, cheaper at doing the things that we've always been doing? But if we're still missing customer expectations, we're, like, we're kind of, like, optimizing for the wrong thing, right? A more efficient way of missing customer expectations, versus, hey, what is the experience? Starting with the customer experience, there's that famous Steve Jobs clip that floats around every now and again, right? Of, like, starting with the customer experience.
Peter Lohmann
Yes.
Andrew Smallwood
And then working back from that. Which obviously, ideas like that hold a warm place in Second Nature's heart.
Peter Lohmann
Definitely.
Andrew Smallwood
We think about the world this way, but I really appreciate you sharing that, and a lot of property managers are thinking about that right now.
I want to, segue a bit here, Peter, because, I think, like, when we talk about thinking differently, like, thinking from an experience versus, like, an operations-centric, right, like, or first kind of mindset, like we were just talking about, or keeping up with AI, everything else, like, we… who you're around, and who you're talking to, and where you're getting your information, like, all these things are really important. And, you know, I'm curious to ask you a little bit more, like, you're going to be speaking at the Property Meld Maintenance Summit, right, that's coming up, and you were just talking about, like, maintenance and the importance of that in churn, and, like, I think about people hearing from you and what you'll share there. I know at Future, you're going to be talking about how you take a month off from your property management business every year, and, like, what I'm starting to see now, like, more and more property managers taking 2 weeks off, 3 weeks off, like, following this and really creating freedom in their business in a way, a lot of them weren't before.
And, like, it's a lot easier to do that when you're around dozens of other people who are doing that same thing. And I'm just curious if you can kind of speak to a little bit of the, like genesis of Crane, and, like why a peer network like this really helps, and how you should think about, like, picking the right peer network for you. You know, there's other groups and communities out there, but I'd love for you to kind of get us started there.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when I got started in property management, it was 2013, and I didn't know anything. I had no experience in property management at all. I never worked at a real estate company. My family didn't own real estate. So, I was grasping around in the dark for anything that would help me figure out how to start and run a property management company, and man, there was not a lot out there. There was… a couple people were circulating PDFs, literally, of, like, presentations given at conferences and stuff, like how to manage from a palm tree.
There, I mean, there was a couple of these things circulating around. There was, Robert Locke was putting out content about property management's a nickel and dime business, here's how you actually make money. I learned a lot from those guys, and credit them with some of the early genesis of RL property management, and helping us actually be profitable.
I didn't really discover NARPM until 2015, 2016-ish. And immediately, once I went to my first conference, I was fully bought in. And anyone who remembers going to their first NARPM conference will relate to this experience of, like… oh, I'm in the right place now. This is proper. This is my people, they get me, I get them, and we are sharing ideas and information, and leveling up, and just… it's like you finally stuck your head above water, and you're like, oh wow, there's a bunch of people doing this. I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
That experience was so profound for me, and, you know, if you're listening to this and you're not a member of NARPM, you should join NARPM.
And so, I never really forgot that, and fast forward years and years, when I got to talking with Wolfgang Krosky, the co-founder of Crane, we got to wondering, like, hey, is there an opportunity to take some of that magic and create a version of it that is, one, sort of online, digital native.
Not exclusively, but a key part of the experience, and two, build it specifically for experienced property managers who have gotten some initial traction, but they want to take things to the next level.
And that was kind of the genesis of it, is we both, at this point, had had a little bit of success, and a little bit, started to build a little bit of influence, and we thought, wouldn't it be awesome if we could really bring together the best and the brightest, and all level up together.
And so that turned into what became Crane, a paid private community with online and offline components. And our mission at Crane is to deliver time freedom.
There are so many great vendor partners who can help you make your business more profitable, either directly with companies like Profit Coach, or indirectly with, I mean, Second Nature's a great example, finding revenue or cutting costs by being more efficient. And there's a ton of great solutions in our space for companies who need to grow. Companies like RentScale and others who will help you with your sales and marketing.
Crane is unique in that our mission is not to help you be more profitable, and not necessarily to help you grow, although there's a lot of discussion that happens around those things, but our mission is to deliver time freedom, and that shows up in the form of these one-week, 2-week, 4-week-long Crane breaks, is what we call them, where you fully disconnect from your business.
The reason we made that our mission is because, when I started taking serious time away from my business 4 years ago, I took my first full month off, it was transformative, and I realized this is something that every property manager needs to get to experience. And they can. And we will provide the resources and the mindset and the peer group to unlock that for everybody. And we have a process where you start with one week, if you've never done it before, and there's… every time someone comes back from a crane break, they kind of report in on, here's how it went, here's what happened, here's what I did, here's what my team did, and, universally, people come back re-energized, excited about their company again, amazed at how their team stepped up, and how little they were actually needed in a day-to-day, and with ideas of how they can make it even better next time.
And I’ve got to say, it's been the most rewarding part of my professional career to date… has been watching people take time away from their company who had never done it before, and have it be very positive for them. It's just… I love it. It's so awesome to be able to see people experience that for the first time.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, I'd love to… This isn't a plug, it's like the opposite of a plug. I would just want to reinforce your conversation about if people haven't experienced NARPM and they're listening to this, Second Nature has such high conviction in what we've seen NARPM do for so many people in the property management industry that, right now, if you're listening to this and it's before mid-October, we've got a few spots left where we'll actually sponsor your ticket in travel to get to the NARPM National Convention in Orlando, coming up in a couple weeks, so if you're catching this hot off the press, you may be able to sneak in or keep an eye out.
Peter Lohmann
I run into people… I’ve run into people who've taken advantage of this offer in the past at the conference. They're like, I'm here because I saw in your newsletter that Second Nature was doing this thing. I'm like, oh, that's so cool, I love that.
Andrew Smallwood
And similarly, like, I remember, Peter, when you reached out about getting started with Crane, and it was a very new thing. And Second Nature was making the decision to commit and support. So, like, we're very proud advisory partner members. I was talking to a CEO at another company yesterday who was considering it, and just telling them what a great experience that we've had. Because I think it's important that, if we see these communities flourish, and the missions of them flourish, right? We're going to see our industry flourish. And that's good. Like, that's good for everybody.
And we've seen it happen, and the power of it's real, and it's really cool to see the Crane members that are taking weeks off, taking, you know, a month off their business, and doing great things with that, in a way they probably wouldn't have done if they hadn't had the group around them influencing them to do it.
Peter Lohmann
Yep.
Andrew Smallwood
I'm curious, like, Peter, what are… I mean, you guys are a couple, you know, more than a year or two into this now, right? You're a few years in, I guess, to this, and, you know, what are one or two of the biggest lessons that you feel like you've learned, or one of the most kind of, like, unexpected things that you're kind of seeing come out of the Crane community?
Peter Lohmann
Yeah, we just… we're just past 2 years into it now, and… man, when Wolf and I first announced it, we had no idea if anyone would sign up for this. This is not a free Facebook group. This is a significant financial commitment, and it is also off-platform. It's not in Slack, it's not in Facebook, it's in this thing called Circle, so you gotta get the app on your phone, you gotta save the website in your browser so that you come back to it, and so we were worried about is anyone going to, like… I mean, we've all had the experience, you sign up for something, you never return to it. Like, you just, you never log in again.
You download some app, you never open it again.
And I was really worried about that, and so, thankfully, and surprisingly, frankly, the engagement inside that online community is off the charts. I mean, I track our… there's a stat that online communities use called Monthly Active Users, MAU,
And our MAU is 90%, which is… they don't even have that… when you look, like, what's a good MAU? Like, it doesn't even go that high.
Andrew Smallwood
Off the chart.
Peter Lohmann
Yeah. It's crazy! So I love that members are seeing the value, that they're making the time to check in with the community on a regular basis. So that's been awesome.
I've also been really… I knew about the power of sort of real-life connections because of NARPM.
Crane takes that to a whole other level. We do crane dinners around the country, we run events alongside NARPM conferences, we do an annual retreat, members only, which is like a 2- or 3-day kind of marquee experience for the year.
And man, those in-person connections and relationships that are built? It’s just… you can't even describe it. Online is awesome, but nothing beats real life, and so… that's been extremely rewarding and fulfilling. I mean, we've got people who, you know, exchanged cell phone numbers, they found best friends, they… and once you… I think my goal for anyone who's listening? What you really want to have in property management, regardless of where you are in your journey, is you want to have, like, 2 to 4 people in your cell phone that you can text 24/7, with a random property management question or problem, or business owner freak-out moment. Like, hey, my COO just quit. Like, I'm freaking out, what do I do? Or, I just got a really weird letter from the IRS, something about 1099 information not matching, like, has anyone gotten this before? Like, you want that little pack that you can rely on and kind of like an iron sharpens iron thing.
Crane helps build that for people through these online and offline connections. So that's been awesome. I love that part of it, which is a very different feeling than I got from running a property management business, where seeing a customer be successful in property management means they get a few extra dollars in their bank account every year than they would have before.
That's awesome, and we're going to continue to strive for that, but success for a customer in Crane means they have a new best friend for life, or the value of their business doubled because of the fact that they are no longer integral to the operations, and they proved it by taking a month off, like…
That stuff gets me hyped to this day.
Andrew Smallwood
I love what you shared there.
Peter, I guess, like, before we sign off, What's… if people are thinking about this and saying, hey, I'm interested in learning more information, where would be the best place for them to go learn more about Crane?
Peter Lohmann
The best place is our website, joincrane.co, we couldn't quite get the .com. Unfortunately, it was… Crane.com is some other huge company, and even joincrane.co. So anyway, joincrane.co, and we only open up for new members twice a year.
We try to keep the quality high, and we don't want to be in promotion marketing mode all the time. We want to be focused on the community and our members. And so, we have an application window opening up here, it opens up at the end of September and runs through early October.
So, if it's that time, you can apply directly. If it's not that time, you can get on the waiting list, and either join that group when it opens, or the next one in the spring.
There's a bunch of information there on the website, and we’d love to see you inside. There is an application process. Members are vetted by Wolfgang and I, personally. Part of the value of the community, and we hear this, both from members and Crane partners like Second Nature, is the caliber of the membership, and the fact that it is a private, vetted community. That's what helps people feel comfortable sharing
I mean, we have people sharing P&Ls, we have them sharing, here's my lease, here's my PMA, here's my everything, and that's only possible in that kind of a closed environment, so we do, we are kind of keeping it that way.
Andrew Smallwood
I love it when I get on my Circle app in Crane and see, and I'm like, oh, wow, and I just see name after name of people, and I'm like, man, it's just impressive property managers from all over the country, and they're putting in really thoughtful, like, it's very engaged, the 90% doesn't surprise me, it's like, man, if I could go to a gym where, like, 90% of people were showing up, and they were, like, really committed, and really serious, and really sharing their goals, like… I'm confident, like, my likelihood of success would be much higher, and I'd just be more motivated to show up in a place like that. And I think it's really, really cool what you guys are doing, how intentional, you know, you've been about it, and not just opening up far and wide to everybody, like, staying really committed and thoughtful about how you're approaching, really the change that you guys are trying to bring about in the industry, and it's great to see the progress against that.
Peter Lohmann
Well, thanks, and Second Nature has been great partners. You were one of our founding partners, took a chance on us when we were smaller and pretty new, and you guys just renewed for another year. We really appreciate that, and all the partners that we work with are fantastic and offer special benefits for Crane members, and it's been a great thing.
Andrew Smallwood
Awesome. Well, Peter, I know we'll see you on the event circuit, coming up here shortly. Thanks for taking the time today. Really appreciate it.
Peter Lohmann
Absolutely, thanks for having me, Andrew.
Topics: