From 'Wild West' to Scalable Systems: Bringing Multifamily Discipline to SFR | Dan French

A Podcast | Dan French

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of the NARPM podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. We have Dan French, who is the new CEO of Northpoint Asset Management. Before that, eight plus years as CEO of Restprop, where he led a team of 450 plus, managing 18,000 plus multifamily units. Dan is a mission-driven entrepreneurial leader who loves to build companies and empower people at the intersection of operations, investment technology. And his mom is from my neighborhood in the Bronx, and he's sporting, if you're watching this on YouTube, he's actually sporting the Louie's and Ernie's pizza straight out of the Bronx shirt, which I-

Dan French: Which you gave me. Which I appreciate. Which you actually mailed to me. Yeah, yeah.

Pete Neubig: So Dan, we met, I guess, back in last August at IMN event, and you were still, you weren't the Northpoint, you weren't Northpoint AM CEO at the point, at that point in time. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us a little bit about Northpoint first, and then about your journey, how you became CEO.

Dan French: Well, first of all, Pete, I love your vibe, man. I love everything about your energy, and you're a mission-driven dude, and I love what you've provided to the industry. And it's a great thing, and we actually use you as a client, or we are a client of yours. So cheers to what you built.

Pete Neubig: Thanks buddy.

Dan French: It's great. It's outstanding. And yeah, it's a pleasure to be on the air with you today. But yeah, Northpoint, actually, when I met you, I think I was still consulting. And then I was, I became a COO, and then we kind of had an idea that I would become CEO at some point, and then that's happened now. So I got involved with Northpoint because I actually met the private equity group, the team behind Northpoint that recapitalized the business about two years ago. So I became friendly with them. They're in Austin, Texas, where I live. And they said, hey, why don't you go take a look at Northpoint? Maybe there's an area where you can consult and provide some knowledge. And I did that, and then I saw a massive opportunity, because I'm not from the SFR world. That's something a bit unique. I think a lot of people at NARPM are really homegrown people. They built their business from the ground up, and I have tremendous respect for that. My path was a little bit different. I came really from multifamily. So I've been in the business for 20 years, but it's really been very specific to large-scale multifamily apartments. But now going into SFR as a consultant, right, to begin with when I first met you, which feels like 14 years ago, but I saw an area of opportunity. Because multifamily, and there's nothing against SFR here, because the people are really sharp, the people doing it out there, whether it's 100 doors and homes or 1,000 doors, homes, or 5,000, you got to be really good at what you do. But what I've seen at multifamily is that it's a much more mature asset class. It's been around for a lot longer, right? When I think of large-scale SFR property management or national ownership, that really happened after the GFC.

Pete Neubig: I mean, you think it's still happening. I don't think it's happened yet.

Dan French: It's super fun. It's emergent as a real true asset class, right? It's emergent because it's only been a couple, let's say a couple of decades in. So that means multifamily has multiple decades prior. And what you have is that you have a scaffolding of understanding, a scaffolding of talent, of these platforms that are built out and kind of shown the way. Graystar's from 1993, okay? Now they're at 1.1 million doors. It's crazy. And everyone thinks they have, it's all just a bunch of like Blackstone and assets that they manage for. 51% of their base is clients that own only one deal. So they own one deal. It's a 300-door deal. So that's a lot of work, right? It's not just that they have all these clients that have 100,000 doors. So in other words, Graystar has shown the way for…

Pete Neubig: That's okay. So Graystar...

Dan French: Yeah. Graystar has shown the way for many years. And so what I saw when I started consulting with Northpoint was an opportunity to bring some of my expertise, things I've learned in multifamily, and push it into what many people were calling the Wild West, which is lovingly...

Pete Neubig: Is Northpoint managing mainly single family homes right now, or are they managing single family, multifamily, HOA? Are they doing like everything, or are they focused?

Dan French: Quick background on Northpoint is that we're about 5,000 doors nationwide. We're in 20 different states. And we're about 80% single family home detached doors that we manage. And then the other 20% is a blend of maybe a duplex or a 10-unit, 20-unit, things that just kind of came to us. And so again, I'm only six months in, but we are... Going forward, we're going to try to push into multiple channels of growth. And that includes BTR. So we're going to the BTR conference if anyone's going to be there. And if this airs in time. We're going to be there in Nashville on Monday and Tuesday, the 16th and 17th. And so BTR is a growth channel. Single family rentals, of course, is going to continue to be a growth channel where we have a lot of retail mom and pop clients that we serve, but we also serve institutional clients on the single family detached side. And then we're going to go open up a big channel in small multifamily, which is to me really exciting because a lot of groups have kind of thought about going into that space, but they realize that that in itself is a massive challenge and no one has cracked the code there. Like SFR, okay, Invitation Homes and Amherst and whoever else, like Firstkey, they're all national platforms now. They know how to do that, but no one really is a national platform around small multifamily. And small multifamily, just to define it is like 10 to 80 doors. This is like that missing middle and it's a huge part of the housing stock in the US and no one's done it really, really well. And so that's it. And then lastly, sorry, Pete, I'm just going to keep threading you.

Pete Neubig: Go for it.

Dan French: But yeah, I'm just on fire for this. I love this mission here that we're on. The last one is M&A. So we're seeking to partner with other property management founders that are out there and seeking to bring their company, their team to the next level. And I can go into that a little bit more, Pete, if you'd like around like what are the differences between partnering with us and partnering with someone else?

Pete Neubig: Let's hold that thought real quick. So there's a lot to unpack just in that. So first I want to ask you about the institutionals. I know back when I worked with Mynd back in 2021, they had actually kind of pushed the retail and they focused on institutionals. Now obviously that was, even though it was four or five years ago, it seems it's just like a completely different landscape now out there. And so are you seeing institutionals buying properties and needing third party management? Or is it since kind of slowed down with Trump saying, you call him 100 doors. Is it slowing down because it's slowed down originally because of interest rates? So what are you seeing out there right now?

Dan French: Yeah, Pete, what I see is a lot of what I call FUD, like fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And that's always bad for when the capital markets feel that and that becomes a thing, then money stops moving around. The velocity of it really slows down. And we're starting to see that already. And it's really unfortunate. I think the whole housing bill, I just can't believe that it's a once in a generation thing, which is also mind blowing. Like housing is foundational to the US economy. It's foundational to everyone's life. And we've only done this once in a generation in the US. And now we're picking a fight against this so-called bad guy, which is an institutional owner that owns like a really small percentage of the housing stock. So it's really just to me, I call it pontificating. It's doing a lot of pandering to their base.

Pete Neubig: You think they're just saying this and doing this for the midterms?

Dan French: Yeah, it's total garbage. It's absolute garbage. It's playing to the populist thing, which is that everyone feels that they're locked out of the American dream and it's not affordable. So they're picking on a bad guy that's easy to say, oh, that's like a main street thing. Well, we can have a whole podcast on this alone, Pete, but it's so misguided. And really what needs to happen for housing affordability is to create new supply, get out of the way of builders and allow them to do it.

Pete Neubig: We could definitely go left there, but I'm just talking about... So basically though, that is pausing the institutionals on buying properties right now. It's kind of a slowdown on that, correct?

Dan French: Absolutely. And we're pitching actively a bunch of institutional groups and it's crazy because they're uncertain, right? So they don't know what that housing bill is going to look like.

Pete Neubig: Are you seeing institutionals bringing back in-house third-party management at all? Are you seeing any of that yet?

Dan French: No, I've heard that. I've heard that, but I haven't seen it with my own experience. I'm sure maybe there's one or two groups out there doing it. I mean, my thesis on that, Pete, is having built... I built in my prior life too, I was CEO of really presided over two different firms, same firm, right? But just two different strategies, let's say. The first was when we built out after the GFC starting in 2011, totally vertically integrated, right? So we did the full stack between sourcing, buying the homes, placing debt, raising capital, and then managing. So the management team is obviously the bulk of that team, right? So you can do... We bought $2 billion in asset value. You can do that with a very small team. If you're really good, you can do it with 10 people, right? But to have a property management and construction management team bolted in vertically integrated, dude, you need 450 people. So when teams that are allocators, when they think that through, I think they should discover that it's far better to just go choose Northpoint. Just call me up. Call me up. I'm going to handle the property management. I've been doing it for 20 years. I'm going to solve that. I'm going to be the easy button for you. And I'm going to be owner obsessed and I'm going to align my interest to yours. So just don't build it in-house. That's my message for people.

Pete Neubig: So I've been doing this a long time. And so you start seeing cycles, right? And I remember in the, I would say like the mid-2000s, like 2010s, the institutionals used to do third-party management and they actually outsourced the leasing. Now it's flipped. Then they kind of started doing the leasing and the purchasing and they outsourced the purchasing as well. Now that they outed to that, in 2020, they flipped that around. They do the purchasing and then they give the leasing and the management to third parties. And so now, I think again, I like the FUD thing, right? Fear, uncertainty, and what was the last one?

Dan French: Doubt.

Pete Neubig: Doubt. And so they're trying to figure out ways to save money. And a lot of times they're like, oh, I can save money by bringing in third-party management, not realizing that you need 40, 50, 60 people to kind of run it, depending on the number of units. All right. So you also said that Northpoint is going to start focusing on, you think you cracked the code on small to midsize apartment complexes.

Dan French: Correct. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: All right. In my experience, I've seen that typically those small to midsize, they're older. They don't have that many amenities, if any at all. So that brings in a different type of clientele. So how do you get around some of those? How's Northpoint getting around some of those challenges without giving us the secret sauce? How do you force in your people, like your residents to use technology? Because a lot of my residents back then, when I owned those small apartment complexes, didn't even have a computer, let alone a way to pay rent online. They didn't speak English. They would call me because the neighbor next door is playing music loud. There's no manager on site for these eight unit and these 10 unit deals. So how do you get rid of some, how do you, you know, get over some of those challenges?

Dan French: Well, I'm happy to share the secret sauce, Pete, just like, like at Louie and Ernie's, you know, we're chefing up over here, bro, we're cooking up and it's really fun. Because look, ideas are easy, man. Execution's hard. So I can share all my ideas all day. But at the bottom of it is that I came from this deal, right? And I was CEO of 18,000 doors. Now that team is at 25,000 doors. So they kept growing. So it was a good, really well run team. And it's super competitive. But what happens is those teams build specifically to handle 250 unit door communities and everyone's on site there. So it's a really different model. And actually the small multifamily model cannot support a person on site. That's a key differentiator. And that's why no one's cracked that code because it's just really hard to price it, to manage it.

Pete Neubig: And, but I, my thesis- In my mind too, you need somebody there because of the quality of resident there. Like you need someone to knock on the door, get me the rent. You know what I mean?

Dan French: Like, so like- Well, that's why, so two things pop out. One is that people coming from property management of scattered site property management, which is SFH, right? Single family homes. They're going to be far superior coming up channel to small multifamily because they're already used to this on-demand. No one's on, no one, no one can sit at a home, right? Like you're going to manage 200 doors or 300 doors. Like, you know, you have to figure out how to route all that stuff just in time for, from a leasing standpoint, a maintenance standpoint, a resident, you know, maybe there's a knock on the door for, for delinquency or posting a notice. You know, all these stuff have to happen in a way that's highly coordinated that the single family groups know how to do. So it's really unique. They can come up channel. The big groups that do 300 doors, they cannot go down channel because I tried it at ResProp, my former team. I tried it, we got our ass kicked. And we had to, we had to kind of like go away from it and just say, you know what, let's keep growing in our, where we know we have good- Systems and people. Systems and infrastructure built. Exactly. So what else I want to say about it? Yeah. Then you have to, you still have to select your groups, right? You have to select great owners because a lot of it is true. It's true, right? It's class C because it's infill and it was built a long time ago. It's really hard to build 20 doors now anywhere, you know, because the economies of scale, you have to build something. Most, most developers are building stuff.

Pete Neubig: That's 200, 400.

Dan French: Yeah. So, and the math just works better if you look, if you understand, understand construction loans and whatnot. So yes, you have to, you have to pick your neighborhood. You can't just do every deal that comes your way, just like in single family homes. And you have to, and then you have to figure out certain things where it's dense. The density really matters. Like we don't want, if we're going to grow a thousand doors, I want them all in Austin, Texas, right? I don't want a thousand doors in 10 markets. So if you have a thousand doors in Austin, Texas, you can route someone so it has the feeling that someone's almost always there, right? Because you just have a team.

Pete Neubig: Whether that's a porter or a maintenance guy.

Dan French: Yeah, yeah. A leasing person. Just someone has eyes on that deal quite frequently because you have this sort of like routing mechanism between those thousand doors. And even though there are 10 and 50s and 60 and 30, it just all makes sense because the density helps it work.

Pete Neubig: So you talked also a way for Northpoint to grow is not just through these smaller apartment complexes, which God bless you, man. I'm going to give you a little little- And I'm going to bless you on there. Good luck to you. We talked about mergers and acquisitions. So are you seeing a slowdown of some of these private equity backed companies? I'm thinking like mine. I know Mynd real well because I used to work there and I sold my business to Mynd. They're not really buying that, man. They're not really doing any mergers and acquisitions any longer. I've heard some of the other big ones are slowing down on the mergers and acquisitions. Are you seeing any? What are you hearing out there? Or are you seeing a slowdown in that? Or are you actually seeing- no, Pete, it's still blowing and going.

Dan French: No, I think it's slow compared to what it was. When did you sell your deal?

Pete Neubig: I sold in 19, but I think the high was like 22. That's what I was thinking.

Dan French: 22 was when it was super hot. 22 and tapers off in 23. And some of that is exogenous shocks in the history of the environment, Ukraine war, all this stuff happened that depressed multiples and depressed capital activity. So yes, I think we're still seeing that's crazy that it's been four years since then. But yeah, I think it's not what it used to be, but it's still there. So example, pure HRG come together, right?

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of, that was out of the blue.

Dan French: It was out of the blue. And you think about HRG used to have 38,000 doors on their own. And when they merged, it came in with 20,000 doors just two years later. I don't know if people are understanding that, but so the churn, this is the problem that private equity is really starting to understand about single family rental space versus multifamily. Multifamily is actually tends to be a lot stickier because of the contracts and they're still 30 day out on the contracts, but it's a lot harder to, to go, you know, change over management on a, on a 300 door community because you have like six people on site and it's just like a lot more daunting. And you might have a lender more involved. It's like your capital partners involved. There's just a lot of more things happening. Whereas in the single family world, it's very tied to the owner. So when you go like with your deal, I don't know, you know, people might be like, Hey, I signed up for Pete. I didn't sign up for XYZ firm who bought his firm. So this is called the melting iceberg that, you know, this is what some of the private equity groups have told me that they're avoiding single family because they can't get their head around the melting iceberg. So when HRG has 38,000 doors, two years later, they merged with 20,000 doors. What happened to the doors? You know what I'm saying? I'm not picking on HRG.

Pete Neubig: I know it's, I've talked to, I've talked to even, even the folks, you know, just mom and pop and churn is still, is, is a challenge. It's obviously there's negative churn and then there's, you know, you call it neutral churn and positive churn. Positive churn might be, Hey, I'm selling and we get to sell the house. You can call that. Some people call neutral. I used to call it positive. The best churn is when Dan says, Pete, I want to sell my house. And I say, sure, Pete, you could sell it for me. And then I sell it to another investor. And then I get management. That's a great churn.

Dan French: That's pretty good. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. And then of course people just unhappy, right? They're just unhappy. Right. Because they bought a property that maybe didn't buy from us. They told, they were told it was going to rent for X dollars. It rents for X minus. And now they're not making any money. And like, well, I'm going to manage it myself because it's not, you know, critical cashflow or you just made a mistake, right? Cause it happens. And that's it. You didn't build any trust or loyalty and it is take the, take the door away. Yeah.

Dan French: So by the way, we are still very active, Pete, just speaking about the Northpoint opportunity. Yeah. We have a pipeline, you know, dozens of people that we're talking, that we're actively talking to.

Pete Neubig: And these things just take time, but we were at IMN in Scottsdale, right? We had seen each other there. You guys were on a, a bit of, you know, you guys were actually out. You guys left the conference for a few hours because you had a meeting with somebody that you were talking about purchasing.

Dan French: Well, you got a good memory, Pete. Yes. We did meet with, with that person and they were still under LOI. We should close in 45 days. We thought we were going to close 60 days ago. So yeah.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. I actually thought it was a dead deal. Cause I heard it, I had heard it hadn't closed. Right. And so that's good. Congratulations on it. So talk a little bit about, like, I don't want to get into like real deeps and into M&A, but you guys are looking at buying or, or partnering with, with property management companies. What does that typical partnership look like? And I know it's not one size fits all, but just kind of tell me just kind of typically, how do you price it? Do they, do you ask them to stay on for a period of time? Do they get an opportunity to work inside of Northpoint? Like what does all that look like?

Dan French: Yeah, it's, it's cool. I mean, I love this stuff and I'm still learning. So I, I, I have never done M&A in my prior history. I've done all every other part of the real estate stack, right? I've even done real estate technology companies. I helped launch, I've done the operations and investment side, and now I'm deep in the M&A space. And there's multiple flavors, you know, our flavor is much more for the owner that really would love to stay on and continue, continue to operate even. And they might just change their operating role, right? So for example, someone is the founder, that means they're probably the CEO, right? Almost always. And everything, all the problems hit their plate, you know, every single problem. I met one person that we got very close with down the line on a broker deal on the West Coast. And I'm sitting next to this person, prolific, 25 year company, amazing company. And the person was like, yeah, I'm going to go home tonight. It was a, it was a dinner with all the brokers and the dog and pony show. They're like, yeah, I'm going to go home at night and answer email. So 2am I'm thinking, holy cow, this is a highly successful entrepreneur who is outstanding and still hasn't built all those systems to make them a little bit more free from, from their, their day-to-day of the business. So it's that person is kind of ideal. Now that person in particular, continue with that real life story. They wanted to go focus on business development. They love business development. They love pressing the flesh, talking to realtor groups, talking to, in her case, small multifamily was actually a big channel that she loved and wanted to go get freed up to do that and have the team come in and handle some of that operational complexity over time. But the other thing that Northpoint is going to do, which I think is super smart is the brand States, you know, the branch should, the local branch should stay. And there's other groups out there

I'm not talking bad about them, but I think the ones that changed their name overnight, I think that's a disadvantage because having met a lot of these PM founders, like you're Pete, you're one of them, but I was at the crane event with, with Peter Loman and Wolfgang. And these guys are outstanding. I was with like 30 of these PM founders. They are the ones that made things happen, you know, so to cut their whole brand overnight, just to me, it makes absolutely no sense. So Northpoint style is much more like, Hey, you don't keep your brand. We'll bolt in with best practices on accounting, AI workflows, offshore, maybe things you haven't thought about before revenue, revenue enhancements that we can bring to the table economies of scale that that's what we're going to bring for you. And, and especially that owner, that's like a little tired of the operational storm that hits her plate every day, but wants to keep going forward with a team. That's that I think is outstanding as the best in the business. Then that's, that's why Northpoint should win your attention. You're in your deal versus someone else is just going to snap their fingers. Once you out the door and say, go take a cruise ship. You know what I'm saying? That's not us.

Pete Neubig: Unless you want that. Right. There are some people that are ready to retire.

Dan French: Yeah. But our, our style is like that might not be, we might not be your best fit at that point because we actually prefer someone who really wants to kind of like take some, some equity going forward into the new business and roll over some of their chips. And that means they're much more, they're a little more highly tied to the, the, the new co the new business going forward.

Pete Neubig: What is the event? Is it to go public? Is it to sell to another private equity? What's the, what's the, if I'm putting chips on the table, what's the event for me?

Dan French: Our exit. Yeah. We're going to go bring the Nasdaq or, or Wall Street. I'm kidding. I don't, I have no idea. That would be amazing. If that's the case, Pete, we're doing it together, man.

Pete Neubig: That's it, man. I'll set up a pizza tour. That's funny. You know, it's funny.

Dan French: I think it's more likely to be a PE an exit to a larger PE shop or family office that wants exposure to the, the property management space. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete Neubig: You know, when I sold to Mynd for about four months, I ran Empire, my property management firm, just like I normally did. The only difference was like the, the, the money's got changed from instead of the Empire bank account and went to the Mynd bank account. Right. And, and that was probably the most fun I ever had running my magic company or running with Mynd. And then like I sold in October and February, they came in, we merged onto their software and they changed, they ripped the band aid so to speak. Versus like, Hey, doing things like slowly or just let me run the business as kind of the business owner of that business unit, you know, and then giving me maybe more of Texas, like, or give me everybody, everything in Houston or whatever. And, and so when that changed that the whole, just the, just the, the demeanor and the culture of all the people that work for me, like you could just feel like the, the, you know, just like somebody let the, like the air out of the balloon. That was, that was kind of the big, big thing. So you mentioned AI, how is Northpoint? What, what is, what is Northpoint doing? You know, I mean, as how are they implementing AI? What are some of the things that you guys think, you know, like, because I mean, it's such an unknown, everybody's like worried about their job and all that good stuff. Where, where do you see AI impacting, you know, the SFR space and, and Northpoint?

Dan French: Yeah, it's, it's going to be massive. Perhaps it already is starting, but I have some contrarian views. I don't, I don't buy into this, this whole like SaaS is dead and, you know, AI is going to crush the, the, the white collar knowledge worker and everything's gone. You know, the U.S. economy is going to be in a tailspin. This, this, this is a famous report that came out recently called the Citrini Research Report. I read the whole thing. I don't believe in it. Whereby they say that, you know, unemployment rate is going to, in the U.S. is going to hit like 10, 15%. Everyone's going to, all these white collar workers are going to start.

Pete Neubig: That's before the robots get here.

Dan French: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why I think that Pete is because these things just take time. There's a lot of organizational inertia that, that happens inside of a team that it's just, it's not like you just snap your finger and you plug these things in. You have to do the deep work. That's what I'm really proud of at Northpoint. We're doing very, very deep work. So we're going full stack in, in that folio is one answer to your question. We're, we're cutting off. And I like a lot of these vendors that are out there, but we're cutting off a lot of point solutions and we're going full stack with that AppFolio. And we're using all their like cutting edge things like performers. So leasing performer, maintenance performer, I think someday soon they'll have a sales performer. And we're, we're trying to do that because the integrity of the data is a lot cleaner, right? When you have one system and all the flows are together, you don't have to stitch data together. And that's a foundational layer for AI. So if, if, if AI can get trained on, on data, that's very clean and structured, then AI is going to work a lot, a lot better. And that's our thesis. And that's what we're going toward. But inside of that is a ton of like nitty gritty, like, like Pete, every Friday, man, I'm doing this thing where I call it discovery day. And it's like four hours straight. Now I'm sitting in my chair the whole time, big, you know, everyone's around a lot of people around anyway. And we're having people click through the actual systems, what they're actually doing inside the systems, sharing their screen, showing me exactly what they do. And we're going down to the saving, you know, people 15 minutes of time here and an hour there. And over time, man, that's going to, that's going to add up. And then when you introduce AI to that clean flow, it's going to be outstanding. So, cause when you put AI into a flow, that's like garbage, you know, yeah, it's just garbage. So people don't understand this. And most CEOs are not going to sit there for four hours and do a discovery day.

Pete Neubig: But I think that's amazing because, you know, garbage in, garbage out for anything, whether it's data, whether it is a process. And, you know, I think people get caught up in the, we have this ability for automation, right? Whether it's Leadsimple, APTLY, Monday.com, whatever it is, HubSpot. And they want to, you know, they get excited about it and then they just kind of put their process into the automation. And then it just exponentially make things worse because anything that was a crack in the foundation just gets spit out exponentially. So I'm glad you're all doing that because that's how I built Empire. I sat, I used to sit there almost daily with the team. And that's the important thing that you said, Dan, you do with the team. So it's not you figuring out, oh, here's how you do it. You have the people who sit in the seats. And then my guess is your questions you're asking is, how can we make this more efficient? What tools can I give you to make your job easier?

Dan French: A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And I always look at, as CEO, what are my highest leverage activities? And I've sort of determined that that's the highest leverage activity because over time it just, it compounds so fast, right? If we, if during one session of an hour, an hour long session, maybe there's 10 people involved, right? Or eight people, whatever it is.

Pete Neubig: It's expensive.

Dan French: It's expensive, very expensive, but it could save 20 PMs an hour every week. So that's 52 times 20, you know, it's a hundreds of hours.

Pete Neubig: Infinity.

Dan French: Yeah. Forever and always.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Forever and always.

Dan French: And when you think about the power of AI being introduced into a flow, that's actually clean, then it's really, it gets exponential. So we're doing that hard work now to figure things out and make sure, you know, and also I feel like a duty. I feel very high duty to our team, to a lot of people. Right. But, but our team, I hate, one thing I really hate about the PM industry is I call it mind numbing and soul crushing work that I'm serious. And no one, no one understands this unless they're in it. You know, maintenance guys are being forced to do like admin work. It's mind numbing, it's soul crushing. Property managers are forced to do the same data entry three, four times, or, or getting pinged with the same questions three or four times from different, from accounting, from IT, from it's mind numbing. And I don't want that for our team. I want people doing true knowledge work. I want people growing their career. And I want people to feel like they've learned something at Northpoint they would never learn anywhere else. There was never a four year stint that they could take anywhere else in the world for PM, the PM world that would match what they're going to learn here. And that's, that's my goal. And that's what I wake up and dreaming about. I think about it all the time because I know that a teammate that's empowered like that is going to serve owners well. Yeah. So.

Pete Neubig: Have you, with, with, with building automation, using AI and, you know, building efficiencies, have you had anybody worry about like, where am I going to have a job and how do you overcome that?

Dan French: Yeah, look, if I was really worried though, if I was someone in the whole world, I would, my, my worry would be offshore. So it's sorry that that's, that hits probably close to home for you people. There will be definitely a space for it. Right. But I think that is the first, the first work that gets automated away will be some of the stuff that's, that is currently being offshored. I don't think that decreases the offshore headcount over time because more people will find more things for people to do. This is one of the unlocks of technology, right? It's a deflationary force. So when, when things become easier to do, you'll find more things to do. Do you know what I'm saying? That's why I'm a techno optimist. I'm not, I'm one of the, who are these techno pessimists? Like, I don't, I don't understand them because we've always figured out more, more things we want done as humans. And so we'll just, I think there'll be far fewer per head. If you think about direct labor costs per door, let's say, I think I would be scared if I was just like, Oh, I only have one way to win as a, as an offshore PM. But if I started thinking about the, the, the amount of work to be done in the world, then you're, you're fine.

Pete Neubig: I see AI as an enabler, not as a kind of like, you just plug it in. I still, it's, I think AI is more, I look at it more as a teammate. AI is a teammate and it still needs to be supervised and managed and it needs to be, you know, course corrected. And I, so I think that you're going to see a lot of people, most likely virtual, start getting that little, like that, that they become AI certified in something like where they know how to run AI. And AI right now, today, it still needs an off ramp. Meaning if I call, I equate, especially the AI when the call centers, look, we had that. It was called, it was called a phone tree back in the eighties. Anytime somebody had a phone tree, what's the first thing they did? Zero, zero, zero out.

Dan French: Right. Right. I still do that.

Pete Neubig: I think you're going to see a lot of, even when it says, Hey, this is Pete, I'm an AI bot, zero, zero, zero. I want, give me a person. Now that over time, because you got these, you know, these kids that are born in, you know, 10, 2010, 2015, those kids are going to live with AI. Even, even the Gen Zers didn't live with it. They have adopted AI, but they're not native to AI.

Dan French: Right.

Pete Neubig: You'll see more, more adoption over time. But right now in the next 10 years, you're still going to see an off ramp. You're going to need people to help monitor and manage and manage the AI. And that could be just me owning a VA company. That's trying to hold on to hope.

Dan French: No, I think, I think that's absolutely right. That's, that's yeah. Good nuance.

Pete Neubig: So Dan, if somebody wanted to reach out to you, whether they, you know, they're maybe looking at, maybe, you know, getting an idea of what their PM, what a merger would look like, or just to pick your brain on all, all things, you know, SFR, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Dan French: Text me 845-629-1808. And yeah, I'm a nerd about this stuff. I really love learning from people and we can learn from anyone. So yeah, I'd love to just trade notes with you or, or, or hit me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there. Maybe annoyingly so, but I've done it for a long time now, like a couple of years and it's been really good. And so, you know, connect with me there.

Pete Neubig: He's a good follower. I'll say you're a good follow on LinkedIn.

Dan French: I appreciate you. Appreciate you. So I'll be at all the NARPM events.

I'll be a Broker/Owner. I'm in Crane. So if any of these are ringing bells, like, you know, I'll be around this year for sure at all the events. So if I can connect with you in person, I'd love to.

Pete Neubig: Awesome, brother. And if you are not a member of NARPM, how dare you give them a call 800-782-3452 or go to narpm.org. And if you are in a need for virtual assistance, go to vpmsolutions.com or email me, pete@vpmsolutions.com. Thanks everybody. See you, Dan. Thanks for being here.

Dan French: Thank you, Pete.