A Podcast | Derrick Karimian

Pete Neubig: Welcome back everybody, to the NARPM Radio podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig. And as I say, every week we have an incredible show. But this one's even more incredible than normal because I got my good buddy Derrick Karimian here. He's the broker and co-owner of Krystle Properties, a Northern California real estate firm. Which just property managing in California. God bless you all. He's got over 35 years experience in residential property management with more than 20 years in the industry. He's known for strategic leadership, systems oriented approach and commitment to client service. He currently chairs the property management committee for the Solano Association of Realtors. Derrick's Journey reflects a deep belief that you don't have to burn out to build something great. Derrick, thank you so much for being here, buddy.

Derrick Karimian: Pete, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you having me on. I love your show, so it's an honor to be here.

Pete Neubig: And it's been a minute since we actually hung out. Last time I saw you, we were.. NARPM. California NARPM two years ago.

Derrick Karimian: Yes.

Pete Neubig: At Northern California, where you took me around to some of the local establishments. And me, you and Felicia, my wife got pretty happy on some of that great wine there in Northern California.

Derrick Karimian: That's right. You gotta enjoy the fruits of California. And when you're in Napa, you have to enjoy the fruits of the grapevine.

Pete Neubig: That's right, that's right. So talk to me a little bit about, about Krystle Properties. So how, you know. Well, I love is I love the origin story. How did you get started? What made you create a property management firm? And you and I were talking in the green room. So today's topic, we're going to literally talk about how you went from an old school property management systems to kind of new school, and I'd love to hear that journey, but just let's talk about your your beginnings first.

Derrick Karimian: So my beginnings in property management, funny enough, start at the age of about four. And this is when my parents purchased a very, very small property management portfolio of about 50 units. We're talking about 1988 here. So I don't know if you can picture property management in 1988, but in the 80s and the 90s, property management had a very specific vibe. And that vibe was women in their 40s and their 50s drinking way too much coffee, smoking way too many cigarettes and that was property management. So I grew up in a back of an office like that. I played with the leasing agents when they weren't showing properties. They were playing with me. So I...

Pete Neubig: You literally grew up in the industry.

Derrick Karimian: I did, I did. And the last thing I wanted to do was property management growing up. So fast forward a couple of years. I'm 21 years old, 20, 21 years old. Mom's not doing so well. Company's, you know, struggling. She's, I think, down to maybe four employees at about 500 units.

Pete Neubig: Oh, wow.

Derrick Karimian: Yeah. Unfortunately somebody pass away, somebody was going on maternity leave that never came back, she had an HR issue of somebody that wasn't showing up, so.

Pete Neubig: So give me the bottom line. Is this early 2000s, at this point?

Derrick Karimian: This would have been about 2004.

Pete Neubig: 2004. Okay.

Derrick Karimian: 2004. So I came in.

Pete Neubig: 400 or 500 units with four people. That is, and again, I'm just thinking back in oh four, not a lot of technology at that point. So that's that's pretty that's that's a lot of properties for that few folks.

Derrick Karimian: So it's an experience in Firefighting when you have that few people and you don't have the technology to actually properly anticipate issues and follow up with issues. It's literally people coming into the front lobby and screaming, hey, I've had this leak going on for ten days and it's not fixed yet. That was kind of what I had walked into.

Pete Neubig: You got you got pulled back into the family business basically.

Derrick Karimian: I got pulled in because things were getting chaotic.

Pete Neubig: What were you doing at the time?

Derrick Karimian: I was floundering in college. I was doing theater. You know, I was...

Pete Neubig: Isn't that more of a SoCal thing? Theater?

Derrick Karimian: The theater?

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Derrick Karimian: It's a Bay area, New York kind of thing. People that go down to LA, they'll do theater, but really, their passion is going to be more on the film side.

Pete Neubig: So the property management firm, a theater kid basically saved the PM firm. Is that what I'm hearing? There's a show we can write. There's gotta be some kind of musical or something.

Derrick Karimian: Yeah, there truly is. And we. I'm sure we could. Right. Particularly with the help of ChatGPT, we can come up with a heck of a script. So I wouldn't say that I saved it. I came in, I helped stabilize it, and then my sister came in when she finished her business degree in college. And between the two of us, and my sister, of course, is my business partner. Between the two of us, we really helped turn things around.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. So that's in '04. How long? You know, going back into your memory banks probably seem like forever. But how long did it take you guys to stabilize and turn things around? Was it a year, six months? Two years. Like, how long did it take for something like that?

Derrick Karimian: A good two years, I would say. A good two years. By that point, you know, there were some more employees on the team. You had her and I who were coming in. You know, we're millennials. So we were able to come in and immediately start teaching people how to appropriately use the computers. I mean, Control-alt-delete was was eye opening for these people.

Pete Neubig: I can only imagine what the technology looked like back then. I'm guessing they were doing everything on, like, ledgers, like literally like notepads and stuff.

Derrick Karimian: So there actually was a reasonable technology. It was called Property Manager Edge. So this is an older platform that was discontinued, I want to say, in about 2008, but Property Manager Edge, so they had a reasonable platform. The problem was, is that they didn't have a server because cloud based technology didn't exist at this time. So they had to have everything on a server. This server had to have multiple computers running on whatever it was windows XP.

Pete Neubig: Update your windows updates and all that good stuff. Yeah.

Derrick Karimian: Correct. Correct. So if any piece of data you know, got corrupted, it could screw up absolutely everything.

Pete Neubig: Oh, wow.

Derrick Karimian: So it's not like the days today. Propertyware, and Appfolio, and Yardi where everything's in the cloud and it's backed up in four different locations. So any mistake, you know, it was really all of our information and all of our ledgers could could disappear like that.

Pete Neubig: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Especially if you don't do a backup in the server croaks, you know.

Derrick Karimian: Right, right.

Pete Neubig: You gotta do those those tape backups back in the day. Right?

Derrick Karimian: Oh, it was it was an absolute mess, Pete. But I came in and I had the experience of building websites as, as early as fourth, fifth grade. So that was one of the first things that I was able to do. They had a website that at one point was active but hadn't been active in about three years. So there were listings on it that had been rented for years. And you know, all of the information was just completely outdated. The contact us and all of that. So that was one of the first things that I was able to do to really move the ball forward. Being an HTML coder, old school HTML coder, I was able to really set us apart from the local competition, just as the web was really becoming the way that everybody did business. So I think that's lesson number one here, Pete, for modernizing your company, you have to have a dynamic website in order to have that visibility. I think that's huge. That's key. And our growth in both size scale but also in our operations was all fueled by having a good online presence.

Pete Neubig: You know, I think you can you know, there was that evolution or revolution how you want to say it. Back in the early 2000s, where internet was just becoming something that people would actually use. Right before that, it was just like BBS, the Bulletin Board Services and all that stuff. And there's a new revolution coming with AI. And so I think somebody listened to this could literally take that concept of you were first to market with using website using new technology at the time, which is kind of funny to say now in 2025. But, you know, somebody, you know, if you can really crack the AI code, right, like, because more and more people are searching using ChatGPT or using some AI based, if you can get like to their first and they find you over like the old Google method of, of searching, that might be a lesson learned. So take me through. So now in 2008, '10, around there, the vendors are just not there to support the industry as well. Right. So what does the company look like in 2010? So you have a static website? I'm guessing there's no SEO. So take me through like some of like there's no Tenant Turner. Like take me through some of that stuff. How'd you do leasing? How'd you do all this stuff?

Derrick Karimian: Oh, leasing. This is fun, Pete. So when I came in in 2004 through about 2000, mid 2005, the way that you did leasing was you had your paper listings and you had your goodwill in the community and people would come in and get your paper listing and then you tell them, go drive by everything. There were no photos or anything like that. And then in order to get more people in your door to come and grab your paper listing, you know, we used to always have at least 40 printed because that's how many people would walk in our door and grab that paper listing. We would do a classified in the newspaper and we'd go and change it every week. And essentially... you couldn't fit, you know, our ad was I don't think people could see this, but but, you know, it was a decent size ad, but we could fit, you know, maybe ten listings on it. So what we did was we rotated those ten listings in the newspaper classified section, like, that's where people used to go. And we had that very clearly in there say, habla espanol. To get more listings, come visit our office, 2101 Tennessee Street. So we use the newspaper to direct traffic, which in 2025 is absolutely hilarious.

Pete Neubig: I just have a question. What's a newspaper? No. I'm kidding. I mean, think about think about today, you have Evernest, and Mynd, and you have HRG. You have all these all these companies that are able to be in multiple markets. Could you even see that back in '05? Like, that's not even possible.

Derrick Karimian: No. Absolutely not. And in 2005, I'm trying to think of who the biggest player was in 2000. It was all regional players. And by regional players, it was pretty much city by city. You might cover two, three, four cities. But going beyond that was difficult because you, you, you really depended all on good will and you can't continue to build good will city after city without having multiple locations.

Pete Neubig: So you're the young buck coming in. You're doing this really interesting new technology called websites. And then you're, I'm guessing you and your sister are, the ones who are the forefront like pushing as new technology comes out. Now people haven't changed as far as mindset and change. Right. People don't like change. So what were some of the things that you did to get your team to accept change?

Derrick Karimian: Well, that's a good question. When I came in. There were definitely some older players that had been there for 10, 15 years. You know, Craigslist was one of the first big steps forward as far as marketing online, and then using Craigslist to draw traffic to our website which the newspaper did that as well. How did I get them to go along? I don't know if at the time I really did. I was I was too young and I would say that people in that generation have a lot of trouble putting faith in new things.

Pete Neubig: All right, let me rephrase the question then, because you have been on the forefront of technology ever since you're in Northern California. So that makes a lot of sense. How do you get your team today to embrace new technology and change?

Derrick Karimian: That's actually much easier...

Pete Neubig: That are actually older and wiser?

Derrick Karimian: Much easier to do. Communication channels are much clearer now. The vision that we have of the company is much cleaner. So I think that's probably step number one, is to have a vision. Step number two, is to make sure that your team understands that vision. And then if those changes are in line with your vision, it makes it much easier for your team to have that buy in and to go forward with that. You know, if part of our vision is expanding while maintaining a top tier service for our clients, well, part of maintaining a top tier service for our clients is having low vacancy rates. And if we're going to try out a new leasing platform, while it might, there might be some temporary pain while while we're learning it, if it starts Increasing, you know, our occupancy rates, if it starts decreasing our days on market. It's a lot simpler to get people to get on board.

Pete Neubig: Now, you've been in this business a long time, has your vision changed over the years?

Derrick Karimian: 100%

Pete Neubig: It has. So that's pretty normal, I think. Right. So you have this one vision because you know, like you don't know what's going on. And then you build that vision as you were growing the business. Did you have people that just were no longer... Did you outgrew them? Did you outgrow some team members and how'd you handle that? Because those are difficult conversations.

Derrick Karimian: Absolutely. We've had team members that we've outgrown, and we start getting into HR issues when we talk about how to resolve that. I think you need to have very clear expectations of what is needed of the staff. And that starts with your employee handbook. And if people are starting to fall away from the vision, if they're starting to not follow that handbook, you need to let them know sooner as opposed to later. And unfortunately, sometimes that means oral warnings, write ups. It means negative annual reviews, which very, very keys you need to have at the very least, annual reviews so that your team members know if they're on track.

Pete Neubig: Third time today that I've heard annual reviews. And I'm going to be honest, because I'm the honest broker here at NARPM. I don't do them. And so now you're the third person today to tell me how important they are. So if you're listening to this and you're not doing annual reviews, don't be Pete, be Derrick. Do them and I'm going to start doing them. Derrick, it's on my list. Next year I'm going to do annual reviews.

Derrick Karimian: Well. And Pete that's that's one of the most important things I've learned in the last five years is sometimes you don't want to be Derrick and doing annual reviews. You don't want to be Derrick. Derrick is too nice. I have my second in command. Who's my VP of ops?

Pete Neubig: Let me guess. It's your sister. She's the pitbull.

Derrick Karimian: Oh, no. Actually, Krystle sticks to the real estate sales. I'm on the property management, so I run the property management. She runs real estate sales. But my second in command in property management, the VP of ops. She is the one because she is much like you. She's operational minded. She's by the rules. You know, she's like a DC in the disc.

Pete Neubig: You're touchy feely, right? You don't like hurting people's feelings.

Derrick Karimian: Well I'm a high I. But funny enough, in times of stress, I become a high D.

Pete Neubig: There you go. Hey. So. Okay. Let's dive into this a little bit more because, one is you're younger than some people that are working for you. Now, that's not the case. Right? Where the guys with the long tooth. Now, we've been around, but two, as you're outgrowing these folks, how important is is like the culture? So I get it, like you have to have these and now. Alright, so I gotta I got so many things here. So I want to talk. I want you to talk a little bit about culture and how that affected it. And then two, do you think that you should have quarterly reviews and, and along with an annual review? Because I've been told now three times that when you have an annual review, there shouldn't be any surprises. Like, 'what do you mean? I'm not doing a good job.' So talk talk about the culture and talk about how you led up to those annual reviews.

Derrick Karimian: Okay. So culture. We have had the culture that we are seeking listed in several places within the office. Were we doing enough action to make sure that we were living up to that culture i would say up until about two years ago, no. We just had the list and saying this is the culture that we want. Funny enough, the culture change that we were looking for started happening as we parted ways with a few team members that truly didn't live up to that culture, then we didn't really have to talk about the culture as much. We lived the culture. And I think you're you're 100% right on. If you're doing those quarterly reviews and you're talking about things like, are you living up to the culture? Are you living up to the company vision? Here are ways you can improve. I think that's a great way to make sure that it's happening. For monthly meetings, one thing we started doing as we were really focusing on making sure we were delivering the culture that we were looking for instead of what we called compliment ball, where we toss a ball back and forth. You know, digitally, we'd have to pretend toss the ball, but you toss the ball back and forth and you'd give somebody on staff a compliment, something that they did that was going over and beyond. Well, we changed that to something that somebody did that exemplified our culture. And so each meeting we would go around, we'd take about ten minutes. When was something, either living up to our culture or one of our core values and that became huge. Not that people became competitive, but you started getting noticed when you were exemplifying what we were looking for.

Pete Neubig: Man, I'll tell you, I do that in my monthly meetings. And we do just that same thing. I don't throw the digital ball, but I just say, is anybody have... First we go through each one of our core values and I pick on somebody randomly, and I say, what's the value? , what's one of our values? And what does that mean to you? And then I say, does anybody out there have any... After we go through the core values, does anybody can does anybody want to recognize somebody that's exemplified our core value. And it's the one piece of the meeting that I do not make a time constraint. If we go 20 minutes, we go 20 minutes and I will get the time back somewhere else. Because I'm, I'm such a huge believer that if you have the core values, and they have to start top down and people live those values, this way when somebody comes in, they just know that these are the values and they just conform. If they didn't have some of those values. Now we hire based on values. So we don't typically have that challenge. But I'm glad that you do that. So it kind of makes me feel like I'm doing something right. So all right. So now talk to me like, because, you know, you've been doing this since oh five or oh four or whatever, like when you were four years old, your company looks completely different now than it did back in 2008.

Derrick Karimian: Correct.

Pete Neubig: So let's talk about some of the tech stack that you've implemented over over those years, because now it is almost too many tech stacks, right? Have you have you reached that challenge of there's like, 'oh, Derrick. I don't even know how to log in. You bring in a new piece of software in here', like, talk a little bit about that challenge and then some of the tech stack that you guys are using.

Derrick Karimian: Yeah. So that's been a real issue. You know, I'll go to a NARPM convention, I'll walk the vendor floor. I'm in, and if I see something that's going to advance our game, I'm very eager to try to bring that in. For property showings, we've tried ShowMojo, we've tried Rently, we've tried Tenant Turner. Currently we're on RentEngine. So we're trying RentEngine out, which is one that we've heard very good things about. I will say their support is phenomenal. Still learning the platform more so I'll have more to say on that in the coming years. On the main software side, Appfolio has been where we've been since 2013. Appfolio has been very good to us. We've looked at different software platforms, but Appfolio is kind of the the jack of all trades. You can do pretty much everything within Appfolio. and. I think that's more the direction we're going is to do more within Appfolio because our tech stacks gotten so big. So we've recently upgraded the service with Appfolio so that we can start eliminating some of these extra services.

Pete Neubig: Interesting.

Derrick Karimian: We're using Property Meld right now. So we have a Property Meld login. You have a RentEngine login. You have an Appfolio login. We're using Monday.com for workflows which is great, but it's another login that you have to use.

Pete Neubig: You got a VA, you have a VPM login.

Derrick Karimian: We have a VPM login. Absolutely. Now fortunately, it's just people on the HR side that have to log in on that. However, it's another thing to log into.

Pete Neubig: So you're going from disparate systems back into a once centralized, if you will.

Derrick Karimian: That's correct. We're trying to do that more and more. We're not going to eliminate everything. But instead of having nine logins, we're hoping that we're going to get down to 3 or 4.

Pete Neubig: That's really interesting. Can you imagine running a property management business without an accounting software like Appfolio?

Derrick Karimian: I know, some competitors that do that, and it blows my mind and I've let them know. I said,  it's worth every penny. You need to do this. I can't imagine doing this on a spreadsheet.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I had one company that I know of. They were trying to do it all through, QuickBooks. I'm like, oh my goodness. Like, imagine doing property accounting and QuickBooks plus your, you know, your corporate books. Alright. So other than coming back and doing centralization. Let's talk vendors real quick. What is something like you said, you moved from ShowMojo, Tenant Turner. And I don't want to put any of those guys under the bus here.  But what is what are some things that you're looking for from vendors that would make you consider moving to a different competitor or changing out of their software? Like, what are some of the things that these vendors really should do to make sure that they keep the, you know, our business as property managers.

Derrick Karimian: Support is key. You know, one thing I can't stand is when you have to search for help. and you know what? This is a big company, so I will throw them under the bus. Google workspace by finding out how to get help. And Google Workspace is like pulling air. So I would say that's one of the biggest things that a vendor can do. It should be easy. I'm not saying that there needs to be somebody available on the phone at all times, but whether it's a chat function, whether it's a, you know, contact us and here's their information. You shouldn't make people search and then go, oh, well, we'll search the community boards. The answers are in the community boards. Half the time they're not in the community boards. And you know what? I don't have 30 minutes to search the community boards to find it. So I would say communication and support are absolutely key.

Pete Neubig: I got a quick story. I'll throw it. There's a big payroll service company. We put a ticket in with them two years ago. It has not been responded to yet.

Derrick Karimian: I couldn't imagine, I couldn't imagine. And then meanwhile, you're in some sort of employment suit or something waiting on an answer on that.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, yeah. All right. So, , so getting support doesn't have to be on the phone, but easy entering and creating a ticket or doing some kind of chat, I would think. And getting a response right, because you can create a ticket if they don't respond within the same day or 24 hours. That's a you know, I'm guessing that's a red flag.

Derrick Karimian: Correct, correct. So I think within 24 hours is reasonable or one business day. Obviously if you're putting in Friday at 4 p.m., Monday, you know, before noon is sufficient, of course, but there needs to be some sort of system for them to track it. And on that note, that's something I would love to implement on our side is a better tracking system, instead of random emails from owners that we don't know if people are responding to or not. But yeah, some sort of tracking system to make sure that somebody is getting back to them, even if they don't have an answer, let them know that they're going to find an answer and get back to them.

Pete Neubig: So on that note, it just made me think of something. So I'm going to pivot here for a second. When I owned Empire, we, we had the same problem. Everything was was in email. We actually had HubSpot as our CRM system, and we figured out a way to create a ticketing system within HubSpot. So I was able to look at all the tickets and all the communication was was in and out of HubSpot. So I thought, pretty unique way of using HubSpot. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Derrick Karimian: And did you have like, a nice little dashboard you could look at or it was easy to pull out the the data so that you could see without having to spend hours researching.

Pete Neubig: I had a dashboard that showed me all the open tickets by person or by department. So like for example, we had a lease renewal person. Well, at the beginning of the month, all the lease renewals would show up. So she looked like she had all these tickets, right. But it was open for like 90 days. And so we were able to track that. And so if somebody said that like they couldn't get things done, we could actually look to see the performance based on their tickets. And that allowed us to determine if we need to hire different people or just get in some help. Right. You know, all that stuff. And we use that for kind of property management stuff and we use Meld. Meld is great for tickets, you know that allowed us to track everything just in their dashboard.

Derrick Karimian: Right. Yeah. Meld's a very good system for, tracking the maintenance metrics, for sure. One thing I can't stand, you know, you want to have your team performing up to par. You want to look at their KPIs, but when it takes hours in order to pull that data, interpret that data, that becomes a problem.

Pete Neubig: Absolutely. It can't be. You can't use it as a KPI. It takes too long to build it. And I'll tell you a story, man. We got rid of. I'm going to tell you this when we have, when we have our glass of wine after after our, our podcast here. But at Empire, I ended up getting rid of all four of my property managers on the same day. Got rid of them all.

Derrick Karimian: That sounds. That would give me nightmares.

Pete Neubig: Oh, it was about a year in the making. So like, I was building a foundation for it. And maybe that's a podcast I'll do one day. Anyway. Murphy's law, like two weeks later, we get some freaking random lawsuit. It's buried in somebody's email. Can't like somebody doesn't work for me anymore. Can't find it. We end up having the insurance company settle. I find the smoking gun, like, literally like a month after we settle, like, oh, my God, we were not wrong. We were right. We did everything. Like, here it is. Here's the email. But because we didn't have a ticketing system at that time when this was going down, it was burying email. And, you know, I mean, trying to search an email. Good luck. Especially when... I can't even search my own email, let alone searching some random property manager's email. So, the ticketing system becomes really, really important. All right. So let's go back to the vendors. And so having good support is paramount. Probably the number one thing that you're looking at. What's one more thing that you could think of that a vendor should be doing to keep your business?

Derrick Karimian: They should be improving. You know, that Japanese phrase, kaizen, continuous improvement. if it is static, then they're falling behind, even if they were the best a year ago, if they're not, you know, constantly doing updates, if they're not listening to complaints from their clients and  doing something about it, they're falling behind.

Pete Neubig: I totally agree, man. Like those are the two big things I could think of as well. And like, you know, is reaching out and creating relationship is what is that, is that like super important? Not really important as long as they're kind of doing the support, like where do you come up on that?

Derrick Karimian: So if I have a direct contact with a company that makes my loyalty to that company so much higher and I, you know, for me personally, I don't like to take advantage of those relationships. I won't start with a contact to them. I'll go through the proper ticketing system. But if I've got somebody that I know I can BCC if things are going south, that makes all the difference in the world to me. So I think actually having relationships, going to NARPM conventions, if you are a vendor and making relationships with those property management companies, that's huge.

Pete Neubig: Where do you fall off on like, you know, and I don't know if there's anything that can be done with it, but like, you know, you meet a vendor and of course, you're talking to a salesperson, , especially if they get bigger. Right? Like even VPM now, like, I'm not at all the events. I'm at most of them, but not not all of them. And then, you know, you talk, you build a relationship with a salesperson. And then next time you see him at a conference, they got a different business card with them.

Derrick Karimian: So I've seen that a few times and funny enough, I am more apt to actually use their service that they're working with if I've built that relationship. Now that's assuming that it's in a different field. You know, for example, my sales person for property went to RentScale. And so when we tried out RentScale for a little bit, I was comfortable to make that leap because I had that relationship with that salesperson. What's that?

Pete Neubig: I said that does work then if they move over, if they bring over some clients.

Derrick Karimian: And then similarly, I have my sales person with Second Nature. They've moved over to Pest Share. So I'd be a little bit more apt to give... Actually, I think through second nature, I think we have a relationship with Pest Share, but we've not used it much. But I'd be more willing to jump fully in with that relationship.

Pete Neubig: All right. So we're up against it. So I want to finish up with one, like I want to brainstorm real quick though. So now, \you've seen it back in '05 what it looked like. Now, you know, here we are in 20 years later. Can you believe that, man? Wow. 20 years later. All right. So anybody who's listening to this tell me your top three things that somebody should have as like whether it's tech stack or just like just three, just give them three things like, this is what Derrick says to have a successful business, these are three tools that you should have.

Derrick Karimian: Strong SEO.

Pete Neubig: Okay.

Derrick Karimian: If people can't find you, it doesn't matter how good your operations are. So, so strong SEO that's huge. That's huge. That's huge. And obviously that's a whole podcast on how you improve your SEO. But strong SEO, a strong main platform, you know, whether you're talking about Appfolio, whether you're talking about Propertyware, Rentvine, any one of these but your base software has to be strong. You have to know how to use it. You need to go to their conferences, their user... what they call the learning conferences.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. User Conferences. Yep.

Derrick Karimian: There you go. So you have to go to the user conferences, and you should have somebody on your team that is a specialist in each of the features. And then the third one I would say. A good CR... Oh, oh oh. Wait, wait. You know, I am a fan of virtual assistants. So I would say a good platform in which you could hire virtual assistants. I'm going to throw out VPM maybe as a name.

Pete Neubig: All right. Let's go with the fourth one though, CRM. Because you're right man. Let's talk about CRM real quick. And then we're going to we'll wrap it up.

Derrick Karimian: Yeah. So a good CRM is going to allow you to take those potential clients that you get from that SEO and convert them into actual clients. You're not going to necessarily get somebody on first contact. So having a way where you can automatically put them into workflows, check back in with them, have a KPI dashboard where the sales lead can go in and see who's doing their job. Key. Absolutely key. Because if you don't have clients, you don't have a business.

Pete Neubig: Well said. You can tell Derrick is the sales and growth guy at Krystle Properties. I'm sure if I asked your sister, she would give me three. You probably have the same answer on the software, but you probably give me two other different answers on that. Dude, it's been awesome. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. If somebody's listening and they want to reach out to you and just pick your brain, what's the best way to connect with you?

Derrick Karimian: So my email is very long. So I will give my phone number and you can text me (707) 563-0424. And we are in aggressive expansion mode right now. So if you're sick and tired of property management and looking to get out of it, reach out to me.

Pete Neubig: All right. And if you are listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you. Go to NARPM.org and join the movement (800) 782-3452. And if you want to be cool like Derrick and get a virtual team, go give us a try at Vpmsolutions.com. You can email me directly pete@vpmsolutions.com. I am the co-founder. So then you get that connection that you want, not a sales guy that moves around.

Derrick Karimian: Absolutely. I can always BCC you if I need to.

Pete Neubig: That's right buddy, thanks for being here.

Derrick Karimian: Appreciate you Pete. Thank you!