Disrupting the Industry: Inside DoorLoop's Next-Gen Property Management Revolution | Ori Tamuz

A Podcast | Ori Tamuz

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to the NARPM podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. And as I say, every week we have another incredible show. We have Ori Tamuz here today. He's the CEO and co-founder of DoorLoop. And if you haven't seen their software, it is actually really slick looking. So we're gonna talk to him all about DoorLoop. It's the all-in-one property management software transforming how property managers and real estate investors run their business. He's a serial entrepreneur, investor, and product leader. He brings over a decade of experience building and scaling technology companies. Previously co-founded and served as CTO at Practice Partner Law Practice Management Software and Nova Point of Sale, both of which were exited successfully. Ori, thanks so much for being here, buddy.

Ori Tamuz: Good to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Neubig: All right, so Point of Sale, and then you got into Law Practice. All right, tell me, okay, what made you think of like, okay, property management's the next step? Tell us about the story of DoorLoop and what prompted you to start this business.

Ori Tamuz: Wow, so I am passionate about B2B business software. I love solving business problems with automation. That's kind of what I did in my first two companies. I saw the first one in 2014, second one in 2018 with the goal of pretty much early retirement. Soon enough, realized how boring that is. And I was looking for the next industry to disrupt. Property management, honestly, I've been looking at it for many, many years before starting DoorLoop. It's got a few big players in the space. I'm not gonna mention them by names, who have done really good job building great software and kind of dividing the space.

Pete Neubig: So you have- How did you think about property management? Because I actually started a property management firm and did not know about single family property management. Didn't even know it existed until like a year or two into it. And then I'm like, oh, there's actually people who do this for single family, not just multifamily. So you're not even in the industry unless do you have rentals? Were you, are you an investor?

Ori Tamuz: So I did. So part of selling companies is that you come into liquidity and money, and then you start acquiring real estate on your own, investing with other property managers. And I really got to learn more and more about the industry as someone who manages properties and also someone who has other people manage their properties for them. And in many occasions, I would ask for like a report or like get more transparency into visibility into how my properties are being managed. And I've noticed there was a delay between when I was asking for a report until I was actually getting it. And then I asked these people to show me their system.

Pete Neubig: Just create it yourself. Like, hey, as the client, let me just build my own report, right?

Ori Tamuz: Exactly. Like I wanted to know what's going on, but the software that was out there was pretty complex. So like you had to find the person in the office that knows how to go into the software and build a report. And I found that to be a little crazy. And then for the properties that I managed myself, I couldn't really find anything that I could just set up. I mean, I care about accounting, right? I think there's different kinds of property owners, those that care about accounting and those that don't. So those who just want to accept rent payments, there are a couple of dozen solutions out there for them. But once you care about the books and making sure you get to the end of the year and you can just run a report and send it to your accountant in five minutes, there were just not good solutions out there. I couldn't find anything that I could just sign up for and start using without going through lengthy onboarding sessions or hiring a bookkeeper to kind of walk me through it. And that's kind of how the idea of DoorLoop came to life. From a business perspective, from a personal perspective, I just love this and I got really bored and I partnered with some of my best friends to build a generational business. I built two companies with the purpose of selling them prior to this one. But this one, I'm building for the long haul. This industry is so amazing and exciting. There's just so many things going on. If I think about like law practice management, it's great. We build software to track time, create invoices, edit a couple of features for like document automation. And that was kind of it. But with property management, the world is just endless. And you see this a lot in the space.

I think a lot of people started talking about property management software as accounting software. And you see that every other week, there's just a cool new company out there working on just a small aspect of the property management, the property management world. And I think that excites me. So I believe in like great software as a platform, as a system of record, should not just be an accounting software. Like we wanna build an all-in-one platform that will solve everything a property manager needs, either by building it, buying it, or partnering with the best and implementing really well into our flows. And that's kind of how we got to where we are today. We have been working on DoorLoop since 2019, launched it just post COVID, like around 2021, with the goal of bootstrapping this business as well. We came with our own money, we invested heavily into it. And once we launched, we just blew up. We couldn't hire people fast enough. We couldn't increase our marketing spend fast enough. We saw the real need in the space for people who just wanted to manage their properties. They needed accounting and didn't wanna spend 60 days going through lengthy onboarding sessions and to set up a platform. That's kind of when we went then, I think it was back August, 2022. I sold my last company to Alpine Investors out of San Francisco, pitched them the idea. They loved it, investing in a Series A. We deployed that 20 million bucks that we raised pretty well. That exponentially accelerated our growth. And lastly, we raised an additional 100 million bucks from JMI Equity. And what we're doing with this money, and this is why I'm super excited, we are investing it in our product and in our technology to really build a next generation property management software.

Pete Neubig: And what does next generation mean to you? Because it's really interesting to see there's different software vendors have different types of solutions, right? Some of them are just Omni accounting. I have an API that can connect to me. Some of them are, I'm gonna be closed. Some of them be super open. Some are starting to build data flow systems inside their product. Some companies are like, I'm gonna build a data flow system outside the product and connect with your product. So there's lots of different types of solutions, which is the one that you guys are thinking about doing. Are you guys open API, closed API? Are you guys, what are you guys building inside your, and of course we didn't even touch on, but AI too, I'm sure is a piece inside the software. So where do you think, where do you see trends and what are the trends that you're jumping onto and basically adding it to your platform?

Ori Tamuz: So we are open API. Like we believe that every good system of record needs to be open to allow other people to build on top of it. Like there's a limit to what we can build. We're gonna try to build as much as we can, but we want anyone to be able to get access to their data especially for automations and building their own flows. I think that we spend a lot of time and effort tackling the most complicated part first. So, and I believe that in property management, accounting is the hardest part. I'd say about 80% of our resources, especially in the early days were to build the accounting platform. This is something that we believe as we go up market and this is what we're here for. Like over the next one, three, five, seven, 10 years, we're gonna be adding more and more features on top of our accounting platform, which we have invested heavily on to make it as robust as possible. Now, if you think about business software and this is kind of where AI comes in. It has done a really good job automating workflows. For example, tenant logs into the tenant portal, has an issue, they create a maintenance request. Software was really good at creating that request in for you, sending you an email alert that a tenant requested something. And I'm using the maintenance piece as an example because we just launched our AI assistant suite of features and the maintenance piece is actually our most used piece right now to date. What AI allows you to do and AI is a big term. I wanna speak specifically about LLMs, which is large language models. It can reason, it can understand it, it can communicate. So rather than just setting a tenant, say, hey, there's a problem, property manager, here's a list of problems that you can go over and solve one by one. AI can understand what the problem is about, who's the best person to take care of that problem. And AI has a lot of great general knowledge as well. So it allows us to try to resolve a problem. If a tenant complains about the AC not working, AI can then walk them through how to solve it. Hey, is your thermostat on? Is it set to cool? What kind of thermostat have you got? Where's your filter? When's the last time you replaced your filter? So like a lot of these things, but back in the day, a tenant would create a ticket, a day, two days later, Monday, property manager will then have to pick up the phone, try to troubleshoot these issues on their own, then understand if it can, it cannot be resolved, then hang up the phone, summarize that, call the vendor, get a quote, see if it's a reasonable price, get another quote, and then reach out to the owner and get the approval. That entire flow can be automated today. And I think that's really exciting.

So just like, if you go back to when cloud software first started coming out, if you think about the cloud transformation, back in 2010, if you wanted to pay a rent, you would go down to the lobby and drop a check off at the check box, safety box. That's kind of silly. So cloud allows you to log in and just make your payment online. That's really cool. But what AI now allows you to do is automate a lot of extra factors in your business. Now, everybody's talking about, is AI going to replace jobs? Is it going to replace humans? I think it's going to enhance humans. I think AI is not going to replace people, but people that use AI are going to replace people who don't. And our goal with DoorLoop, and the reason that I think that this is, like, this is what I love being the system of record. We know everything about the customer. We know everything about the property manager. We know everything about the tenant. We have access to the lease. We can answer questions from the lease. We have access to the list of vendors. We know how previous maintenance requests and tenant requests were actually handled. We can have the property manager upload their own policies and basically help us.

Pete Neubig: DoorLoop becomes the LLM itself.

Ori Tamuz: DoorLoop can become the LLM. So the key is that we have the context. We know everything. And obviously we protect everyone's information. It's completely isolated. So, you know, it's only relevant to the PM and what they want to share. But we can solve a lot more problems.

Pete Neubig: Can the PM also upload their policies, processes, things of that nature up to DoorLoop? And then DoorLoop would use that as well in their decision?

Ori Tamuz: So absolutely. And we have this also tenant facing. And we also have this on the property manager side to the point where the property manager can grab their phone and say, hey, are there any issues that require my attention today? And do this completely by voice. And then DoorLoop will say, hey, there's nothing open. Or, hey, you know, there's a tenant request that's been open for three days now that's high priority and probably requires your attention. And I can just tell DoorLoop, hey, that's great. Can you please assign that to Pete? Create another task for him to follow up with him. I'm not sure why this is taking so long. So we can answer business questions. AI can generate reports. It can help automate things that you do inside of DoorLoop. AI has so many different use cases. For example, we're working on an agent now. It's really cool. So if you think about Zillow and basically an inquiry comes in for showing. So the way the PMS has worked today, including DoorLoop, we send an email to the leasing agent to say, hey, Pete just is interested in this three-bedroom unit, unit number three at 123 Main Street. And then Pete has to pick up the phone, call, pre-qualify, schedule the showing. AI can do that. So the second that you submit the request for showing, AI can automatically respond. Thank you so much for your inquiry. Tell me more about yourself. Here's a couple of extra units that you might be interested in. And then connect to the leasing agent's calendar and just schedule the showing. So is this going to replace someone's job? No, but is this going to help you close leads faster, increase your show rate?

Pete Neubig: I think it replaces some jobs. For example, you still need a leasing agent or a leasing assistant, but you may not need three of them, right? You'll be able to do a lot more with less people and you still need… And I personally think over time, it's going to go the other way where people don't want to use, they don't want to talk to a bot, they don't want AI, that they're going to want a customer service. They're going to want to be able to talk to somebody. So personally, I think as a PM firm, you're going to always need some people for that 10, 20%, you know, us Gen Xers, I guess the boomers will be gone, but us Gen Xers, they're going to want to speak to somebody or something happens and it, you know, a challenge gets escalated. Somebody's going to... So basically what I think we're saying is you can do more with less, but you still need people to handle, I call it the 80-20 rule, right? 80% of systemization, 80%, 20% humanization. And I still think you're going to need some of that. And I think you're going to be able to differentiate yourself by actually going the other way and actually being, hey, we're customer service, you actually talk to people.

Ori Tamuz: Yes, and you know, you get all these AI services run out and say, hey, call me and an AI will pick up the phone or like AI will make, you know, calls for you. This, I think the voice thing is not going to be as great. I think the cool thing about submitting 10 requests on the portal or like sending a text message is that you don't necessarily know that you're speaking to AI. Does it sound like AI? Because everybody texts the same. I think AI is not at a level from a voice perspective where, like when a tenant calls in, they don't want to speak to an AI. They want to speak to a person. So the question is, how do you build that balance? Maybe AI is used to route the call to the right person. But I don't think you should replace the customer service. I think customer service is what makes, you know, even with DoorLoop, you know, we use internally AI a lot to help property managers get answers to their questions. But at the end of the day, like if AI is not solving that right on the spot, super quickly, we want to get them to a human being that can help them solve the problem.

Pete Neubig: I think having a really solid, easy to use AI chatbot, if I'm using that in the right way, is going to solve a lot of challenges, right? It's going to solve, like you'd be able to grow your business, double the size in business, but your tickets may stay constant, right? Instead of tickets doubling because people can easily use and chat with a AI bot that is built on your company's LLM, they'll be able to get, you know, answers to 50, 60, 70% of their questions, which reduces the phone call. And that's what we're seeing.

Ori Tamuz: So DoorLoop customers that are leveraging our AI Assistant suite of features, our tenant co-pilot, that's how we call it right now, inside our tenant portal, resolves, as of today, about 74% of all tenant requests, all tenant questions, all maintenance issues.

Pete Neubig: They'll ask the same damn questions, right?

Ori Tamuz: You could probably- Same questions.

Pete Neubig: You could probably use in the application processing too, right? Every time somebody calls up and asks, is this a three bedroom house? Well, heck yeah, man. It says it on the listing, it's a three bedroom house, you know, but they still ask the same questions.

Ori Tamuz: I know, but would you do it on the phone? Would you want somebody who's like interested in a unit right now to feel like they're talking to AI? Or do you want to get like somebody that can close that lead on the phone and get them to schedule a showing? That I think is where the gap is, you know, about using AI in a way that provides better customer service and also reduces your workload to, hey, I'm just, I don't want to pick up the phone anymore. I'm going to handle everything.

Pete Neubig: The younger you are, the less you want to talk to somebody is what it seems like. That's where like we're, you know, these kids today, you know, millennials are texting, you know, the Gen Zers are the TikTok. I don't know what the next brand is going to be. They're going to be the AI people potentially, right? So the next generation. So, you know, if you're talking to somebody who's like my age, I'm 55, I want to talk to somebody. I still hate phone trees. I, you know, I either want to search online and find it, right? Using Google, not ChatGPT, because I'm old. I forget about ChatGPT because I've been using Google for 25 years, right? And then it comes to me, but I can tell you right now that, you know, my friends' kids, they don't want to talk to anybody. They want to text. And so I think there's a solution, but if there's a challenge that I can't answer through the text, now I need to pick up the phone. I need somebody that can answer that. So I think if you can find that balance that you were talking about, Ori, that really is the solution, is the balance.

Ori Tamuz: And that's what we're working on. So how do we find, how do we automate, but how do we do that without, you know, reducing conversion rates for prospects when they're moving to a unit or without getting a tenant upset because they're trying to reach a property manager and they feel like they're in an infinite AI loop. And I think we, at first, built it internally with our customers, and that's why we have such a high, you know, customer satisfaction rate.

Pete Neubig: And we want to- It's funny, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We were having the same conversation 10 years ago about phone trees.

Ori Tamuz: Phone trees. You know, every time I get to an IVR and like, you know, I would much rather press a button than say what I'm calling about and then have my kids scream in the background and just have to restart that phone tree all over again. I think it's really cool. So it really excites me. Because, you know, I've been, this is the third time I'm doing this, but it's, I'm feeling as excited about AI and how we can build that into DoorLoop as I was when I launched my first point of sale company. And I was able to build it on the cloud so that, you know, as a store owner that manages four different stores, I can see in real time my sales and what's going on in my stores right now. So there's just, it opens a world of endless possibilities. And this is where we're investing a significant amount of our resources right now to automate. So when we talk about next gen, you know, it's, yes, we're building it better. We're building it easier. We have incredible customer support. We're doing this for a much better price, but we're going to be building into Dooloop all these things that today require you to sign up to six or seven or eight different softwares and pay 10X what you should be paying and get onboarded to like eight different softwares where you got to train your employees on different ones. We want you to be able to do this all in one. If you think about this, the tenant co-pilot feature that we just launched, it's ready to go. You can just turn it on with a click of a button. You don't have to set anything up. You don't have to have a single onboarding session about it. It's just ready to go out of the box. If you want to customize it and you're the kind of person that want to invest more into it, with time, you can absolutely do that in your free time. But it works. It's amazing. And that's our focus. How do we get things to work great with minimal effort from a property manager side? Minimal investment, minimal cost, and just get the best outcome.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, you hit on a bunch of points there. The first one is, the average age of a property management owner is they're in their fifties, right? So if you're giving them this convoluted, difficult installation for AI, it's not going to happen. So easy button, build it inside your platform using just one button to turn it on. The second thing is like, okay, how do I trust this information? Well, you're using the information right inside DoorLoop. So it's kind of like, what is it? Garbage in, garbage out, right? Gigo, right? If you have good data in your platform, which you should, then the information that you're going to spit out to your property managers, your leasing agents, and your residents is going to be valid information. And then you can feed that information very easily. And then the cost, right? If the cost, instead of having to buy, two or three or six different softwares at X dollars a door, and I can buy it one time and just pay one time or just a smaller fee. Well, now I can do a lot more. And that means I need less people and I don't have to manage four or five different modules. And then the last thing is, I personally believe that you should, you still need, to me, AI is an employee and you need somebody to manage that employee is the way I look at it, right? And what better than to use a remote team member? If somebody knows AI in the US, they're going to want a hundred grand, $150,000. Find somebody who's a remote team member, find them a VPM Solutions, not just saying, and they could actually manage that AI. They can learn how to build it. They can work with the DoorLoop folks and say, hey, I want to build X, Y, and Z. And then they can also identify, hey, there is going to be some escalations and that we'll be able to pinpoint them. And over time, you get the AI to actually solve those escalations more and more, right? May start at 50% go escalations. Then it goes to, you know, then it goes 70% only 30 years escalations. And you finally get into about that. I think it's like less than 10%. I think you can really get it down. Did I kind of bundle that in a nice little package there? What I missed?

Ori Tamuz: So you did, and it is an employee, but we're not expecting a property manager to have someone like this on staff. We have teams of those people on our end that are monitoring the request, optimizing it for you. We don't want, we will do the heavy lifting for you. Like we'll give you the tools to help you customize it to your needs by just providing us the information that you want to share. And we have a team of super, super smart engineers that will continue optimizing the model that we use to tie it in with your personal information to provide the right answers. So this should be, I believe in AI for all, you know, not just, you know, property management companies that want to bring a full person, you know, to be on staff, full-time person.

Pete Neubig: So what is next for DoorLoop? What's coming out? You know, this is airing early January, 2026. So what can we expect in 2026 for DoorLoop?

Ori Tamuz: So DoorLoop has, as I said, been around for six years now. We just, I think the last NARPM show, I think it was earlier this month, was amazing for us. It was, I call this our coming out party. So as I said, we, when we built DoorLoop, we wanted to build accounting first. We believe that's the core that needs to be amazing, needs to be robust, it needs to be fast, customizable. And we've done that. The way that we launched DoorLoop, we started from smaller property managers. And if you think about where we're going and our goal for 2026 is to take the money that we raised and double down on our product. And that includes not just AI. I mean, we're going after companies that have been doing this for decades and they've done a good job. They're great, great companies. But the way that they've divided up the space between them, there's just not a lot of competition. There isn't any, to be honest. Maybe one, two companies we saw in NARPM that were really relevant for the space. And while it's great to have players that have been around for a really long time, not having competition is bad because that reduces innovation. DoorLoop is here to innovate. So we're investing in not just building flows, think about like inspections. We're gonna be rolling out a new inspections features, probably when this airs out. We get the privilege of thinking about if we were to build it from scratch, what's the best way to build it? Especially today when AI is available. How do we make it easier and not just like checking boxes and filling out forms? So that's, I'm not gonna give you too many details about that, but I can tell you that the feature that we'll be rolling out will be game changing. And I think that, yeah, go ahead.

Pete Neubig: Do you have any property managers on staff? Like how do you, you know, you're building a property management software. So are you, how are you coming up with what you should, are you using any property managers on how to help build the accounting softwares and the process and stuff like that?

Ori Tamuz: So we, a lot of the people on the team actually worked in property management before. We have more than 10,000 property managers using DoorLoop right now. And we have private groups that work closely with our product team. Where we see how they use it every day. We see where they get stuck. We understand what features they need that we currently don't have. And what we are really good at is understanding what people need then building something even better for them. So we are just, there's what we think property management software should have and should be. And there's what our customers tell us it should be. And we listen to our customers. So a lot of these features that we're coming up with were built with our customers. And these people that get to join these private groups, they consider us to be their free development team in a way. So it's kind of like a win-win. You tell us what you need. We get your knowledge and your experience. And in return, we'll build it for you.

Pete Neubig: I would say that's one of the things that, because I used to own a property management firm. Now I own a tech firm. And one of the things that I really like is one person has a challenge in our tech. We solve it for them. We solve it for everybody.

Ori Tamuz: Absolutely.

Pete Neubig: I'm a property manager, and I solve that situation. And I get to see when we build something, I get to see it. When I build a process in property management, it's like, I don't get to see the actual process. We do the lease renewal. But whereas I build something in tech, you literally can see there's the field, there's the report, there's the process flow, whatever it is. It's cool. So it's pretty cool to see it in the technology. So very cool.

Ori Tamuz: And it's really fun. It's really fun to build it. And one of the things that excite me is just seeing how customers react when we show them what we're working on based on their feedback, and how amazing it is, and how we do it better than the competition, and how it just helps them just implement it with just a few clicks. And so if I think about 2026 for DoorLoop, we're going after big companies. Some of them are public companies. They're worth billions of dollars. They've been around for a while. We're still playing catch up on some features, right? I mean, we've been around for six years. We have hundreds of developers, but there's a limit to how fast we can roll things out. 2026 is the year where we're gonna be able to check all the boxes, and also have these, wow, catch up from a feature parity perspective. But everything that we do, we're gonna be able to get the privilege of doing it better, and building it with AI.

Pete Neubig: Excellent. If someone is interested in learning more about Doorloop, or they wanna reach out to you personally, how do they connect with you?

Ori Tamuz: So they can just go to our website, doorloop.com, request a demo, click the little chat bubble at the bottom right, obviously powered by AI. I'm happy to speak to anyone who has any questions, any suggestions, anyone that has ideas on what they'd like to see us build, any property managers right now that are part of NARPM that are facing difficulties, and they have ideas on how we can do stuff to help them automate their day-to-day, save them time and money, that's what we're here for.

Pete Neubig: Excellent. And if you are listening to this, and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you, go to narpm.org, or give them a call at 800-782-3452. And if you're not ready for AI, and you still need remote team members, go to vpmsolutions.com, or you can email me direct at pete@vpmsolutions.com. Ori, thanks for being here.

Ori Tamuz: Thanks Pete, thanks for having me.