The Operator Era: Why Property Management Performance Matters More Than Ever | Ryan Killian

A Podcast | Ryan Killian

Pete Neubig: Welcome everybody to the NARPM radio podcast. I'm your host Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. Ryan Killian, President of RENU Property Management is at the forefront of what many are calling the operator era in rental housing. His work focuses on helping institutional and private owners unlock performance through technology, data-driven decisions, and operational scale, making him a go-to voice on the future of property management. Ryan, thank you so much for being here.

Ryan Killian: Thanks, Pete. Appreciate you having me.

Pete Neubig: All right. So you're with RENU Property Management. Tell us a little bit about RENU. How many markets, how many units, breakdown, just give us a kind of a little history of RENU and you in the industry.

Ryan Killian: Yeah, sure. I mean, I started back in right after the GFC, the Great Financial Crisis, you know, linked up with American Homes for Rent initially and helped them acquire 20 plus thousand homes then and helped them build various departments around the company, was there when they went public, phenomenal experience and insights into really what scale looks like in the property management business. And then I went on to FirstKey Homes after that to do the same thing, essentially, as FirstKey was a little bit later than AMH was.

Pete Neubig: Are they public as well, FirstKey?

Ryan Killian: They are not public. They're still private. They're owned by Cerberus. But, you know, great group, scaled very quickly. They had a mission, realized they kind of didn't get there as fast as the early movers like Invitation and AMH, and then decided to go quickly. It's interesting. That's where I got my first interaction with RENU. My current partner and co-founder, Travis Bonwell, current CEO of RENU, you know, had an acquisitions underwriting platform that at the time didn't exist anywhere that I was aware of. You know, now most folks have something like it. But at the time, using, you know, national syndication with various, you know, MLS systems and other data systems to auto identify based on predefined buy box criteria and then underwrite and stack rank acquisition opportunities didn't exist. People were building, you know, massive numbers of teams to go out and collect that information, underwrite, etc. So I brought Travis and RENU in at FirstKey Homes to help us acquire quickly. And we did so, you know, buying as many as 700, 800 homes a month and quickly building that portfolio.

Pete Neubig: So was FirstKey managing their own homes as well, or were they third-partying that out at the time?

Ryan Killian: They were. And it's interesting you say that because, you know, what happened is we got so big, so fast and scaled so quickly through acquisitions that we had to actually pause to let the operations side catch up. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's a tale as old as time. It's at that time that, you know, so we put a pause on that. That was around 18, end of 18, maybe. And I shifted over to the upside of the business to help get that in order with several great folks at FirstKey Homes. And, you know, we built out a, you know, best-in-class operations platform to help service all those thousands of homes that we had brought in. Did that for a couple of years. COVID hit, obviously. At the time in COVID, I was fortunate enough to be over construction and operations and maintenance at the time, you know, 120 technicians under my umbrella, you know, with vans and tools and, you know, performing 60% of work orders in-house. And man, as hard as that was, I learned some of the best lessons I've ever learned through that period of time about systems, about scale, about automation, about understanding what should be done in the field versus what should be done in back office. And then really just understanding how little problems at, you know, 5,000 homes become, you know, the Grand Canyon of problems at 25,000 homes. So anyhow, during this time, also coming out of COVID, Travis, back to RENU, right, who had continued to seek out institutional, you know, capital for which to underwrite and identify acquisitions for, decided that, you know, he had seen far too many times, kind of like FirstKey, right, like operations lags the acquisition too much, right? It's never the first thought. And the thought was always, hey, let's buy this right. Let's get, you know, rents are going up. And at that time, if you recall, rents were going up in perpetuity. Underwrites were very aggressive and you almost couldn't be wrong because-

Pete Neubig: Money and money was cheap.

Ryan Killian: Money and money was cheap. And, you know, he said, look, this is not going to be sustainable. I need to build to complement my acquisitions platform at RENU. I need to build an institutional quality property management platform that scales and asset management platform, not just property management, very two, very different things, but it's got to scale, right? So he called me up and said, look, are you interested in partnering and coming over here and help build this thing at the level you just did FirstKey and AMH? And, you know, Travis is a friend and a mentor in a lot of ways and couldn't pass up the opportunity. So I went over there in 21 and we started to build quickly. Again, he already had the property management platform, but we started to really scale the systems and structure everything for massive scale. And we were buying for a couple of groups at the time, scaled them up to, you know, 5,000 homes each, put them under our management. And, you know, we've been doing it ever since.

Pete Neubig: So you, you basically help institutionals purchase homes and then you manage them for them as well.

Ryan Killian: Correct. Well, that was what we were doing at the time I came over. And then of course, everything happened in 22 where interest rates went up and folks stopped really buying at any kind of, I mean, most stock buying went to a halt for six months, if you recall. And then it started to trickle back in. And even today, it's not a lot of acquisitions happening on the single family side, even prior to the executive order stuff. So we wound up, you know, kind of getting put on mop-up duty for property managers that were underperforming, which is kind of what Travis saw coming, right? Third-party property manager, you know, you build it on a mom and pop kind of platform, and then you try to bring in institutionals. And there's a wide gap between the level of expectation from a reporting standpoint, asset management standpoint between mom and pop investors and institutional investors. So, you know, we found a lot of folks who went with some property managers that, you know, just weren't delivering on the scale that the capital expected. And we were able to come in, show them our tech stack, our reporting stack, our centralized structure, which really is born out of, you know, being an SFR, scattered site manager, right? You can't, you know, by definition, if you manage scattered site homes, you're centralized, right? Because you don't have a leasing office on site to go to, you don't have an apartment building complex or amenity center to go sit at, these are scattered homes. So, you know, they were interested in that kind of structure and some of the efficiencies we'd seen and the ability, our pricing model, obviously, which allows us to pass through some of those savings onto those capital groups and our client owners. And, you know, we've been doing that ever since. And we also then saw, you know, maybe a little later than we would have liked, but we saw the BTR side of things, just kind of going and, you know, not knowing the uncertainty around rates and how and when people could grow their SFR portfolios, again, prior to the executive order being a thing. You know, we really wanted to make sure, we saw an opportunity to flip the BTR model on its head, because again, most BTR sites were going with the traditional multifamily apartment manager, thinking that these are just horizontal apartments. And I think there's enough content out there. And I've certainly been a loud voice in this camp that they're not the same thing, right? It's a very specific playbook. It's not exactly scattered site SFR either. It's something right in between. And, you know, we were able to bifurcate given our tech stack and how we built it. It's all modularized and can be, you know, bifurcated out based on the specific asset or client needs that we have. So we saw an opportunity to go and show capital that was interested in BTR, hey, you're leaving money on the table from an operational perspective. Early on, again, with rents still continuing to appreciate year over year, the message or the value proposition didn't resonate as much, but obviously in the last year, seeing what continues to happen, you know, this is our kind of operator era, which is what I've been kind of saying. You know, rents aren't going to save anybody anymore. That's not where we're at today. And it might not be there for another five to 10 years. So, you know, your operations can save you, you know, whether it is, you know, automation, centralization, whether you're using AI, it's really just about putting the right people in the right seats is what we found and making sure that anybody who's in the physical market or in the home, in the asset, isn't doing something that could be done anywhere in the world. And that's really what it was. It's very simple, but not easy, right? Don't let anybody who's sitting out there in a market, who's in the field, who's talking to a client or prospect in person, touring them through a home, don't have them do anything that can be done from a desk that by anybody, by someone sitting anywhere in the world, keep them focused on the asset, keep them focused on the prospect, keep them focused on, you know, the business relationships they're trying to make to promote their asset. That's really been kind of the underlying secret to our success.

Pete Neubig: How many markets are you guys in right now?

Ryan Killian: We're in 13 right now, but we've been in as many as 26 and are ready to be in those additional 13, opening a market kind of along the lines of a centralized strategy. You know, given that we've got broker's license everywhere, very easy to do, right? Very easy. We've got a fairly decent and repeatable recipe for hiring field employees. That's, you know, very quick and easy to do. You know, you're always going to win and lose sometimes in the, you know, the HR world, but it's easy to get set up in any particular market and we're prepared to do that in multiple.

Pete Neubig: So let's, let's dive into your operations, you know, expertise. What do you, what do you think has changed in the last few years that's made operations such a defining factor in performance?

Ryan Killian: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Is this just a few years thing? Is this since, since the great, you know, the great recession of OA? What do you think?

Ryan Killian: It's a great question. I mean, it's, it's, it's a layered, it's a layered answer, but essentially it's always been there. It's always been a problem, right? It's always been a major factor in, you know, determining success. It's just not been paid attention to as much because again, for a large portion of the last 10, 12 years you've had rental appreciation and you've been able to benefit from that, which covers up a lot of mistakes and inefficiencies. What's changed in the last couple of years is that has gone away. There's been some oversaturation in certain markets in particular.

Pete Neubig: You know, and that's funny. I was at an IMN conference last year and it was the first time that I heard, you know, resident experience. And I've been going to those conferences for 10 years and like no one's ever talked about resident experience. Now that's all the rage.

Ryan Killian: Right, man. That's right. No, it's, and it's, and it's real. And again, that's, that's a, you know, a slightly different concept than, you know, operational efficiencies and performance, but you know, it's certainly a factor. And those two things in particular, you know, is where you can win right now, right? Like retention, resident experience equals retention, right? Now, sometimes that comes in direct conflict with cost, but if you're doing it right, you can find that perfect blend and you can ultimately lift your NOI and your P&L. So what's changed is you can't get bailed out by rents anymore. No longer is like, I bought the best asset in the best location and I'm going to be better than everybody else because I've got, you know, an asset that just can't lose. Now you've got to, you've got to operate well. And, you know what, what was once covered up by these, you know, the income side of of the income statement being, you know, your savior is now, is no longer. So, you know, it's the operator's time to shine right now.

Pete Neubig: You think that like, there's been a, there's been a huge increase in number of vendors that support this industry, number of money that's coming into the industry and, and just the number of software that's been available to manage, you know, SFR. Do you think that has a big, that that's been a big change in, in helping operations get a little bit, I would say leaner or help, help performance?

Ryan Killian: I'm getting, I'm going to give you a fence answer, sitting on a fence answer. Yes, there are certain vendors and prop tech that have been transformational in this space. No question about it. You know, they help you scale again. They can give you very inexpensive ways to replace as a man, as a property manager, things that you could otherwise not do as efficiently or as inexpensively as you can with this prop tech. Right. I think of, you know, certain, certain like photo services, Planmatics, I'm a big fan of Planmatics, right? There's been things like that, that have come through and that have been transformational, but by the same token, there's been such a flood of these tools and systems and, and prop tech in general that it's, it can be distracting, you know, too quickly. And, and we've seen, and I'm sure you've heard plenty of horror stories where PMs have been sold on a software or a service or a combination service and software that was going to be transformational. It was going to reduce overhead. It was going to improve performance and ultimately output. And none of those things happen. They plug and play, they go on, they go on with the rest of their business and something tanks, either they can't hit a deadline or the quality is not what they thought. And they have made decisions about their own business, what it could be overhead count. It could be their tech stack that is hard to undo. So I think it's, yes, it's been a factor and it's been a positive factor in some cases, but it's also a trap if aren't careful and don't do their due diligence and don't really at the bottom, you know, at the, at the base of it, if they don't ask themselves, is this accretive either to my client or to my PM business or to both ideally.

Pete Neubig: Does RENU use their own software or did they build something or are they using out of a box package for their, for their property management software? You guys use that, right?

Ryan Killian: We're at Folio.

Pete Neubig: At Folio users.

Ryan Killian: But we've bolted on multiple additional workflow software and tech tools, some of which is custom and some of which is also, again, you know, other acquired software or SaaS software that we've bolted on. So we we've got a mishmash of our tech stack.

Pete Neubig: So you touched on this a little bit earlier, but where do you see traditional property management models falling short today?

Ryan Killian: Yeah. I think it's one, I think, you know, with respect to BTR and MFR, I think, you know, a tried and true philosophy of I'm going to throw, you know, I've got a model. I'm going to throw five or six employees on site because that's what we do. And I'm going to pass through every single cost. I have, you know, phones. Yeah. I think that is where, you know, times are changing. Right. And, you know, you're slowly but surely seeing folks evolve. And again, you've got groups like us who, you know, have are rooted in centralization because we were at SFR, right. I mean, we're finally, SFR is finally old enough where you've got traditional SFR managers that are now jumping into, you know, BTR and MFR. And that you couldn't say that six, seven years ago. Right. You were, you know, because MFR and they were all and BTR, they were all just competing with each other. So there was really no kind of competition from a pricing structure and an operating model. Now, again, you've got where SFR operators like RENU are jumping in and saying, hey, I don't need to pass through telephones or computers or my software. I'm going to, that's it. That's baked into my cost to you, my PM fee to you. So you've got right there. I think that's, if you're not, if you're a PM and you're not thinking about how to address that shortfall, that that model is changing. I think that's where you're, you're falling short for sure. Additionally, again, centralization is such a buzzword, but you know, if you're not thinking about how to kind of do what I said at the outset, if you're not thinking about how to remove tasks from onsite that don't have to be done onsite, then you're, you're falling short. You're doing yourself a disservice and you're doing your clients a disservice.

Pete Neubig: You know, one of the things like, you know, I'm CEO of VPM solutions marketplace that connects property managers with remote team members. Right. And one of the things that has been very, like the single family industry has been very early on virtual assistants, the multifamily, they still want to hire local people, put them in the, in, you know, they want to hire a local leasing agent and put them in that apartment complex or that BTR. So I, I actually have run into what you're saying is like, they, the old school model when they, they can actually be more centralized and they can actually extend some of the, you know, some of the tasks to a remote team member that would get paid a third less, but a lot more than where, you know, than what people that they're in their, in their hometown. So find that very interesting.

Ryan Killian: And your risk is the same, right, Pete. I mean, your, your risk of performance really, it still exists. You could make that bad. Again, we all try to do our best and hire the right, the best people and get out of their way, but the risk of, you know, human failure exists either way, whether you're virtual or whether you put somebody on site and you know, why waste a body on site to pick up the phone and call somebody when you could have, you could be waiting to and interacting with real residents that are on site or prospects that are coming on site or walk in a unit that can't be done remotely, right? That's kind of a core of our philosophy is don't do it on site if it doesn't have to be done on site.

Pete Neubig: Yep. That's we say, what should be, what should be handled by a remote team member? Anything that does not require a license does not require to be at the property.

Ryan Killian: There you go.

Pete Neubig: All right. So most of the folks that are listening to this are what we would call traditional property. I'm sorry. We would call smaller operators, right? Most people listen to this probably have 500 units or less that they, that they third party manage. What are institutional operators like yourself doing differently that small operators should be paying attention to?

Ryan Killian: Yeah. Great question. I think it's, it starts with your reporting environment. You know, are you looking at all of the factors that impact a P&L daily, weekly, monthly? Are you, do you have somebody dedicated to evaluate how the various levers that you're pulling throughout the portfolio, whether it be pricing or, you know, internal completion of turns and maintenance, whatever, whatever the lever is, are you looking at how that impacts different things? Are you looking at your choice to eliminate full paints from your turnover process? Are you looking at how that impacts vacancy, days on market, ultimately the net you're achieving? So that's one, right? And then when you have that data in front of you, you've, you know where to find it. And by the way, stepping back, sorry, zooming out. If you don't have that data, find out a way to capture it, put a process in place to say to your turn team, I'm not just going to measure the day somebody moves out and the day the next person moves in, or the day somebody moves out and the the turn is complete, whether it's done by your own technician or, or by a vendor. I need to understand the various steps inside of that. For example, turns, we'll stay with that for a second, right? We at RENU measure seven sub steps of the turn, right? You know, move out to move out inspection, move out inspection to bid being approved, to bid being created, bid being created, to bid being approved, bid being approved to vendor start, vendor start to vendor complete, vendor complete to QC, QC to punch list, and then punch list to final job completion, right?

Pete Neubig: If you're not looking at a job completion to getting, getting listed.

Ryan Killian: Correct. And then, and then, and then further getting listed to lease signed and then lease signed to move in, right? Those are all those, and, you know, it's beyond the turn process, but your point's right. You know, if you're not looking that in depth, you're, you're leaving money, vacancy, whatever you want to call it on the table. And ultimately that's not good enough for an institutional owner. They want to understand that you are identifying every single place where dollars can leak and dollars don't just leak by not getting a high enough rent. They leak from vacancy as we all know, right? So if you don't have the ability to see that in your system, start thinking about a way to capture it, whether that means getting a new, you know, building your own system, which is what, what we've done, or, you know, using, finding that cool new prop tech tech SAS platform out there that captures those data points and then train your employees on it. Hey, look, this is our source of truth. This is how we perform. The only way we get better is by measuring it, looking at it and understanding how we can improve it. Right. So, you know, that's what I would say to anybody who's, you know, looking to appeal to an institutional investor is understand your business and your operations at that level. One, by default, you're going to get better because you're going to look at it and you're going to go, well, this doesn't make sense. I have to, I have to be better here. Some people probably think they're doing pretty good and, you know, they just don't understand where that waste is.

Pete Neubig: And they're doing good. And maybe three of those seven factors that you're right now, right? Like they, they're doing good here, here, and here, but this is where they're, they're not doing really well. You know, that was a, I really liked that breakdown because I've heard of that on the sales side of things, right? So like you have seven steps in your sales process. You want to track every step, but I never even thought about it. Like step, doing that on the turn, you know, I see where, where your dip is. So basically what you're saying, Ryan, is that institutional operators are more data-driven than your smaller operators.

Ryan Killian: That's right. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I think, you know, another practical example of how we kind of leverage the level of data that we have is with our renewal pricing strategy or new lease for rent, you know, recommendations from a pricing standpoint, you know, understand having the ability and tools and systems to be able to predict where occupancy will be in six months for a particular client or site or whatever the breakdown gives us the ability to say, Hey, I know that you feel like your pricing is good right now. And it is, it's good for market. However, you've got an inordinate amount of, you know, lease expirations in two months. We've sent out renewals. We don't have all the data back yet, but we do know that our current lease market is slightly under where those leases signed last year in the year before you're going to lose more than 50% of them. Most likely based on the data we're seeing, right. Again, based on tracking other data. Now we're going to keep watching this, but we recommend a special promotion on this particular unit, like some sort of lost leader pricing. We have to get people in the door. We have to look at, you know offering multiple, you know, lease length terms, right.

Pete Neubig: You guys aren't just looking at your internal data. You're looking at external data as well to make decisions.

Ryan Killian: Correct.

Pete Neubig: All right. So when I was researching you, you mentioned decision velocity a handful of times in posts. And then also in the questionnaire you sent over to me, it's not something that people talk about enough. What do you, what can you define what decision velocity, can you tell people what decision velocity means? And then give an example of where speed or lack of it, material effects performance.

Ryan Killian: Yeah. And I'll stick with the two examples we just went through.

Pete Neubig: Ryanism.

Ryan Killian: I like that. I've got a lot of them. This decision velocity, you know, it is the speed at which you're able to make decisions about your business, impactful decisions about your business. And I don't mean just, yes, put that on the market for rent. I mean, data-driven decisions that are going to impact the performance of your portfolio over months and even years at a time. So stick with turnovers for a second, right. You know, we've got a handful of clients, institutional clients that really like to have their hand into what the, you know, because they've got budgets, they've got a hit and oftentimes, you know, covenants for their loan, you know, their, their lenders that they've got a hit. So they want to have a real active hand, or at least visibility into the day-to-day decisions you're making. So some of that includes turnovers, right. Or, or, you know, large maintenance work orders, they want to have the ability to approve them. It's a great, that's a, that's a very positive thing for a capital, a capital group to want to have. However, if they're not quick and that if they're not in the system, which we, you know, we have the ability for them to enter our system and make decisions and ask questions live, right. But if they're not in there on a daily basis, what happens? You delay the start. I just, we just went from that, the seven, you know, legs of the turn that I mentioned, all of a sudden we start to see our days from bid complete to bid approval exceed a day to 24 hours. That's a waste of money, right. At the end of the day, that means that the capital group that is, you know, that wants to have a hand in that to keep their eye on it, they're actually doing more harm than good, right. By causing additional vacancy. And while their heart is in the right place to make sure that costs don't go crazy and it's to their expectations, they're actually costing you occupancy. And so over the course of X amount of turns over the, over the year, there's real dollars. They go out the door. Same thing goes for the, for rent pricing and renewals, right. You know, you want to get your rent, your renewals out there. Certainly we have, you know, lease, you know, terms that we have to stick to and have to get it out there within 60 days, but we prefer to get it out there 90 days in advance. Now, you know, again, your ability to capture renewals hinges on the ability to get it out in a timely fashion. Same thing with new lease pricing. Because we're using, you know, our predictive analytics to tell us where we'll be in two, three or four months, we're going to have a hand in, hey, this is what we should be doing with pricing right now. Yes, it might look lower, or it might look more bullish than we should be, but hey, you don't have anybody expiring in a couple of months. You can afford to be a bit more bullish right now. And again, taking too much time and making that decision almost defeats the purpose. So that's, that's what I mean by decision velocity. And you know, if you're not required to get approval by your client, whether it's a mom and pop owner or an institutional investor, then if you're slowing it down internally, you're doing yourself a disservice and your clients a disservice.

Pete Neubig: Do you find that the mom and pops take a little bit longer to approve big maintenance tickets more so than the institutionals? Or are they both stingy?

Ryan Killian: I think they're both rightfully so stingy and, you know, ask good questions. Again, we are so I have examples of both for both types of ownerships. I can tell you that for sure. Again, we are, we are for that we are for an active ownership group who, you know, wants to have because at the end of the day, what are we trying to deliver? I don't, I don't want to just hit a turn time because, you know, for a badge on my shoulder, right? I want to do it because it's going to meet the financial goals of whoever my client is. So the more they tell us and communicate to us what their goal is, the way do you want to be, right? We can reverse engineer our processes to arrive at that outcome. So we're for that. So yeah, they're, they can be stingy. And we're for again, as long as, as long as that question comes within an hour of when I asked them for it, I'm, I'm all for it. We want that healthy discussion.

Pete Neubig: How do you, how do you get them to approve sooner than like, do you go out and get two bids? Like, like, like is there a lot of education on the front end? Like, you know, cause a lot of these guys, especially the mom and pop investors don't know what the price of a water heater replacement is or anything like that. The institutions might know a little bit more, but how do you, how do you get that speed? Like, how do you work on that metric?

Ryan Killian: Yeah, it's a great question. Well, one, I will say, you know, the various large language models, pick, take your pick, Claude or, you know chat GPT or whatever, they make it a lot easier to figure out with a couple of keystrokes, what's a water heater cost in Austin, Texas. Right. But so you are getting a more educated ownership group these days, you know even with respect to things that you wouldn't normally expect in the mill, like how much does a water heater cost? But to answer your question, it comes with, yes, thinking about it in reverse. And this is what we, we talk about a lot internally at RENU. Pretend you're the owner, what would make you accept this bid or approve this? And if once you come up with that answer, once, if this is your money and if you're, if you're supplying that, then you can expect a quick decision. If you're not expect, if you don't, if you're not delivering on that mandate, mandate, what would you need to make this decision and spend your own hard earned dollars? Then do better. We need to do better. We need to provide more. So to your question, sometimes that means over a certain price threshold to, you know, multiple bids. Sometimes it means just a very clear specific line by line breakdown of what the, of what is included in the cost. Sometimes it includes repair options and replace options, right? Hey, here's and in turn, here's your replacement option. It's X, right? That's if that's the full boat, you know, we're not going to save this thing, you know, this water heater or this refrigerator or whatever. And then here's a repair option. But also with the repair option, what's the other piece of data you would need to know?

Pete Neubig: How long should it last?

Ryan Killian: Exactly, right? So if you're not providing that, how can somebody on the other side make a decision, right? So, yeah.

Pete Neubig: Basically, here's the repair, they'll give you a 90 days, you know, like a 90 day, you know, refund policy. So it will last 90 days or last 91 days.

Ryan Killian: Very different decision than if you say this will get you through the next two years, right? Very different decision.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Interesting. All right. So you guys have grown rapidly. What, what in your, you've done this numerous times too. What typically breaks first when you grow in a portfolio too fast?

Ryan Killian: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: And don't say everything because I know everything breaks, but what breaks first?

Ryan Killian: That would be, don't let, I appreciate you not letting me off the hook there. I would say field operations probably breaks first. Yeah. That's, that's, that's the biggest thing because again-

Pete Neubig: That's if you're growing in multiple markets or is that growing in one market?

Ryan Killian: It can be one market if you're growing, like if you've just acquired a, you know, or just signed on a client with a thousand homes in a particular market, that's easily one market, right? So I think having a really solid understanding because every model is different. So, you know, operating model, and I'm not saying Renews is the only way to do it, but we've, it's all interdependent, right? I can't take somebody else's way of visiting vacant homes and the style that with which they do that and the number of employees it takes them to do that at the cadence they want to do it and layer it into mine because I've got a different, it all works with our internal technicians and with our centralized operations managers. So it's all very interdependent, but ultimately understand your metrics. How many people at various levels does it take you to service a certain number of homes? Where are your efficiency gains? At what numbers in the hundreds or thousands do you start to reduce the need for additional overhead? So, and I think not understanding that is where we see the break happen first. It's also very difficult. I don't want to make it seem like it's simple. As you're growing, you learn these mistakes somewhat on the, these things somewhat on the fly and you make mistakes and you pick it up and you do better. Right. But understanding where that is, or the lack of that understanding is what I typically see break first. People who say they've got, you know, they're groups who have a very solid foundation. They've got a decent tech stack. They're somewhat centralized, but they, and they grow and they sell a client on that perspective client on that. And then they get something under, under, under contract, under a PMA. And then they try to use surge resources, which is, can be trouble right now. Certainly there are great inspection platforms out there. I don't want to say there isn't, but it's a different level of performance. Are you prepared? Is your tech stack ready to absorb information from a third party? And then take it and make the same decisions and not hurt decision velocity by getting information from a third party. Again, these are the little decisions that permeate throughout an operational team that can ultimately hurt and have your property management platform come off much worse than it really is. All because maybe you didn't do, you didn't have the right planning in place for growth.

Pete Neubig: All right. We're up against time here. So I got a couple, two more questions here. Put your future hat on like you're, you got your little tinfoil cap there. What's one shift coming in the next few years that operators need to prepare for now?

Ryan Killian: Yeah. Is it too, is it an easy way out to say AI?

Pete Neubig: That's so easy. Every one of my podcasts have mentioned AI in the last year. So yeah, you can say AI.

Ryan Killian: Well, I think a couple of specific examples though, right?

Pete Neubig: What about legislation? They just put this thing in with a hundred, I mean, so-

Ryan Killian: That was going to be my second one. But yes, I think to just to hit AI for a second, you're seeing more and more folks, you see the great prop tech companies like Elise AI and others that are leveraging large language models that are both chatbots and verbal bots that are having great success and they are really good. You can't tell the difference. And they've got, and if you do it right, you've got real ability to have the transition between the bot, whether it's verbal or chat and go straight to a live employee. Those, if you're doing it right, and ideally if you're building in-house, those things can be very seamless. They can reduce overhead and they can even overhead and even increase the resident or prospect experience. I really believe that. And that's coming. I mean, it's already here in some cases, but it's only going to get bigger.

Pete Neubig: All right. I'm going to ask the obvious AI question here. Do you see AI taking over all these property manager jobs?

Ryan Killian: No.

Pete Neubig: Tell me what you're, what kind of, what do you see?

Ryan Killian: I see AI as being complimentary to be able to be better property managers, not to take over property manager jobs. Now, are you going to have certain overhead reductions? Absolutely. Like, are you going to need a call center because of what I just said? Maybe not. You may be able to replace a call center with a chat bot.

Pete Neubig: Or reduce the call center and have some people for the overflow, right? Because I still like to zero out.

Ryan Killian: Exactly. But the real property managers and the skilled team members, AI should be complimentary to what they're doing. They should help them create better asset manager, forward-looking reporting and analytics to help make better decisions around the portfolio, not remove their job completely, to answer your question.

Pete Neubig: All right. Last question. If someone takes just one, if someone takes away just one action from this conversation, what should they do next? Because you hit on a lot of stuff, man. Wealth and knowledge, by the way. Thank you so much for sharing. But what do you think if somebody's what's one thing that they should do next?

Ryan Killian: Yeah. I'll go back to the reporting and your data environment. What I would do is if you were interested in listening to this, and you were interested in the way I talked about turns. And again, that works for collections. We have 15 different subcategories or statuses of tracking somebody who's delinquent, right? From the day one of being delinquent all the way through being evicted. If you're not tracking these sub steps right now, you should really think about it. Plug it into chat GPT or any of these and talk about the various different, some of them changed by market, some of them changed by asset class. But think about ways that you can better measure the things that happen in a particular phase or function of property management, collections, leasing, turnovers, maintenance, and think about investigating more deeply what your teams are doing and what your residents are experiencing within those little subsets.

Pete Neubig: Ryan, thanks so much for being here. If somebody wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way to connect with you?

Ryan Killian: LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. I'm very, very out there. Also, the RENU website, renumgt.com. Can find me any of those places and love to talk shop or, you know, compare notes. I'm always open.

Pete Neubig: Thank you so much for being here. If you are not a NARPM member, shame on you. You should not be listening to this. If you're not a NARPM member, join NARPM, N-A-R-P-M dot O-R-G, or call them at 800-782-3452. And if you want to be cool like Ryan and use some offshore talent or near shore talent, check out vpmsolutions.com. We have over 45,000 people looking to work for you. They're in 120 different countries. You can find them, train them, pay them, all through our platform. Ryan, thanks so much for being here. See you, everybody.

Ryan Killian: Thank you, Pete.