Peter Lohmann's Mailing List - Issue #52

Data Leadership in Property Management

You can’t improve what you don’t understand.

My friend Jordan says “Location before augmentation… Invest in clarifying the baseline before trying to fix things.”

Our industry just received a huge shot-in-the-arm as it relates to understanding company maintenance request and work order data:

Property Meld just released a massive product update called “Insights”. Link to hype trailer.

Ironically, Meld is sponsoring today’s newsletter, but this topic was planned before I even looked up who today’s sponsor was. I swear!

If you’re not familiar with Property Meld, they are a work order management solution for property management companies. Basically they streamline the maintenance request and work order process (they call this a “Meld”) and allow you to manage more units with the same number of maintenance coordinators. We’re customers and I’m a big fan of the product, especially because they have a direct integration with our property management software Buildium (they also have a direct integration with AppFolio).

As you can see from the screenshot above, this new release unlocks a massive amount of data about maintenance requests and work orders. In fact I think this dashboard is the most sophisticated look into operational data available anywhere, from any vendor, on any part of the business. Imagine if we had access to this level of leasing data, for example?

This is particularly relevant to us, because we have 7 in-house maintenance techs (W-2 employees). Nearly 40% of our company revenue comes from that maintenance department, so understanding their performance is absolutely crucial.

So let me just say… great job Property Meld for this product release, and I would love to see more operational data getting exposed in this way so that we can all continue to level up! We know the power of data within our industry; just look at what ProfitCoach has done with their NARPM collaboration and the financial benchmarking studies that resulted. Look also at what LeadSimple has done by tying into the data that was previously locked inside our property management software. Data will set us free!

Are You Sick Of Podcasts Yet

In case you missed the news Wednesday, I just dropped a brand new episode of my podcast! Look up “Owner Occupied” in your favorite podcast player. My interview with Nick Huber is something I am proud of, and I’m getting a ton of positive feedback from the episode. I think you’ll enjoy the conversation.

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In other podcast news, I was excited to recently discover that Marc Cunningham has started a podcast:

Marc is a leader in our industry and his YouTube videos are some of my favorite property management content anywhere. I haven’t even listened to this podcast yet but I’m already recommending it because that’s how much I trust Marc and the quality of his content!

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If you’re looking for more property management podcasts, I have a list of my top 5 favorites that you can read here.

This week’s issue is sponsored by Property Meld.

Property Meld dropped a new feature last week that possibly provides some of the most important and unique data the industry has ever seen. Property Meld's Insights feature will allow the industry to make informed improvements within their maintenance process, backed by data, before things escalate.

Insights will empower leaders to compare, forecast and understand backlogs based on historical maintenance data. Users can filter data by work category, priority, property groups, and assignee type to analyze more granularly. The feature will also allow the user to compare metrics to a period in the previous year or the past 90 days. The ability to see performance over time to know if the strategies implemented towards improvement have taken effect.

We are excited to see Insights' impact on property maintenance as it will change the approach industry leaders will take, making decisions based on reality instead of assumption.

Request A Proposal?

I love the idea of having potential clients “request a proposal” for property management services. Check out this example - it’s from the association management world, but I think this would work for traditional property management. It really sets the right tone… this is a serious decision and we are professionals. And it allows you to control the process better (and get all the data you need up front). Do you know of anyone doing this in our industry?

Industry News & Upcoming Events

• NARPM’s national conference is in Atlanta this year and tickets are on sale now. It’s October 16th-19th (I will very likely be attending).

• LeadSimple User Summit! LeadSimple is hosting their very first user summit “LeadSimple University” in Austin, TX on Dec. 5-7. This is the perfect opportunity to learn from experts and level up your processes. I am a keynote speaker at this event. Buy tickets here.

• Have you heard about the “UNconference”? It’s a new “conference without the conference” in the property management world. August 12-16 in Key West. Go here to find out what it’s all about.

Closing Thought

That’s all for this week! -Peter

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