How Courtney Rosen Transformed a Property Management Company

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Transcript

Stephen Fox 
Courtney, thank you so much for joining me today. To kick things off, could you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and your background and experience in property management?

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, so I got into property management, like a lot of us, through family means. Pre-property management, I was a school teacher, and I started doing property management by doing the bookkeeping. And the only way you get a dyslexic Spanish major due to your bookkeeping and property management is nepotism.

Stephen Fox 
Fair. So from my understanding, you eventually took over the company. I guess, when did that happen? How many years did you have of experience in property management before that happened?

Courtney Rosen 
Yep.
So in order to buy the company, I had to have my broker's license and I had to have five years of managing of like real estate experience with the licensure in order to do that. So that kind of delayed it and gave me more experience in property management before I purchased it. I think we did it in 2021 was the official, but I was pretty much running it, especially post COVID because when COVID hit, I had three children in preschool. So I went to my dad who was the business owner even though I was running the company and I was like, hey dad, I can take care of my children or run the business. Which one would you like? And he said, give me them grand babies. And he didn't come in the office a day after that.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, and I guess can you tell us a little bit about your experience? Like what did the early transition days look like when you originally bought the company?

Courtney Rosen 
Well, all the real transition happened before buying it because I was still running it. I just, the brokerage license was hanging with my dad, even though he wasn't coming into the office that much and not really being very involved in a lot of the decisions in the company.

For us, the biggest transition was a company culture transition and an employment transition, right? Because my dad had very different expectations around what is a good company culture. And probably company culture wasn't something he thought about that much. And also his expectations for how people would interact with each other. So we had to do a lot of clearing house before we could get to real changes because there's just a lot of resistance on the inside. A lot of, we've already done it this way or not being supportive. it was just really, you had to clear house and then kind of build it up from scratch. The other biggest issue I had when I came in,

Is that when I first started working with our company is that I would ask the three people here the same question and get three to four different answers and there was no policy manual no procedures and everything was obvious And it was all in people's head and that also made it a lot harder to get rid of employees because you're getting rid of All the knowledge base and you have nothing to start training the next person with so lack of documentation made the tendency to hold on to employees that are not performing how you need a lot longer than you would have otherwise because onboarding a new person is too difficult. So we had to really switch. So my first years in property management wasn't really around the doors conversation. It was around basically my sanity is how do we document? How do we make checklists? How do we know who's doing what? How do we hold people accountable? And how do we interact with each other so that we can clear out people who don't match what we're trying to build here.

Stephen Fox
And can you talk walk us through a little bit like what that looked like? So day one you're like, okay, we need to change things because right now all the knowledge is inside of people's heads. What did you do?

Courtney Rosen 
It really took my dad, was the owner of the company and technically the person running it, although he was not involved in day-to-day. Hearing from his primary person that he had been allowing to run the company that she was sending our business to other companies. She told him straight to his face, like, I can't recommend my clients to our company anymore. And he was like, really? And so finally he gave her the boob. But she was very toxic and sabotaging the company from the inside. I was like, can we change this, please?

But that was a hard one. No, it was a hard one for him, you know? Because I think when you're a business owner and you don't want to be involved day to day and you have your trusted employee and it's good enough, and you don't have a backup plan. So for example, until I came in, this employee was the only person who knew how to do accounting.

And she was supposed to teach me, I had to teach myself. She refused to teach me the accounting.

Stephen Fox 
So there's some serious risk when you first came in.

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, so it was really you had good contracts you had knowledge But it it wasn't let's say if you were gonna buy a company this would not be the one and So it was a lot of the first few years was clearing that out and she took clients with her She came back. She had the client list like it was it was really crazy But after that it was trying to figure out

What do I want from this company? It's the same question that I asked my clients when I or potential clients when I meet with them whether it's on the brokerage side or the property management side. It's like what do you need this house to do for you? Right? Not what we think the target price of what sounds nice or what Zillow told them or you know, but like what are your needs and with regards to this house? And I think if you start thinking about it, it's like what are my needs with regards to this business? And the answer that came back is

I need systems. I need a I need a company culture that feels supportive to me. My personal needs for a job or business is need creativity. I need freedom of time. I'm a mother of three small children. I mean, they're what, eleven, eight and six right now. And that's demanding, right? So it was building a company culture that allowed me to have those things. And then the flip side of that is I think we talk a lot in NARPAM about quality of life and work-life balance for the owner of a company, but we don't talk about it so much for our employees.

But something that's interesting is so a few years ago, I was on the planning committee for broker owner and I suggested that we put in a question, a couple of questions at the beginning when everyone did registration. And I was like, hey, what's going well? What are your hardships, right? What are you doing well? What are you doing poorly? And I aggregated all that data and I think it was around, it either in the 60s or 70s percentiles of people having issues with retaining employees, training and retaining.

Courtney Rosen 
And for a problem to be that large in our industry that we're not talking about is, it blows my mind actually.

Stephen Fox 
And I guess how many employees were there when you first took over? if there was one, that's one thing, but if there's a bunch, it's much harder to change that.

Courtney Rosen
So I had, there was me and I was technically an employee and there was my dad who was the owner and broker of record and then three other employees. And they all, two of them chose to leave. I don't think they liked working for me, honestly. I kept on changing things. But it didn't help that another employee was also saying toxic things about me. And then,

that final one who would have held on with a death grip to the end was ousted. And once we had that, but then I had to learn how to hire, I had to learn how to train. These are the things that I'm like, ooh.

Stephen Fox
soon.

Courtney Rosen
We don't talk about this so much, but they're the essentials of the business. So we've really changed up our hiring process. And I also started moving into virtual assistants. So my first hire that's really stuck with me, I think it's been nine years now, is in the Philippines. One of my first hires of virtual assistant. And it was great because he was secluded from a lot of the toxic culture and he was just focused with me. And at one point, the two of us were running the business.

Stephen Fox
Okay, can you talk to me a little bit about that hiring process? you mentioned we don't talk about it enough in this industry. What steps do you take to make sure that the person you're hiring is A, going to do a good job and B, going to fit the company culture?

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, so I have learned I'm a really bad person at choosing who to hire. That is not my skill set. I'm tempted by other things that sound good that aren't really good. So I have a trust my team approach. So it's a little different between if we're doing a new hire, that's a virtual assistant versus a new hire, that's a local staff. And I'm 50-50. That's my sweet spot. So I have three people in the Philippines. I have three people in my office in Texas.

Stephen Fox 
Okay.

Courtney Rosen
Excuse me. So For that what I do for my local is I'll put it out on LinkedIn Right up, you know what it is that we're trying to do. It has a focus a lot about ownership I will not hire from another property management company. I've tried that It's always been a disaster because we run it so differently in our expectations are so different. So We did I'll put it out there the skill sets. I'm looking for

The first round of screening is I have an auto response, answer these three questions or five questions, whatever, and complete sentences. I didn't say complete sentences in there, but I see can you write and are you willing to actually respond? If they don't respond within 20, I think I give them 48 hours, off.

Out of the ones that respond, they'll get a phone call interview from me and I just kind of like poke at them and say, hey, you why are you looking for a job right now? What's going on? And if they're interesting enough, then they come in for an in-person interview and I'll just like one day and just interview a whole bunch of people. And then once we get past that, I invite, depending on the round and who I have, about two to four people to do a full day shadow with my team.

And for that full day shadow, I am totally absent. I think the last one, wasn't even in the country. I am totally absent and my team sets it up and plans it and who they're gonna shadow for how long. And then once we get through all of those, and I'll ask my team like, are your feels? When we get through all of those, we come together and I prime them.

Right? Like, who are we as a, how do we find ourselves? What is our work culture? What do we want in the qualities of people who are gonna join us? I share everyone's resume and I'm like, all right, let's talk about them. And my team consistently picks someone that I may not have picked myself.

Courtney Rosen
And I think they pick much better than I do. And I think it's also really strong because one, the person who's shattering, they don't realize it's part of the interview and I'm letting my teammates pick their new teammate. And so they'll say a lot more things. And so if they have a negative attitude, like they're gonna talk badly about their previous employers like that, it comes up because they're off guard and they're trying to be friends, right? And it's how they think they connect.

Stephen Fox
When you say that they don't realize this is part of the interview, do they think they've been hired at this point?

Courtney Rosen
No, no, I tell them they're gonna come shadow the team for a day and it's their opportunity to ask my team any questions that they want. Right? And I'm like, hey, I present the company in a certain way and this is what I think. But come see if it's true. Right? Come test out my team. Nope. Come in for a day and shadow. And they come in.

Stephen Fox
And is this a paid, is this like a paid training day for them or is it just?

Courtney Rosen 
And my team learns so much because I just chat them up. And they're not on guard like in an interview.

Stephen Fox 
And are all of, like you said, two to four people, is that at the exact same time, exact same day, or it's stat? Okay.

Courtney Rosen 
No, it's just like, it's like a week. And at the end of the week, we're like, all right, let's talk about it. And they do such a good job. And on the VA side, we use Summit VA, so they already do a lot of pre-screening and they do the personality test and they, you say, this is what I'm looking for and they'll already give you a selected amount of candidates. And I like that because I'm busy and I don't really like hiring. And then when we do the interview on that one, I have my other VAs in the room.

And with it, I'm like, all right, here are my questions. Now they get to ask the questions. And because they're coming from the same country, the same culture, the same, you know, they know they can tell me more about what's in their resume than I would otherwise understand. And also they'll ask some really pointed questions because our structure is such is that everyone is cross trained and we have an unlimited leave policy. You get unlimited leave, right? However,

You are not allowed to leave the team holding the bag when you're on leave. Right? That means that whoever you're going to go and fill out a form and like these are the tasks that need to be completed while I'm gone, these are the people who are going to do it. I'm signing off and they're signing off that I have trained them if they didn't already know or I've updated them because we changed the system and I've made videos for it or whatever it is. And they have a post leave when they come back. Like they check in, yeah, this is where we are. We're going to hand it back off.

So if you leave someone holding the bag, it's really painful. So they're very protective too. Like I want someone who's not gonna leave me holding the bag. I want someone who is gonna take care of me and I'm gonna take care of them. So they're very particular and if they find things like we had a VA interview.

Stephen Fox 
Yeah, the true team effort.

Courtney Rosen
And he was saying how he had gotten so bored and he didn't make mistakes in his job. But my VA was like, but you made this mistake in your resume and this mistake in your resume and that mistake in your resume. Right? And they're ruthless. And I'm like, great. Fabulous.

Stephen Fox 
Got it. So it sounds like to rebuild the culture, you almost had to clear house, bring in a whole new team, get everything out of the existing employees heads into standard operating procedures documented.

Courtney Rosen
It was 100 % clearing.

Courtney Rosen
Yeah, and a lot of rebuilding and a lot of, because I didn't come from a property management or real estate background, right?

If you want to talk about, you know, conjugating verbs in the passé composé, I am there for you. Okay. But that's not a skill set that's very useful in the property management sphere. and I felt very ignorant when I came in. It was really hard going from like top of my field to bottom rung in terms of actual understanding of the job. it was a huge mental and emotional blow. And so what I did is I made sure that I could do every single job and even now.

Now when we change processes, I want them to use a new platform. We're going to switch this up. I test it myself. I go back into being one of the workers and I test it and I don't, I refuse to ask any of my employees to do a task that I'm unwilling to do. So for example, we take all our call in-house and we're about 220 properties, but we get almost no calls. Like all our after-hour calls, it's almost none.

and that has a lot to do with our systems and setups, but I take calls Monday through Thursday, right? And then, I don't want the weekends, and they take a rotation of which weekends. But I don't, I wouldn't ever set it up where I'm like, yeah, you guys need to take calls, but I'm not going to. Even if I'm not really in the business day to day, I think it's important that the seemingly less fun tasks are ones that I'm willing to do too.

Stephen Fox
Yeah, I get it. You're basically leading by example.

So on the flip side, so you were able to clean up the culture during that time. What would you say were some of the biggest missteps that you made?

Courtney Rosen 
I didn't understand. But the biggest missteps weren't so much in terms of culture, but lack of really understanding some elements of business. So my two biggest missteps and you know, it cost me a lot financially and also mental health. One was hiring a company that promised a lot of benefits and SEO and doing our website that actually tanked.

Like our SEO went down with them. And it was, happened to be, I happened to hire them and then my mom passed away, my brain turned off. So it was really hard for me to kind of dig out of that one. But it is, that was just so expensive. They were so expensive and they promised such shiny things. And I was like, sure, I can afford that if you give me those shiny things. But they didn't. And so that was really hard on our return.

on our bottom line. And then the other one is, I was trying to, so I did the bookkeeping, I tried doing the bookkeeping and hiring someone in house to do it and training them. And then I got a little, I have a lot of bookkeeping PTSD. So in addition to not really understanding what Apple was doing, but the,

So I hired someone in house and she ghosted me on June 1st, 2020. Which I think I can remember that date better than my birthday or my marriage date or any of those other dates. It was so traumatic. She literally ghosted me and she went hired by another property manager. And thank God I knew how to do the accounting. I think that's also the systems, right? Is that when you don't have good systems, if someone leaves for whatever reason and how much notice, you are left holding the bag.

in it. So I did it for a while. I tried one more in-house and I was like, you know what? I'm going to outsource. So the first company I outsourced to, they were decent. I would give them like a seven or eight out of 10, but it was like people who knew how to, they learned how to use a calculator, but they didn't understand what the numbers meant because they were like, you need to move money because this, I'm saying why, what happened? What's the story? And they're like, this must have happened. I'm like, yeah, that would never happen. Right? Like it's not possible.

Courtney Rosen 
So I think, so I switched to another company and the timing of this was terrible. I was like, look, I'm about to go out of the country. it, maybe we should delay the onboarding. And I should have followed the red flags. Like sometimes you're like, no, I'm gonna do this. This great. They had hired my onboarding person. They wanted me to onboard with is actually the employee that ghosted me. I said, no, I'm

You hired her? No, I'm not onboarding with her. That should have been my red flag to just scoot doodle. But I onboarded with them and it happened to be October of two and a half years ago and we were in Israel and October 7th happened. Seven of the month is also accounting time and so I was with my family and...

trying to figure out how to get out of the country because the flights were canceled, know, locations to bomb shelters, all kinds of fun things. And at night after my kids had gone to bed, I realized that they were trying to process owner payments without having processed management payments first. So I wouldn't get any payment that month.

And they were totally terrible and I was trying to figure that out with them. was so traumatic. So I finally got smart and I went to Enterprise Bank and I was like, hey, you guys work with a lot of people, who do you recommend?


Courtney Rosen 
And I signed up with Reconcile Daily and they are amazing. I think finding those teams, but also realizing who you can ask for resources. I felt like I didn't, you I could just figure it out and I could trust how people presented themselves. But there are people who are presenting out there that cannot do what they say they're going to do.


Stephen Fox 
So it sounds like some of your biggest missteps were in vendor selection, essentially.

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, huge. And that's why I tell people they ask me like, you meet new people at NARPAM broker owner. was like, pick your vendors really carefully. Set up your software really intentionally. Because those are things that are harder to switch or are more expensive. So if you're starting from scratch or starting from the beginning, really pay attention and talk to people. Why did they make that choice? What were the bad choices? And my answer of what works for me, might not be the answer of what works for you, but it is going to be at least a way to think about it.

Stephen Fox 
Yeah, getting feedback from other people that have at least had experience with that vendor. I guess spending more time doing due diligence to make sure that you're selecting is the right fit for your company can be a lot of fun.

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, and thinking about it too, right? I don't know why took me so long. I'm like, ask the banker. The banker is the one who has to deal with all these companies, right? Like, ask the person. It's kind of like when I want to find a good mortgage officer, I go ask my title officer. Like, who throws you underneath the bus and who doesn't? Who actually, like, like, ask the person who has to deal with a whole bunch of them. I was like, oh, that makes more sense.

Stephen Fox
Yeah. Makes sense. So now that you have your operations more in order, your team culture is in a better place than it was, what are your current goals?

Courtney Rosen 
So we're continuing on different things. I am very selective with my software now. And so our setup is AppFolio, and I maximize AppFolio. A lot of people use it just as accounting and use all these add-ons. I'm like, I'm paying for it, I'm maxing it. And I also don't, I like one source of truth. I don't like having 20 tabs open to find one piece of information. Because if you have to check 20 places to find one piece of information, your efficiency is way down.

But I recently, recently like the last, I don't know, two and a half years now, we moved over to Appley for tenant screening and then we've been going through and I love their workflows and how customizable they are. A lot of vendors have actually told me that I'm too particular and too hard to work with, which I will take as a compliment.

And so, because I like things done a certain way because I'm trying to prevent errors, right? And I want checks and balances, and I want to make sure that what we do is correct and best practice. And so, Apley allows for all these customizations. So we're working on putting all of our processes into Apley. So instead of having Checklist in Google Drive, which is currently what we have,

is moving them to more interactive checklists through the boards and app with a lot of automation so we can leverage our staff instead of having to hire more. And that also makes my team a lot stronger in terms that we can step in for each other. And if anyone steps out temporarily or permanently, we know exactly what was left off, where we are, what we're doing. So it allows for a lot more measurables. That's something I've struggled with is I have a good sense of what's going on. I can keep a lot in my head.

Like you name one of our 220 properties and I'll be able to tell you all kinds of information about it, right? But that's not the best scalable. My head is not the best scalable process, right? So it's putting it in there, doing automations. I think it makes the company a lot stronger. I think it makes training a lot easier. So doing that and then creating, instead of having the Google Drive docs, right? Because what I say all the time is people don't go looking for things they don't know exist.

Stephen Fox 
Thanks

Courtney Rosen 
is that putting it into a knowledge base, and we're gonna be using Appley for this, so try it out, so that people can search our knowledge base during our training, or if you're stepping in for someone and pull up the Loom video, them showing you how to do it, or whatever it may be. So that, and we're redoing our onboarding, because...

I think we do a really solid onboarding, I think there's always room for improvement. So those are our three areas of improvement. And part of that for the owners is that we've been waiting in Texas a long time. We use our Texas Realty Trust property management agreement and they just did the update. Not just now, it's a while ago, but I need to go through and rethink about everything at the same time.

Stephen Fox 
Yeah. And I guess at what point do you feel that the business became stable and predictable versus when you first came in where it was, I guess I'll call it more reactive and just.

Courtney Rosen 
was really reactive. I think it's more when we get into checklists and everyone knew what they're supposed to be doing. And I think part of it too is that it also depends on the culture of their activity, right? Because when something goes not as planned, you can either go to shame and blame, which is what the company culture was when I started working here.

Or you can go to, how did this happen? What's broken in our system? Is it that we weren't following our system or our system's broken? Did we not prepare for that? And this is an opportunity to improve. And that's where we are now. So I think that...

I mean, it's been a couple of years. And I think part of it too is I was very blessed. I made a really good hire for a really high capacity person. She was, I hired to do maintenance and she ended up doing maintenance and property churns, which we had two people hired for before. And she was doing all of it and considering it a part-time job. Right? She was just super hired. Yeah, and she was doing it better than anyone else who had been in there. Right?

I showed her, I'm like, this is our maintenance mess. And she was like, how do we fix that? I'm like, this is what you do. One week later, she cleared it out. I was like, whoa.

She now does the majority of running the company. And I think it is sometimes there is that component of finding your unicorn, of finding someone who is high capacity. And then the flip side of that is taking care of them. So for her, she's a single mom. She recently got married, so no longer, and has a baby. But I'm like, how can I take care of you? We bought a pack and play. I'm like, babies always welcome in the office. I my babies were in the office.

Courtney Rosen 
Like what can I do to make your life easier working here? And I think that's also in that conversation of like we talk a lot about the cost of owner turnover, but we don't talk a lot about the cost of employee turnover. And what does it mean that you actually check in and care about your employees? And are you willing to buy little things that make their life easier, like a standing desk or a pack and play or?

whatever the request may be, it's a small line item, it's like a belief in our budget, but it can mean the world to the employee.

Stephen Fox 
Yeah, when you find a, we'll call an A player, make sure you hang on to them for as long as you possibly can. Cause at the start, generally it's one person and you're the business. But eventually as you bring on team members, those team members become the business. And if your business is full of A players, your life's going to be much more enjoyable than if you're busy trying to kind of squeeze every penny out of the business.

at the mercy of not hanging on to your employees that are high quality, high performing employees.

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah. But also it's like it allows you to be consistent. And this is where I go back to check this. I'm obsessed with checklist, right? Is that if we can make everything consistent regardless of the person who's doing it right. And you make it easy to check. So like everything goes into our system. I can check on any property when the person visited what was checked at it. Everything is documented at folio. We're obsessive about it. Right. But.

if we make it that way. the flip side of that is that when employees know exactly what's expected of them, it's easier to perform. That was the problem. When you asked three people and got three to four different answers, then nobody really knows what's expected of them and they can always be judged for not doing the right thing. Employees like to know what is expected and that they're doing a good job, right? But if you don't have good measurables or good expectations or good feedback measures, like you're not gonna get it.

Stephen Fox 
100%. Yeah, if the mission isn't clear, how are they supposed to know what they should be doing?

Courtney Rosen 
Yeah, and it goes back into training. But if your training is from my head to your head, that's what it was when I started, then first of all, your training taking way too much of your time.

Right? My employees train my future employees. I don't do training anymore. Right? I do systems improvement. And then my next really big one is I do need to hire a business manager to work all the leads. Because I'm inconsistent about it. I went to the property management systems in Vegas in January. And I was like, oh. So there was a presenter who called out. It's like, you're being your own business development manager, these are all the problems you're going to have. And I was like, oh, this

Stephen Fox 
Especially in your case where you have a I'll call it a heavy lenience towards operational because a lot of times the business owner will get themselves completely out of the operational side and just focus on business development, but in your case where you from speaking with you Tend to lean more heavily on the operational side as your strength You can't do both right like

Courtney Rosen 
So I know that's on the list.

Courtney Rosen
No, you can't. it's also that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and time is my weakness. I don't notice. It could have been a month. It could have been two days. Oh, we were supposed to do that? I'm terrible. The other thing I would say, too, when you talk about business culture is do you let your employees critique you?

Right, you're telling your employees all the time what you think. I'm like, hey, what do you think about me? And I think it would make it uncomfortable sometimes, because they're like, oh, I'm going to tell my boss. But I'm like, look, I know I'm frustrating to work with sometimes. Right? And my office manager, she'll come in and be like, this decision you're making is stupid, and I hate it. And I'm like, oh, tell me about that. Like, that's great. Wonderful. Let me know so we don't make that decision. Tell me why.

But being able to be frank or having someone come and tell you, right? And I ask, like, I just evaluate you, what am I, you not getting from me that you need? Or what are you not getting from this business? Or asking your employer, like, what would make it better to work here? Right? So we've done all kinds of fun things. I've decided to buy health plans for my VAs, right? Because it's literally the cost of onboarding a property.

maybe two properties depending on which property. But for the cost of onboarding one or two properties, it makes it that much harder for them to leave me. Yeah, we're all in the Philippines. Because Summit VA is really based out of the Philippines, that works. My accounting team is based more in Latin America. But that's through them. It's not more of a direct employee relationship.

Stephen Fox 
all your VA's in the same country. That's doable.

Courtney Rosen
So I was able to do that for my local employees. I'm like what would make your life easier? We I take them at the lunch to talk to them I've hired a masseuse to come in and massage everybody and they all now have membership to the botanical gardens because I find it's relaxing and my go hang out take your kids whatever and If they want a gym membership, I'm like hey as long as you're using it

Like, let me help you with this. Because here on the US side, paying for health care is not feasible, and most of my employees don't need it because spouses and how it works. But I think being like, care about you as a person, it carries a lot of weight.

Stephen Fox 
100 % I think at least at our company one of the biggest comments we get from our team is People here are rational and normal And I'm always shocked when I hear that But I guess thankfully I haven't had a ton of experience with this, but I guess a lot of companies create a toxic culture where

You're on pins and needles all day. You don't want to go to work because you're scared of dealing with your boss or whoever it might be. And yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's just treat people like a decent human being would. And that goes a long way because it's...

Courtney Rosen
goes a really long way. And I think too, it's like, you focus, so when I started working here, it was really focused on arriving by 9 a.m., right? Or it was actually 8 a.m. at the time. Like you have to be here, you have to be here. Now when I was a school teacher, like I totally get it, because there's a classroom of students waiting right there. But if I'm not the person who's responsible for opening the door and sitting at the front desk, why do you care if I got stuck in traffic and it's 9 a.m. a.m.?

Right? Versus, well you didn't care the days that I show up two hours early to do the accounting in quiet, or the days that I spend two hours later. Right? And we, it's how do you measure a good employee? And for me, my goal as a company owner is to get completely KPI oriented. Because then you are rewarding people for being efficient. If you're just guarding their hours, there's no reward for efficiency. Right?

Stephen Fox
Yeah. And what are some of those KPIs that you keep track of?

Courtney Rosen 
So I'm working on that. That's one of the reasons I went into Aptly. And I've railed at AppFolio for not having measurables and being able to get data out of the system, which is one of the definite downsides of Aptly.

But I'm hoping with our, sorry, with AppFolio, not Appley. Is it downsize with AppFolio? So I don't have, that's one of the things I'm working on building is trying to get everything into the flow. So we can say how fast did we respond to this? How, the biggest one I have is how fast are we getting applications done? How fast are we getting houses on the market? How fast are we getting them rented? Right? How old are our maintenance work orders? We've now gotten.

We enter data in our work order net folio in a way that we can pull data out and actually get measureables on how long it's taking us to close a work order and what type of work orders we have. Some of the most interesting data is that the majority of our work orders are either unit turns or part of our preventative maintenance programs.

We actually have a very small percentage of our work orders that are tenant in place, which is amazing when I go to a new owner and say, check us out. We're doing such a good job with our preventative maintenance that the likelihood that your tenant is going to have a maintenance experience is very low.

Right? And that's number one reason that people bolt is bad maintenance experience. Either you have a lot of it or you had a bad experience with one. So that's where we're at right now. As far as the doors and the income per doors, every once in a while, the profit court does the survey and they're like, we'll give you your information if you give us your data. I'm like, sure. And they're like, hey, you're doing pretty great. I'm like, awesome. Right? But I just think that it's about relationships.

Courtney Rosen
It's about systems and if you focus on making all of it more efficient all the time and rewarding efficiency, right? So the person who's running my office when she was just doing maintenance and unit terms for 120 properties, she's like, yeah, I'm gonna wear from the beach for two days because I organize my work so. I'm like, great, amazing, why not? But for a lot of people, if you're not in the office in certain hours, they don't trust their systems enough to know that they're getting value.

Stephen Fox 
Yeah. So it's basically creating a culture where get the work done, get it done well, but you don't have to feel like you're a prisoner to this nine or eight AM until six PM and you have to be at your death. Yeah. And I think that's the new, that's the new way of work, right? For most.

Courtney Rosen
That was terrible. He was like eight to six and I was like... We're generally a nine to five-ish.

Well, it looks like what can you get from a company, right? So if you look at, if you ask people why they change jobs, right? Most of the times, and ask your peers, why do people change jobs? Most of it is not money. Sometimes it's money. And I'm not gonna be the highest paying people out there, right? I pay well, I mean, I have a profit line too. But what can I give them that other jobs can't? Freedom of ownership over their time.

respectful work culture, right? And I tell them all the time, you let me know, a vendor talks to your rude, an owner talks to your rude, a tenant talks to your rude, you let me know, because either we're gonna figure out how to make this polite, or they're not gonna stay around. And I have their back 100 % of the time. I'm like, you will not be yelled at.

Stephen Fox 
No, that's obviously a place someone would feel comfortable working and having a long career in, which is going to, in the long run, only benefit the business.

Courtney Rosen 
Exactly.

Stephen Fox
So I do want to touch on one last question before we wrap things up. If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to someone that is either, call it inheriting or buying a property management company?

Courtney Rosen
I think for that one, what I would say is really think about what systems. And if I were inheriting or buying property management company, the first thing you need to know is where are you at?

And no new document that is produced during the sale is going to tell you that. But if you have it and like it's yours now, I would take, and depending on how many employees you have, I mean, I'm smaller, right? There's six of us. I would take everyone out to lunch individually. What do you do? What do you like about it?

What's broken? What doesn't work? What would you like me to fix? Right? I think so many times we think we know everything, which I never think I know anything, because again, you have a Spanish major who taught French running a property management company. I have tons to learn.

But being able to be humble enough to learn from your employees, so many of those initial system changes happened because I allowed my employees to tell me what they didn't like about the company and then make a procedural change that fixed their problem.

So I would start with your baseline of figure out where you are, create that culture of trust and listening, and then start figuring out what systems. Is it a software issue? Is it a personnel issue? Is it we don't have documented systems issue? But for me, especially when talk about doors and onboarding, I honestly didn't want to onboard tons of doors if I couldn't do it and keep my reputation at the high standard that I have.

Courtney Rosen 
And so that goes back to systems. And now when we onboard, literally the minute they sign their initial sheet, I don't have anything to do with it. Because my team just starts running with it. And I know whatever service they're getting is quality. But I think, really think about your software setup. Don't make it complicated. I think Peter Lewin's last email that just went out was like, hey, people who are paying more in tech is actually getting a low return. So really think about your systems.

that you're gonna do, but listen to your people and figure out what can they add. You'll be surprised what gems they have, because it's the people who do the work that understand what the problems are.

Stephen Fox 
Good advice. Thank you so much for sharing. For anyone that wants to connect with you, what would be the best place for them to reach out?

Courtney Rosen 
I'm an IRL person. So if you're in San Antonio, I'm not in social media, which is almost a running joke how much I'm not in social media. You can email me, but that's also a thing. You can text me.

If you want to connect, I'm a phone call, text, real person, which is not a great way to follow someone, but I think there's a little bit more authenticity to it.

Stephen Fox 
Thank you so much Courtney, talk soon.

Courtney Rosen 
Alright, thank you. Bye.