Using AI to Run an 800-Door Property Management Company | Ping Hsu

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Transcript

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

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, I started my property management business back in 2016 and back then two main reasons why I started. Number one was I already own a couple of student rentals and I really wanted to dive into real estate full time. I was an engineer and I knew that that route wasn't really, that career path wasn't really for me. So as I was searching for ways to get into real estate, Flips Wholesale obviously came to my mind initially. But after I've done a couple of projects, I realized that

Number one, I don't have a consistent income coming in. There's no recurring income coming in. So I won't get paid out until the project is done. So that bothers me. But the second thing is that you do two or three projects, you eventually run out of the investor list, like your contacts. So back then I was thinking about, got student rentals. I couldn't find any property manager to take over my portfolio for me to be a full-time investor. 

I'm like, why don't I just start with a property management company, connect with other people, have that recurring income coming in and I get to service other people's portfolio and then I use that way to connect with other investors. So that's really how everything started back then. And then very quickly in the student rental market, back then there wasn't much of a, I guess,

Good competitors. So for me, it was just a lot of cold calling, reaching out to people who are out of town, see if they'd be interested in using our leasing service. And that's how I got things started.

Stephen Fox 
And you still manage only student rentals?

Ping Hsu 
No, eventually we'll have to branch it out. So, Serial Rento is where we started. But one thing leads to another. We now manage over 800 units mixed with Serial Rento, single family, also multi-family, and a little bit portion of mixed-use commercials.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, so a little bit of everything. Do you find it hard to juggle, let's say, a student rental versus a mixed use commercial?

Ping Hsu
Yeah, yeah, it's a very different operation. Before I was just taking anything that I could, but you eventually learn how to say no to, know, things like that, that I guess we're not good at. Student rental was where I started because I understand the student, I guess, seasonality, you know, like leasing process, placement, when they're actually looking to move in, when they're looking for a new place. And it was a lot of work, by the way, but leasing season really was a very huge, I guess, generating season for us. 

And then eventually we started managing single family and in Hamilton Ontario there's a lot of, I guess there was a quite a bit of wave for a lot of investors to be coming in here, especially out of city investors, out of...

Stephen Fox 
Country?

I don't want to say out of state investor, yeah, were a lot of different type of investors coming in here. So I was able to really capitalize on that and then get to know a lot of landlords, a lot of investors who want to get into small multifamily. And then eventually one thing leads to another, it's multifamily. to answer your question, multifamily buildings, waste management, tenant conflicts were the bigger issue in my opinion. With student renters, it's just like you need to arrange a lot of cleaning. You need to be paying attention to the vacancy because essentially it's a rooming house, a rooming house that you're placing the tenants to. And how do you structure in a way that protects you legally and from bylaw? Those are the two different skills that we're seeing.

Stephen Fox 
So you mentioned when you started you just kind of did the old-school way where you were just cold calling people I guess first question is where did you get lists of people to call to begin with?

Ping Hsu
Great question. So to start off, a lot of people worry about the marketing. Back then, I actually knew nothing about business structure and how to start it. I just knew that in order for me to get in front of the investors, I need to be talking to them. So first thing first, what I did, it was very interesting because I happened to know someone because back then I was also just a young graduate basically. So I knew the student bodies and all that stuff. So I connected a buddy from University of Oahu. I hired two intern students, $600 for five weeks straight for two people. Very, very good price. And then I got them to, because they were all in sulfur, so I got them to scrape the data from Kijiji, Craigslist, and Macoff campus.

So they gave me all the contact information on the spreadsheet and all I did was I selected the area code from 416, 905 and 647. So I knew that these lenders, they're not local because local would have been like 209, different area codes and all that stuff. So based on those numbers, me and my partner, we started calling people from our house and we basically just started having conversation. We reached out to them because we knew that they have a big pain point, which is...

your property is going to be vacant or you have a vacant units right now and you're trying to list the property for rent, but you're 45 minutes away. So we call them up, we say, hey, is this still available? And then the moment that we realized that they were really trying to confirm the time that we're going to show up and all that stuff, then we kind of sliding in. By the way, we know a lot of people, we actually place a lot of for local landlords. Are you potentially looking for someone to kind of take over this task for you? So that's how we started. It's just a lot of grinding and hustle.

And then we started.

Stephen Fox
So it sounds like you started by doing leases only. Is that correct?

Ping Hsu 
I started leasing because leasing pays well initially, right? Because we can offer 75% of the one month rent or 50% of one month rent. If we stack up 10 leases, that's already 20, 30K. Yeah. So that's basically how I started. And then I pitched the property management service afterwards.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, so you would lease the property for them and then be like, hey, by the way, if you don't want to deal with anything at all, I can actually manage the property for you as well now that we have a tenant.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, as soon as I secured it, asked him like, "Hey, how have you been managing your properties?" And so I'll just write down there, deal with some stuff, like 45 minutes drive. That's crazy. Like, do you enjoy doing that? It's just like, no, I, know, just don't know anybody. I'm like, you know why don't I just take care of that for you as well? So the off-site comes to bright after I finished one service.

Stephen Fox 
Yep, that makes sense. you basically prove to them, I've rented out your property. I'm professional. I know what I'm doing. And it makes them a little bit more likely to trust you to hire you for full service management. Smart. And I guess, is that how you grew? Cause right now you're around 800 doors. Is that how you continued to grow or what did things look like? I guess, as the business evolved.

Ping Hsu 
Yep. Exactly.

Yeah, so that is what I call core outreach. So you can only do so much. Honestly, it's a bit of a brunt. Eventually, you need to start learning about the marketing and draw that inbound lease. That's where UpKey Media is obviously doing for a lot of clients. Google reviews turned out to be something that we focused on a lot. With student rental, we also put out a lot of long sign. So the simple stuff is the ACO.

Using all that long time will be seasonality when a lot of lenders come into the town they see our sign everywhere in a know in a like around student rentals area they also they were just like they were doing things that they don't normally want to do they see outside what happened to be there so we started playing around with the some of the traditional marketing versus the online marketing and that really gave us a little bit more boost you know for the first couple years

Stephen Fox
Okay, got it. So I know that you're heavy into AI. I'll call it heavy into AI compared to most property managers out there. You actually were able from speaking offline, were able to bring your team from around, correct me if I'm wrong, but around 12 to 15 people on the team where you're now only three people on the team. Three full time. I guess.

Ping Hsu 
Three full time, yes. Yeah.

Stephen Fox
What did your team and operations look like before implementing AI and what does it look like today?

Ping Hsu
Is it okay if I give a little bit more context here? How we've been running property management business is that eventually this property management business becomes a lead generation machine for other divisions as well. So property management, sometimes you end up having clients that needs renovation.

Stephen Fox 
For sure. Please do.

Ping Hsu 
We're also brokers too, a team of realtors too. So we also handle transactions. So with the property management, you end up having investors that want to expand or sell their portfolio once in a while. And whenever they do that, it triggers a different type of a service. 

So part of reason why we end up expanding the team all the way to like, you know, 13, 14 people, full-time employees, was because I was trying to internalize a bunch of services like that. Which, looking back, it was a bad decision, bad decision. That was a shiny object. I just kept internalizing or doing the vertical integration for the company, thinking that that was the right decision. It was fine initially, but there was a certain pivotal moment that we had to do. So, to answer your question, the 13, 14 employees, they're not all just for property management.

We even have a full-time per legal at a time because we're kind of using it to handle our own business But we also try to launch it to catch more like other investors to get into that ecosystem

But in reality, think the property management business, were at seven full-time employees, including I think two VAs. One of them was a bookkeeper. The other person was a general admin. When we started really scaling down using AI was when I realized that a lot of work that we're doing is administration heavy. AI really didn't like that my top, I guess, maintenance coordinator, right? 

He's very knowledgeable with, I guess, coordinating for materials and maintenance, even renovation, he ended up spending the majority of his time in admin work. That's when it really bothers me. So I started looking to automation AI agents and I realized that, you know what, everything that a human can do without interacting with the tenants, landlords and all that stuff, or even vendors, we can streamline with automation and AI agents.

Ping Hsu 
Okay, so when I recognized that, I started really dedicating my time to really build out that workflow. And obviously we started with an accounting side of things because a lot of people talk about, you can use AI to insert codes and all that stuff or generate sales. 

I want my best guys on the team to be generating revenue for the business. I don't want them to be sitting behind the desk and do all the admin work. So first thing first, we actually didn't try to solve anything upfront, anything interactive with other people. We tried to solve everything that's kind of behind the scene. So accounting was the very first thing that I wanted to try, right? How to process the invoice, how to upload, I guess, files, how to update tasks, how to prepare reports for landlords.

Right, like even for leasing, how do we actually do the tenant screening without, you know, tying up our guys in there. So those are the stuff that I really, really try to improve. And one thing leads to another bookkeeper VA gets replaced almost immediately. And then the general admin. And then we also had two other admin full time. We ended up keeping the best performer. And so the way that I structure it is very simple. 

There's a maintenance side of things. There's a leasing, there's a general admin. And I only end up keeping three employees, full-time employees to do this and then they all manage a bunch of AI agents underneath them as well.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, well guess at this point, what is the single highest impact AI automation that you've implemented?

Ping Hsu 
What I like the most is actually the accounts payable process. So AP agents, you process the invoice, you upload the invoice to Google Drive, you take out the description of the work, you rewrite it in a way, in a format that we want to upload it into our programming software, close the task, right? And then bill it out to the owner. That part...

I like it the most because Steven and I, we just kind of went over that. It actually allows me to see P&L on a weekly basis. So I'm not missing out on any invoices anymore. 

Stephen Fox 
Would you be able to share your screen and show us what this looks like? So for anybody that's listening to this just audio, I'd recommend checking this out on YouTube because we're going to learn something here and see what an AI agent actually looks like inside of a property management company.

Ping Hsu
Cool. OK. OK, so just very high level. So this is all the invoice that we have this week, actually. And some of them is not valid for post, but I need to kind of look into this one. It solves the majority of the problem. But every time that the invoice comes in here, you'll show the vendor. You'll give me the invoice number. And then you'll actually download from Gmail and then upload it to a Google Drive. And then you'll show me the

Stephen Fox 
So to make sure I'm understanding this properly, you get an email that comes in from a vendor and automatically the AI agent is going to pull the information from that invoice and upload it into this spreadsheet.

Ping Hsu 
That's correct. Yeah. And once it's uploaded to a spreadsheet, and let me kind of quickly explain the purpose of this whole workflow, because you can do all of that, you know.

Like the, like you can have anybody doing this part, but the hardest part is that when you have like 10, 20 different invoices on a weekly basis, you have to sometimes need to do markup. You have to make sure that you're charging the clients so that you don't end up paying out of your pocket. So I wanted to, I always wanted to have a clear dashboard where I can see everything and I can enter the charges, you know, on the same page without jumping things around.

You got a phone call from the tenants, from the landlords, and all of a sudden your workers get interrupted. I want things to be in front of me all the time. So this is where I do, I try, I extract all the information. And then all I have to do is to deal with these three columns. So coming here, I can see, okay, this plumbing company, I can literally go into the invoice here, right?

If I need to kind of double check about this one, what this is about, it's all in here, but it takes all the information split out in the format that we want in here. And this is what's going to be updated into my private maintenance software. Okay. And from here, I get to see the invoice number. All I have to do is, okay, maybe I also spend some time in there and for this specific task, I cannot just charge $565. I need to be charging $600.

Okay, and then I just need to update the beauty and task and then do ready to post.

Stephen Fox 
So basically you'll either, I assume it's a member of your team will come in here on the daily, look at all the new invoices that were sent from vendors, review them to make sure that you understand what they're about and then go into what it looks like column J and add your markup on top of whatever it was the vendor had invoiced you for. And then that information will then get pulled directly from there into your property management software.


Ping Hsu 
That's correct. So that's part one of this workflow is to process the invoice. You can call that invoice agent. That's actually what we have labeled in there. And then once the invoice agent completed this task.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, understood.

Ping Hsu 
What we do is that we send it over to AP2, Accounts Payable Number 2. So AP agent to process the invoice. So in here, that's where we grab, like we can see what's being processed on Buildium, because that's a PM software that we're using. We know that it's been processed everything. If we want to double check one more time, all the links are already in here, right? And then you'll show me whether or not the the vendor has the HST, we're in Canada, so there's a HST on top of all the services. Then you'll show the invoice amount and bill to the owner. So what the AP agent is doing currently is to grab these numbers, bring it over to payment processor, and actually enter all those information for us. So all we have to do from my accounting department is to just approve everything. 

It's literally just a bunch of clicks, make sure that everything is actually good here. And then you're going to complete it. And by clicking that one click, you also upload the entire process, I guess, all the information from invoice, like the actual invoice description all the way to like QuickBooks online. And because we use QVL to manage our entire company, but I'm trying to avoid a double and triple entry here between each department. Yeah.

Stephen Fox 
Okay, got it. Awesome. How did you learn how to do this? Did you create this yourself or did you hire somebody to do it? Like where did this come from?

Ping Hsu
I do have a background of engineering. so yeah, I looked into this and then it just bothers me that my, my people are doing things that are not a revenue generating task, right? Income generating task. Cause at the end of the day, if you look at property management business, it's really, really hard to squeeze that margin out of this, I guess, industry. 

And it's very hard to a lot of business owners because we're dealing with people all the time. And one thing that I don't want to do is I'd rather that my team is dealing with a relationship, managing the relationship, de-escalate the situation, avoid a burn down and not to spend most of time dealing with accounting. this also, and by the way, I just want to add one more thing for the audience.

Out this way it is so much easier to be managing the weekly P &L. Okay so we also quickly talked about this earlier but this one allows me to actually see the amount that we we paid out and which is right here and the amount that we charged the landlords because all I need to know is are we actually making money last week I really need to know that number, but through property management software or even QBO, sometimes it's hard to do because you have to wait for your bookkeeper to reconcile everything. I don't want the reconciliation to be done before I can catch the problem. I want to catch the problem, fix it, so that by the end of the month, I know for sure I'm in a profitable position for my business. So this allows me to see the profits and how I'm delegating it down is that...

I have the workflow set up so my maintenance manager or coordinator comes in here, enter all the numbers, my AP can actually review everything and approve all the charges. So their time is not really spent on here. They just need to catch the problem and fix it beforehand. And once it is all done, then it goes right into this sheet where every single week on Tuesday, that's where I arrange the finance meeting with my finance manager to look at all these numbers. And if there's any negative number like this, the details on why that happened.

Stephen Fox 
So you're able to see, rather than having to wait monthly or quarterly, you're able to see at the end of every single week how much you guys made on maintenance. Okay, understood.

Ping Hsu
That's maintenance, individual, technician, and obviously there's another sheet for leasing, leasing commission from our leasing agents. Because currently we have three, I don't want to say full-time, but three dedicated leasing agents just to our company. Yeah, so full-time leasing manager plus three agents, sorry.

Stephen Fox 
What other areas of the business are you using AI agents for?

Ping Hsu 
We also have maintenance agent. So our maintenance flow is that when the request comes in here, one of the bigger burnout points for a lot of property managers, especially from my experience is that you're dealing with so much emotion, right? Hey, my toilet needs clogging, right? Like it needs to be unclogged. They will add that, it's super urgent. I can't do this, yada yada yada. So there's a lot of emotional wording in here and that's why we get burned out. So I'm trying to put all my team members on the second layer.

Let the agent handle it. Because, you know, ChatGPT, any AI will be able to provide a better response, you know, than a human being, in my opinion, in at least in 2026. So I get the AI to draft the reply, filter out the information, get all the information out, filter the reply, and then use the AI to draft it. So all we need to do is to confirm, right? And the AI will...

Stephen Fox 
There is still a human that's making sure whatever the agent wrote is acceptable.

Ping Hsu 
Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And as soon as we come from the, the, the reply to the tenants, typically the in here, we try to grab more information. Once you have enough information, push it into the vendor scheduling. We have a vendor sheet where, depending on, you know, the severity or scope of work, we have specific vendors. That's why the, that's where the AI agent will grab the information, suggest that should we schedule this vendor? We approve. Yes. Then it goes into scheduling, which is our Google calendar. 

And then you'll send out the notes from butane to the tenants. now my maintenance coordinator only needs to look at the AI's report, say yes to the vendor, so say yes to the vendor, everything gets done, say yes to the notice of entry, three things to approve and make sure that this whole process is documented properly, and then you'll get coordinated already.

All the vendor schedule will be on Google Calendar as well. So that's how I'm really putting it into the second layer of this entire operation. And all they need to do is to manage these agents and making sure we're training the agents to do the right thing moving forward.

Stephen Fox
And what tools are you using to create this? Is it N8n, Claude code? What does that look like?

Ping Hsu 
You just named it. Yeah, yeah, it's made by workflow. Obviously you can use a I wouldn't I wouldn't use Zapier anymore. Zapier used to be my go to, but Zapier doesn't really connect with AI too well. NAN, I find that once you get everything set up, the credentials and all that stuff set up, it's much, much easier to control NAN because I can get the AI. Before I get into, I guess, let AI do the processing and all that stuff, I can set up the rules for them. 

So it really reduces the cost of the token for this entire process. Overall, think I'm spending less than $50 for the token used for the entire operation. Per month. Yeah, it's actually less than this subscription of NAN.

Stephex Fox
per month, I imagine.

And guess on that topic, what has this done for your business financially? Because you reduced your head count, sounds like almost by a bit more than half.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, great question. I was at 14 to 15 % for the longest time. I just couldn't break it through. And a lot of people are saying that 14 % profit margin. Yeah. So if you were making like $1 million where I was only netting about like $140K and now I'm just like, that's where it's mainly training because it's a lot of work and you're like $140K, really isn't that much if you consider the high level business for a saving figure. But once I really remove that labor cost, right now we're at 32.

Stephen Fox 
Net profit margin.
32 % profit margin, net profit margin, just to make sure we're talking. Okay, got it.

Ping Hsu 
33%, yeah, project management. Yeah, and that doesn't include the transactions, project management, and all the other things. It's just a property management business.

Stephen Fox 
That's awesome. I guess if someone wanted to get started with AI automation, what would you say is the easiest and first automation for them to start to implement?

Ping Hsu
Do not start with marketing or sales. There's a reason why upkeep media is there for, right? Because you guys have such a strong knowledge about marketing. Don't try to overcome that immediately. Try to automate your accounting process first. Once you can do all the admin work and replace that and actually trust the system, because those ones are black and white. A number comes in, a number goes out, right? There's no thinking in between, right? 

And so if you can streamline that process first and learn how to use NAN, use make.com to automate your process. Then you can slowly expand it to, for example, DocuSign, signing documents. Maybe it doesn't actually require you to go into the software to do that. And then slowly work towards interactive with the tenants and landlords.

Stephen Fox 
So basically, try to think of things where it's so simple that a child could do it if you really train them on it. then start with that, and then from there, as you get more more comfortable, then you can build out further and more complex automations.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, okay, so a better way to explain it is that you have to write out your SOP in a way that, you know, high school students can read it.

And it has to be super clear that there's no thinking. Because in party management, sometimes we take into other people's emotions, we start making judgment call. For example, the markup on the invoices. Well, this lender will say that he's a little bit not in the best financial position, so you reduce your markup or you don't do the markup. We got to streamline that whole process completely so that there's no, I guess, a thinking process in this part. Then you can write out your SOP. 

Once you have the SOP, you bring it over to your nephew and he's reading it out and see if they can actually follow the process. Once you can do all of that, you can set up the AI. But even better for a lot of people who are thinking that that might be a lot of work, just ask AI what kind of questions they need. You can write out your general SOP, bring it over to the AI, and then ask any language model to ask you questions to clarify this entire workflow.

Stephen Fox
So meaning, just for people that aren't super familiar, you can go to chat.gbt and ask it.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah. Yeah. I'll upload your SOP, ask you the questions, and then you can say, okay, turn this into an NEM workflow for me. Then they'll build it out and you can connect it this way.

Stephen Fox 
Interesting and I guess is there are there certain limits to this meaning if you grew past a certain door count all of a sudden things would break like is this scalable till technically 10,000 doors or is this just work at like the size that you're at which is around 800

Ping Hsu 
Even at 800, you will break. Let's put it this way. AI is a probability game. It's not absolute all the time because it has to process, it has to make certain judgment based on the data. So my advice is that you have to train your team to learn how to use AI. 

And that's why when I decided to downsize my team, obviously there's a lot of uncertainty with the team members, but I decided to actually give them, like I actually trained them how to use AI and why we need to use AI. And then I changed the conversation structure so that they can all earn a little bit more, you know, using this platform. to answer your question, it will a hundred percent break. And that's why our staff has to learn how to fix certain things, give the right prompt. And if it's beyond what they can do, then that's where we're stepping and try to fix the workflow.

Stephen Fox 
That's also why there's still a human that is reviewing everything before it ever reaches the client. It's just that now you need less people because before maybe you needed somebody that was going to manually input all of this information. Now the AI agent can do that and then the manual part will be somebody reviewing the spreadsheet and reviewing the numbers to make sure that everything makes sense before it ever reaches the client being the tenant or the owner depending on what it is.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, we're the QC. We're the QC.

That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. There's a management, I guess, philosophy that I always follow. It's called PDCA, Plane Do Check Adjust. So when we're building an organization chart, we want to make sure that the person who's the manager only doing the checking. sorry, planning.

The person who's doing the execution of the task is doing the doing part only. They're not overthinking about this whole process. But the manager is doing PCA, so plain checking and adjust. So when I put my team at this level and we have AI agents down, AI agents are only doing the doing part, but we still need a human to do the review, which is planning, checking, adjusting. Yeah, so that's the business philosophy I always follow, and a lot of manufacturing literally use this to build a massive empire. Yeah, you can never remove QC. We have to be QC in the AI agents.

Stephen Fox 
So I guess to kind of answer my own question, this can work at any scale. It's just that you will eventually need to, let's say, hire somebody else to manually review things. Because if you're double the size, you're to have double the amount of work orders that you need to review. You're right. Understood. I guess now that you have AI agents running your business, what does a typical day look like for you?

Ping Hsu 
That's correct. Yeah.
I say in a very humble way, I have actually been out of the PM operation quite a bit because as with scaling breaking through the door counts, there's a different business decision, different business pivots I've made. My primary goal is no longer doubling, tripling the current door counts anymore because if I just get all my clients to buy one more property, I already doubled my property management business.

And the profit is actually way more doing it this way. So my day to day right now is actually developing the AI agents in my current business structure. And I'm looking for a different synergy that's on top or has a signature with my current property management business. 

That's what I do all the time is try to figure out where is the margin coming from and how can I optimize it and where is a better opportunity in the next two to three years for the business.

Stephen Fox 
And when you say synergy, you talking about, so for example, we have clients that open a maintenance division and then they offer maintenance services to other property management companies or that open a home service company and then run that. Is that the type of synergy you're talking about or is it something else that I'm not understanding?

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So number one, brokerage, right? How to service our investor clients a little bit better so that they buy and sell with us. And once they buy, we take over the management. So that's the signature that I like a lot. There's also, you know, the in-house maintenance division is another one. Leasing service, right? 

Can we know, leasing service outside of our organization. Can we do it for other property managers? Right. Those are the stuff that I'm constantly paying attention to. And obviously the AI stuff could be, could potentially be another one where we're servicing another, you know, mid-size property management company using the workflow that we have. 

So those are the stuff that I'm really paying attention to, but my involvement in the property management is a monthly meeting with our team members to kind of check on, check on our staff and see how the AI agents is performing. And we also have a dashboard on how many times that failed. 

So all I need to do is to figure this out, talk to a couple of vendors that we have that I hired for the product development side of things for the AI. And a finance manager, because one hour a week can actually allow me to see exactly how each division is performing, and if we're making money or losing money.

Stephen Fox 
I guess to go back to something you said you said right now your focus is not on growing door count, but if you have everything so streamlined and Property management feeds these other businesses. Why wouldn't you want to grow door count?

Ping Hsu
Because we have to really decide where we allocate our energy. So I think 5 % of growth for property management is a healthy number without breaking our current system. Property management is a little bit different from any other industry. Every time that we onboard a client, it means that there's a problem that's coming along with it. It could be a tenant eviction. It could be a big project that the property is not livable.

Right? So there's typically like what I'm problems to the management. So I noticed that every time that I board too aggressively, this is where we can break the entire system. I want a nice and steady flow and then build that relationship and offer different types of service to the clients.

Stephen Fox 
So you are still looking to grow just at a slower pace than aggressive? Okay, understood.

Ping Hsu 
That's correct. Yeah. From 50 to 100, 150, right? That I wanted faster growth, but 800 for 5%, we're talking about maybe 40 additional doors. I'd do that slowly, especially with only three people. Yeah.

Stephen Fox 
Makes sense. And do you think at what door count do you think you would need to eventually hire a fourth person?

Ping Hsu 
Every time that we get closer to like 950, I feel the pressure already. So I either need to keep improving the AI agents or at that time I need to just hire out another person. Leasing is actually the biggest bottleneck in my opinion if we're onboarding more more clients.

Stephen Fox
Interesting. If you could go back in time to when you started your journey in property management, what is the one thing that you would have changed that you believe would have helped yourself succeed at a faster pace?

Ping Hsu 
First of all, hire a bookkeeper first from the get-go. Don't even try to do the accounting yourself. Second thing is try to look into the automation AI agents, AACP, to streamline your day-to-day.

In the beginning of the business phase, it's all about sales, putting yourself out there in front of the audience. Sales is the best defense, in my opinion, in the scaling phase or in startup phase. You need a money injection. You need the customers to be able to sustain the rest of the operation. I see a lot of newer I guess, operators who first got into property management space. They're thinking about the software, they're thinking about the process, they're thinking about the business structure. None of that actually matters. You need to get a paying customer.

at ASAP and focus on leasing to start off with if I were if I were to start over again into this market.

Stephen Fox 
You say focus on leasing meaning the strategy you did where it was like focus on just helping people with their leases and then once you've solved that issue then offer them full service.

Ping Hsu 
Yeah, exactly. And I want to give one last tip, because anybody who wants to grow right now and then just want, feels like they can handle a little bit more. It doesn't matter at which size, because we always do the same thing. Just go onto Facebook Marketplace, click the rentals or property rentals and set up your city for, let's say, 30 kilometers or miles radius. And it's going to pull all the lists, like the basically property for rent.

Go check, Go talk to every single one of them, except for being listed with the property managers or realtors, because these people, they all have a pain point. They need tenants, otherwise they're going to be bleeding money. Talk to all of them. If you do that consistently every single day, you're going to get some sales.

Stephen Fox
That's some great advice. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ping. for anyone that wants to connect with you. Where would be the best place for them to reach out?

Ping Hsu
IG so my IG handle is ping_realestate and then shoot me a message, happy to chat a little bit more. Thanks for having me.

Stephen Fox 
Thanks so much.