Transforming Leasing Practices

In working with property management entrepreneurs, we have noticed that sometimes the leasing side gets neglected.

In today’s episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Peter Roisman, founder of REV Leasing, to talk about unlocking the secret to high-performing leasing teams in property management.

You’ll Learn

[01:38] From the Sports Industry to Innovating in Leasing

[06:39] How to Hire an Amazing Leasing Team

[20:27] Why Leasing Should be a Priority

[28:37] How REV Leasing Can Help You Transform Leasing

Quotables

“Having instability in that position is kind of dangerous from a property owner standpoint and from a management standpoint as well.”

“It felt like, you know, if I could read, write and speak well and clearly and concisely, then it gave me an edge on the majority of the world and the world in general.”

“Leasing is sales in a way.”

“Owners tend to be focused on the bottom line, on the value they're creating because it's usually long-term and it affects them directly. Third-party managers are trying to get a job done and they're trying to do it as efficiently as possible.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Peter Roisman (00:00)

So I was talking to a high, high up person at live core. this person said to me,

 

Listen, I'm afraid to invest in my leasing people because they turn over so often. You know what I said? I would be afraid not to invest in my leasing people because they turn over so often.

 

Jason Hull (00:14)

All right, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses,

 

helping them add doors, improve pricing, increase profit, simplify operations, and build and replace teams. We are like bar rescue for property managers. In fact, we have cleaned up and rebranded over 300 businesses, done websites for hundreds more than that, and we've run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. At DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate

 

high trust, gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to expand the market, change perception, build awareness, eliminate the BS, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. All right, so today, my guest is Peter Roisman of REV Leasing. Welcome, Peter.

 

Peter Roisman (01:36)

Thanks Jason, glad to be here.

 

Jason Hull (01:38)

Great to have you. So before we get into REV Leasing and talking about the topic at hand, which is related to leasing teams and getting all that going, give us a little bit of background of how did you get into entrepreneurism and give us the backstory of leading to REV Leasing.

 

Peter Roisman (01:56)

Yeah. So I guess I was born to be an entrepreneur because I started my first business at 23 and, uh, stayed in that business for 15 or so years. was a sports agent, sports lawyer, and, ran around the country representing athletes and coaches and other types of sporting celebrities. And then had a younger family and wanted to be home a little more than being on the road 26 weeks a year. So I got into other kinds of businesses.

 

including real estate, started developing surgery centers probably another five years after that, and did that for 10 years, developed 21 surgery centers around six states. And from there, I got into the multifamily leasing business because my business partners, longtime friends,

 

I saw a void in that particular position within the multifamily property management world. As you know, it's a high turnover position and, you know.

 

It's the tip of the spear, as you say, and probably deserves a lot of respect because it's responsible for 97 % plus all revenues. And it's the first person anyone meets on a property. it sets the tone and is really important. And having instability in that position is kind of dangerous from a property owner standpoint and from a management standpoint as well.

 

Jason Hull (03:16)

Very cool. So what kind of inspired the, you went from sports to surgery centers to multifamily, then to property management. How did this path work out in your mind?

 

Peter Roisman (03:28)

Well, when

 

I was in law school, my wife will remember this, I was debating very hard between being a developer and being a sports lawyer, sports agent. And the sports agent won because I had my first client when I was already in law school. And so, you know, I was started and I got going and didn't have a lot of time for real estate development at the time as I was doing this. And I was always, you my father was a real estate developer as well as a lawyer and it ran in the family. But, you know, a lot of my friends

 

are many decade developers and owners and property managers. And so it was a natural evolution. The development of surgery centers kind of led to the next phase of my real estate journey.

 

Jason Hull (04:07)

Got it. Okay. Interesting. Interesting path. What do you feel like, I mean, being a sports agent and doing that, that's a very different and interesting career than doing the property management stuff. What do you feel like that empowered you or educated you on or enabled you to do? I mean, it sounds like there's some unique skills that come along with that.

 

Peter Roisman (04:28)

I think so. I like to think that the thing I learned in college and I went to a liberal arts school was to communicate. it felt like, you know, if I could read, write and speak well and clearly and concisely, then it gave me an edge on the majority of the world and the world in general. So.

 

I think, you know, understanding for the sports agency world, had to understand value and marketing as well as contracts and positioning your clients. So, you know, it's not that different if you think of a client as a property in a way. It's how do you position it best? It's kind of similar. It was true when I

 

got to, you know, think that was similar when I was a sports agent, I was managing, you know, high profile.

 

you know, successful, strong ego people. And when I was in the development of surgery center business, the only reason I was able to get in it was because I had done that. You know, doctors very much parallel athletes in that way. They're

 

Jason Hull (05:27)

Yeah.

 

Yes, yeah, a lot of ego there. how is that? also curious, part of your job, guess, in being a sports agent with spotting talent and picking potential. How is that translated into business?

 

Peter Roisman (05:43)

Well, I think that's absolutely true. And there's a saying that, you know, what determines whether you're a sports agent or not, whether you have a client.

 

Jason Hull (05:52)

Yeah.

 

Peter Roisman (05:53)

That's your qualifications. If you have a client, you're now a sports agent. So I happen to have a legal background, but many of the people I was competing against in the world of sports agency did not have legal background. They would just hire legal and they were, they were more marketing and recruiting based. And, you know, so I had, I had to take on marketing and recruiting skills and develop them and they had to hire legal so that we were in the same place.

 

Jason Hull (06:17)

So you had a little advantage because of the legal act.

 

Peter Roisman (06:21)

say a slight advantage and certainly in contracts and negotiating, sure.

 

Jason Hull (06:26)

Got it. Okay, so cool. Well, that leads us, you know, towards getting close to REV Leasing. So how did REV Leasing come about? What is it like? Give us, connect us to that.

 

Peter Roisman (06:37)

Sure.

 

Yeah, so it's different today than when we started six years ago. We started in 2019. We realized that as we talked a little bit about in the intro here, the leasing position is very important, but really, would say not.

 

The focus on it isn't quite where it should be in order to maximize performance on the property. the turnover is a scary thing.

 

When you have two or three times turnover of the same position in a year, and I think in a statistics was, was more than two times a leasing position turns over a year. it's highly unstable as a position that's that destabilizes properties. And so we realized that, you know, what people were doing to fill those voids, the job openings, a lot of times was hiring temp agencies, BG and Liberty being the two largest.

 

And, and oftentimes these were either recycled people from, from who put in a resume that said, Hey, I leasing somewhere else, or they were people really lacking qualifications and, and each of those presents a problem. And so what we realized was we could go outside of the industry, find talented people who could communicate and, and train them to be successful leasing agents. And so we did this about 500 times and we only took.

 

under 1 % of the candidates, we looked at resumes and took a half of 1 % and hired those people and trained them and put them out there in the field. think at any given time, the most people we had working on our team was about between 80 and 90. And so we had a pretty sizable kind of leasing replacement business, if you will. And so then from there, realized our first person we hired and trained was a manager of a restaurant.

 

And so she went out on property. We only had a trainer for maybe two weeks, which was not a full training program. It was a partial training program, but the client needed it. And so we put her out there and within a couple of days, they wanted to hire her from us as a property manager. we thought, check the box. We had done something correct for the industry because the industry recognized it. from there, we did that for a while and we realized.

 

it would be hard to manage hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people across the country. It's a very challenging ordeal to try to do that. And so we didn't want to be in this.

 

grand scale human capital business. So we realized that we wanted to be great leasing teams. And so we built these these teams. We took the best people from our 500. We put them on these teams that, you know, if you've heard of the company class, it's sort of like what we became. They're these expert leasing teams that do lease ups and distressed properties and come in and fix a problem and then depart. And so that's what we did for our next, you know, iteration of our

 

business. We did that for a couple of years. We had all success. had no failures. We took properties that were anywhere from 78 % occupied to low 80s. And we took them well into the mid 90s and all the properties were stabilized and the owners were happy. that was great. But again, we realized the same thing happened. We could become class. I think they have 50 people leasing for them at any given time. But we didn't want to be that, again, that human capital business. So we

 

again, reinvented ourselves and now this is where we are today. We invented ourselves to be a product company. And so we've got two products, essentially. One is an assessment tool, a REV Leasing score, if you will. And one is a training program. you know, 130 online training courses and we customize the training courses to the people who are supposed to learn. so, you know,

 

It's an opportunity for us to help the broader market because we're not limited by human capital. ⁓ We can help hundreds, if not thousands of properties at the same time because it's a self-learning program. We can do some consulting to get them on the right track, but essentially it's an ongoing process of self-improvement and people getting better to capture more revenues.

 

Jason Hull (10:52)

Got it. So the assessment tool piece helps to figure out if somebody could be a good leasing agent or is this broader than that?

 

Peter Roisman (11:00)

Well, that's one way to look at it. I think we're taking people as we find them. So let's say we find a client, they have 10 properties and they might have anywhere between 10 and 20 leasing people. And so...

 

We'll train them all and each one of them doesn't need the same thing. So we will customize the programs. And so as we assess them, we come up with scores and we know where some of their gaps are, if you will. And, you know, the three major areas, if you had to pick three areas that are common for focus in our business today, it's discovery, it's benefits selling, and it's closing.

 

And so we find that if agents can do those three things exceptionally well, that covers most of the ground. Now there are other, you know, there's seven or eight other major topics, but those are the three, big three I like to call them.

 

Jason Hull (11:52)

for leasing agents to get properties leased. Those are the major things.

 

Peter Roisman (11:53)

Correct. Yeah,

 

I can explain why real quickly if you want. It's, you know, discovery is where they get to know the person that walks through the door, right? And so once they know the person, then they can benefit sell to fit the person's needs and desires. And so if they haven't done a good job in discovery, they're certainly not going to do a good job of benefits. And so, but while this is all going on, they're moving towards closure, asking for the lease, right? And so.

 

Those are the three areas. There's, as I said, seven other areas. We have about 10 major topics. And so, you know, that's kind of where we are with our course training.

 

Jason Hull (12:32)

So it really sounds a lot like sales training.

 

Peter Roisman (12:35)

Yeah, it's absolutely leasing is sales in a way. mean, it's connecting with the person, understanding their needs and desires, upselling if you can a little bit. mean, there's just, want to create a home for someone, right? And sometimes that home has to double as an office, right? We've seen that a lot lately in the world.

 

And so, you know, if that's an opportunity, that might be a great benefit sell, right? That's something, if you have to work from home, listen, we have the highest speed internet available. We have this area of your home where you could use it as an office. You know, those are the kinds of thoughts that we put into our training.

 

Jason Hull (13:12)

Yeah, now you guys were in the placement sort of space and now you're more in the education sort of space. Do you guys still get involved in placement or do you partner with companies that do placement and to provide training material to them?

 

Peter Roisman (13:25)

That's a

 

great question. We are not really in the placement business, but we're actually in discussions right now with a placement company to up train their leasing placements so that they go in with higher levels of skill and perform better when they land. yes, that's something we're actually, it's funny you mentioned it because I have a meeting on Wednesday, a second meeting to discuss that exact topic.

 

Jason Hull (13:51)

Okay, cause I was thinking, man, maybe I should connect this guy to my contacts at sunroom and some others. okay. Yeah. All right. Very cool. So, you mentioned earlier when you were kind of entering sort of this space that you noticed some people had bad habits, they lacked skill. Um, I think one of the big mistakes that I've seen in the industry, and maybe you could touch on this is that a lot of people.

 

Peter Roisman (13:58)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jason Hull (14:18)

like property managers when they're trying to hire somebody for their team, they get caught up in this really limited thinking that I have to find somebody with property management experience. And it really seriously limits the candidate pool to the point where they almost really can't get good candidates. And they're getting people with bad habits, like old dogs who can't teach new tricks to maybe people that are like, or they have to go and find people with no skill.

 

Peter Roisman (14:32)

So.

 

That's so true.

 

Jason Hull (14:47)

or that are the wrong personality fit for the role, instead of just going find somebody that, for example, is just good at sales in general, and maybe has some natural personality towards sales that can be trained in property management. What are your thoughts on that? What have you seen?

 

Peter Roisman (15:02)

That's

 

exactly the premise that we started our business on six years ago. We realized that it would be harder to untrain someone and then teach them from, if you could get them near scratch, to teach them from the ground up, then it would be to find people with those personality traits and skills, communication skills, and just start them at zero.

 

You don't have to undo anything to start the training process. So at those 500 people we trained and hired, none of them had any leasing experience. And so that's precisely what we did. And I think the more that the industry looks outside of itself and doesn't, by the way, someone that shows a resume with leasing may or may not be good.

 

But I can tell you this, the way promotions happen, as you know, if you're very, very good at leasing, what happens? You get offered a manager's job.

 

That's very typical in our industry. And so if you're offered a manager's job, oftentimes takes you away from the leasing floor and you're looking at a computer all day. And so those skills that you use really well to lease apartments don't necessarily mean you're going to be great at being a manager. It doesn't mean you won't be, but it doesn't mean they translate directly to it. the people that, so you have that group of people that got promoted, right? Out of the leasing position. What about the people that don't get promoted?

 

Those are the people whose resumes are circulating. If you think about it, not, it's the unpromoted talent pool that most people are looking through. They're sifting through trying to find the diamond in the rough.

 

Jason Hull (16:31)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. I think salespeople like business development managers, for example, in a property management business and property managers, which are, you is a really loose term in this industry. It's a miscellaneous term that means just about anything, depending on who you ask. But in general, property managers, if you look at them as customer service people or client success people or client retention people, that's a very different personality type than a salesperson.

 

And so I would imagine that some of these, some of your training and some of these people that are coming up in as great leasing agents would probably like if they were going to take a step up, it would be towards being a business development manager. Cause those are important people. They bring in money into the business.

 

Peter Roisman (17:24)

They bring in all the money into the business other than pet fees and parking fees and who knows what these minor minor fees. So I think one way to look at it is because of the promotion up and out right up and over to manager from leasing from sales.

 

Jason Hull (17:26)

Yes.

 

Peter Roisman (17:41)

You know, we like to recommend for our clients that they create a sales silo, if you will. So when they get promoted, they get promoted to a manager of, instead of the person on the floor, maybe they're a manager of a couple of properties and they oversee that. There's no reason that there can't be a sales career, step ladder, if you will. And it actually would really stabilize a portfolio in a company that owns multiple properties.

 

Jason Hull (18:07)

Yeah, I agree. agree. Well, cool. What do people typically ask about REV Leasing let's convince some people that maybe it's a good idea for them to get some support from you guys.

 

Peter Roisman (18:17)

Yeah, so we typically tell people go get a demo from us, see what our courses look like, try to understand. If you're a mid-cap company, you might be 20 properties to 100 properties, right? You're not Graystar, you're not LivCorp, you're not these massive companies that have thousand properties or whatever they have. I think LivCorp has 2,800 properties or something like that.

 

Jason Hull (18:41)

Yeah, a few.

 

Peter Roisman (18:43)

These large companies, they're very large. If you have 50 properties, you're running a large portfolio. This is a way to have, I don't know, what do you call it? A level scorecard? You can actually measure all of your leasing people against the same standard.

 

And that's great. You can train them all the same way. And so it's a way of portfolio managing. And that's a really good thing. It's a way of stabilizing a property. Now, when a property is stabilized, I like to think of it from a financial marketplace as well. A stable property gets better treatment from the financial markets. There's no question about it. A stable property will get better interest rates, a lower cap rate when it sells.

 

It will, you know, essentially...

 

It's one of those things where it increases the value of your property to be stable. And a great way to stabilize is to have the same leasing person there for a couple of years instead of turning over in six months or four months or whatever it is. Because when you're going to retain your residents, they always like to know who they leased from initially. They'll go back in the office and they'll talk to them. And so you'll have a much better retention, resident retention rate if you've got stability in your leasing office than if you have huge turnover.

 

And so, you know, we like to recommend, you know, by the way, you're, let's say you're,

 

you know, you're looking for capital investment, investment capital in the marketplace. You're going to attract more investment capital if your properties are stabilized than if they're destabilized. So, I mean, there's no reason to not add value to what you're doing if it's as simple as just training up your team and keeping them and having them feel important and be important to your organization. It's just empowering.

 

Jason Hull (20:27)

You know, this is interesting because I think there's a lot of property managers I've spoken to that feel like the leasing side of the business is not that important. They just, they really just focus on business development and they focus on operations and they're like, and you know, seasonally I need some leasing agents. So they go and kind of tap some real estate agents on the shoulder and say, could you kind of open some properties and do some leasing for us and help us get these things turned over?

 

And these agents are probably not super well trained in leasing in general. And so how could, what do you say to that? And then what, how could REV maybe fill in that gap?

 

Peter Roisman (21:07)

Yeah. So again, I'll go back to the stability thing because if you're thinking long-term, which real estate should be a long-term investment, The markets do change, you know, month to month, but you're buying something. You're typically not going to flip it the next month. You're going to flip it if you're even a flipper. know, people are buying whole too. There's no reason not to build a portfolio if it's cash flowing, right? Cash flowing positive. Why not? So the end of the day,

 

Stability is a good thing in real estate. know, instability is a bad thing. And so if you can stabilize your team and it's the, I had, I had, it's, the position that's probably the most unstable. think, I think maintenance is also a problem area, but we don't work in maintenance, but, certainly leasing is that position that turns over all the time. So I was talking to a high, high up person at live core. Okay. Just having dinner. said, listen, you know, this is what we do. And, and this person said to me,

 

Listen, I'm afraid to invest in my leasing people because they turn over so often. You know what I said? I would be afraid not to invest in my leasing people because they turn over so often. You know, I like to attack problems. mean, when I see a problem in business, I think you come up with the most creative solution you can and go attack it and make it affordable for people to use, make it make sense, and just fill that void. There's sort of a void right now when it comes to

 

keeping skilled leasing people in position. And I think we can help a lot of people with that.

 

Jason Hull (22:33)

So do you feel like REV will help with decreasing the turnover? Or do you feel like turnover is just part of the game with leasing? And so it's really about being able to ramp them up quickly.

 

Peter Roisman (22:45)

I think both. think you ramp them up as quickly as you can. But when people are successful at something, they tend to stay at it for a little longer. And if you compensate them well, and good leasing people should be compensated probably at the high end of the scale. Because as you said, they are responsible for revenues. And every dollar that comes in essentially is due to them. And so, due to their efforts. so,

 

You know, I would be afraid not to invest in my leasing people. I would want them to be the strongest, most confident, most capable people in my office. The management team has to be really, really good, but the leasing people have to be stable and do a great job. As I said before, they're the first person you meet when you walk in the door. They represent your company in so many ways. They're like the advertising for your company.

 

Jason Hull (23:37)

So I think there's also this perception that a lot of property managers, they're so focused on getting their third party management clients that they're not paying attention as much to the residents or the tenants in some situations. then when it gets into, when the market kind of shifts and it's a little bit more difficult to rent the properties out, because there's certain times, you know, where it's very easy, right? There's maybe low inventory, it's really easy to get the properties rented out. But as soon as it gets a little bit tough,

 

Nobody thinks, well, maybe I need better leasing agents. I never hear that. They're usually like, it's the market. And they're just blaming the market. you're one of the first I've heard to kind of bring up maybe this counterpoint. So could you touch on that a little bit?

 

Peter Roisman (24:17)

Yes, absolutely. So I'll step out on a limb a little bit too to do it because at this point in the late 80s, the Resolution Trust Corporation, when there was a huge number of foreclosures, right? So the government had to step in and this quasi-agency, quasi-government agency, Resolution Trust Corporation stepped in and created third party management. Up to that point, it was all owner managed.

 

And so that was the beginning of the shift to 40 years later, nearly 40, 35 years later. Today, did you know 51 % of all properties, multifamily, are managed by third-party management companies? More than owner-managed at this point.

 

Jason Hull (24:56)

Interesting.

 

No, that

 

sounds like that would be even higher, much higher than a long-term residential, like single family, stuff like that. Yeah.

 

Peter Roisman (25:08)

Yes, absolutely

 

right. So think about the third party management companies. They're highly competitive with each other. ⁓ I don't think they compete very well with owner managed companies because the bottom line is it's so important to owner managed companies. Every dollar saved multiply by 20 and that's what it means to them in value. Pick a number, pick by 16 if you want to use a, you know.

 

Jason Hull (25:25)

Yeah.

 

Peter Roisman (25:35)

six cap, you want to use a five cap, whatever you want to use. At the end of the day, a dollar means $20 is the way I think about it. And so that's not true for third party management companies. They're there to perform a job. They do by and large a pretty fair job, but they're not thinking leasing. It's not primary in their minds.

 

We're finding the owners are really paying attention to this. I would love for a day, maybe someone listening to your show, who's a third party manager, to get the edge on all the other third party management companies and provide leasing as one of the primary things that they do for a property. You know, when a class goes in today, or when we used to go in as this...

 

Jason Hull (25:55)

Right.

 

Peter Roisman (26:18)

I don't know, fire department, SWAT team, whatever you want to call it, to fix a property that's in distress or is a lease up situation. When we left, we found that we would get a call six months later and they'd be in the same situation. So isn't it just better to fix the problem on an ongoing basis than have to keep fixing the problem and bringing in a SWAT team? I think so. It seems to make sense.

 

Jason Hull (26:32)

Hmm.

 

Yeah, so it sounds like I think, you know, when times are good for property managers when it comes to leasing, they probably get comfortable and think, well, this is just normal, even though it might be exceptional. And then when the market shifts and it's a little tougher to get tenants placed and to get properties rented out, you need to create a competitive advantage. And it sounds like making leasing a primary focus instead of an afterthought could be that competitive advantage.

 

that because you're getting properties rented out much faster than your competition when the market's tough instead of just saying well the market's tough and losing business.

 

Peter Roisman (27:13)

Yes.

 

I think that's true. think, I think in all moments, you know, it makes sense to perform better than your competition. If you can get more dollars per square foot, uh, if you, know, if you give fewer concessions, if you don't have to use locators, if you can cut your ad budget. mean, all that stuff is cost savings. There's no reason to not save costs at any moment in this world. Okay. So we're really talking about revenues 95 % of the time, but at the same time, if you use us, you do save costs because.

 

people will will concess less often. will not use locators as often and their ad costs will be cut. So there's money to be found on both ends of this. We think the revenue side is a lot greater, but the impact immediately of saving bottom line dollars is real.

 

Jason Hull (28:04)

So some people, some property managers maybe listen to this might think, well, maybe this solution of Peters is something that makes sense if I have a decent, like a pretty large portfolio, or maybe I've got a bunch of multifamily properties that I'm struggling to, you know, with vacancies on. What about the mom, pa shops that maybe have a hundred units or less that are managing maybe 300 units or less.

 

that would make sense for them to be reaching out to boost up their leasing chops, so to speak.

 

Peter Roisman (28:37)

Yeah, the beauty of because we're a product at this point, it would be a lot harder for us to help those smaller companies if we were providing human capital to fix it.

 

Jason Hull (28:48)

Right.

 

Peter Roisman (28:49)

So every one of those situations still has somebody doing the leasing. So there's really no reason to have that person perform at the highest possible level and take the courses, get a training program that's customized to them and do the best they absolutely can and capture the dollars that they can capture. I think it's really, it's from small to large. think, could LivCourse or someone at the top end of the market use us? Probably.

 

That would be challenging, but it would certainly give portfolio comparability. If you've got properties all over the place, how do you compare your leasing team? You're looking at bottom line numbers. don't know. I always think about it this way. Let's say you're buying a property and you're looking at financial statements and you see how many leases they're getting a month and you see what they're for rental rates.

 

You don't know, we do because we now, we discover it, but from reading those financial statements, you don't know whether the leasing team closed.

 

eight leases out of 30 opportunities that month, or they closed eight out of nine, right? You just don't know their performance. And if you're buying a property, I know if I'm buying a property, I want to know if the leasing team is maximizing or not maximizing the opportunity that's there. And so if they're not maximizing, it leaves a lot of money on the table where you could actually go in and buy a property and fix that and then increase value to the property. So, you know, I look

 

Jason Hull (29:56)

Okay.

 

Peter Roisman (30:18)

at this, this is new data. This is data that can help investors, it can help managers, it can help ⁓ asset managers, it helps owners. It's just there's no reason not to be the best you can be. That's kind of the way we're looking at this.

 

Jason Hull (30:32)

So some, think there's probably many property managers that will listen to the show and think, well, I don't think I have a problem with leasing. What blind spots can we expose for them right now? Like what, what leaks or problems are they most business owners kind of blind to when it comes to leasing? Cause I think some are probably thinking leasing simple. Like I just, you know, if the property is vacant, I might just go have somebody open it up and show it. And I'll use my showing tool like Tenant Turner or ShowMojo or Rently.

 

get them in and like, you know, it's just, sort of happens. maybe they're not tracking, maybe they're not maximizing, as you say. So like, let's, I think sometimes if they're not already reaching out for help like this, it's maybe because they have a blind spot or two. What are some of the blind spots you've noticed or realized that, and what impact could this have on this or what impacts have you seen?

 

Peter Roisman (31:06)

Yeah.

 

Jason Hull (31:27)

that maybe they're missing, what benefits are they missing out on?

 

Peter Roisman (31:30)

I think the blind spots are some of the things we already talked about, maybe some others too, but the blind spot to me is.

 

dollars left on the table, you know, an empty unit, you know, if it's empty for a couple of months, that's revenue loss forever. It's like an airplane took off without a seat filled. And so, you know, and the other way to look at this is let's say a property is 95 % leased. I've seen a lot of properties that are 95 % leased that are not maximizing. They may be.

 

they may have missed an opportunity because the market around them is leasing at, you know, 30 cents more a foot and they're missing it. Maybe they needed to do some value adds, some small improvements, but they didn't capture everything that was there and available to them. And so from an owner's perspective, owners tend to be focused on the bottom line, on the value they're creating because it's usually long-term and it affects them directly.

 

third-party managers are trying to get a job done and they're trying to do it as efficiently as possible. so just one, I mean when I talk to third-party management companies...

 

They won't call us typically, at least in other iterations of our business, until they got a real problem and we were the fire at that point, because they thought they could fix it. And you know what? Most of times they probably could, but it did take focus. And I know people that are property managers watching this know when they're in a fire drill, because it'll be all hands on deck when they've got 20 units vacant, everyone gets involved.

 

Jason Hull (32:40)

Right?

 

Peter Roisman (33:01)

But you don't want to get to that point. You might as well have a stabilized leasing team that doesn't get ever get there. And it stabilizes your resident renewals. It stabilizes, you know, your lack of using, you know, advertising sources, your lack of using, you know, locators, all of the things. It's, it's. I guess if I had to tell someone listening to this program, I'd say, listen, just focus on leasing for a change in multifamily because it's important.

 

And you will save costs doing it, but you're going to gain on the revenue side significantly if you train your people up.

 

Jason Hull (33:36)

Got it. Yeah, I think, you know, you mentioned dollars left on the table. Obviously you're going to lose clients if you're not getting stuff rented out. And if you're doing third party, you said 95 % might be leased, but they're not maximizing, which means maybe stuff's rented out, but they aren't pulling in as much rent as they could be. They may be not getting some of the other fees. So your system trains the leasing agents on maximization. Is this part of the process?

 

Peter Roisman (34:02)

I think the system at this point, yes, we train our people to upsell. That's part of our program. We train the managers.

 

of the program, managers of the leasing team, to watch for things like that, to be aware of the market, to know who your sub market is, know people down the street that are charging, you know, know, $50 more, $100 more, and why they're getting it. So, you know, it's, it's, it's literally just more information and more opportunity to compete well. I mean, it's no guarantee you're going to win. But you know what, if you compete well, you could very well win your sub market.

 

Jason Hull (34:45)

And so it sounds like one of the glaring blind spots that's created is just a lack of data, a lack of tracking, lack of metrics. They're not paying attention to how many showings have we done versus how many have gotten leased out. It sounds like your training also isn't just for the leasing agents, but it helps maybe the business owner or the head of the property management arm of the business to kind of figure and learn how to do this piece as well.

 

Peter Roisman (35:10)

Absolutely. So they get regular reports from us. They'll see how the team's doing. They'll figure out a way to incentivize the team to do better because incentives do factor in here. We have a certification program. We're certified by the state of Texas, you know, for certified leasing agents. And so they can, they can put, you know, certified leasing professional, you know, letters after their name, if they complete our course, full course program. So that's kind of cool. And there's only two states in the country that offer that Virginia and Texas. And so.

 

We've got a Texas certification because we're based in Texas. But yeah, we're serious about helping the marketplace. And we think we can help virtually anybody that wants to help themselves.

 

Jason Hull (35:50)

Now you've mentioned multifamily. What about property managers that are more in the single family residential, maybe individual condo units, small multi kind of space? this be beneficial to them as well?

 

Peter Roisman (36:03)

I think learning leasing is beneficial to anybody. And so, you know, the answer is yes. I think, you know, the opportunity is probably greater in the mid cap portfolio play because you're improving 50 properties, you're getting 50 times the return on it, right? If you're improving one property, you know, you know how it goes.

 

Jason Hull (36:26)

Okay, got it. Well, this has been super informative. Really interesting to take a fresh look at the leasing side and making that a priority. I can see how that would be a benefit, especially right now while some markets are really struggling to get things rented out and that vacancies are a little bit higher in some markets right now. I think this could be a big advantage for those that are wanting to up their game there instead of just

 

be a victim of the market.

 

Peter Roisman (36:55)

It is, it's take the bull by the horns time. And it is a little difficult out there right now. know, interest rates are not low. They're in the middle. They're not as bad as they could be, but they certainly could go lower. And so the cost of operating a business, multifamily business is high. And so you have to find revenues where you can. If you can save costs at the same time, why not do it?

 

Jason Hull (37:16)

All right, well, we know there's some big changes coming down the pike with the big, beautiful bill. And I think real estate investors in general are optimistic and excited about this. So it should be interesting to see what happens and how that affects leasing. But, you know, eventually. Well, Peter, I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow show. This has been very insightful. Any parting words for some of the property managers out there that are listening?

 

and how can they get in touch with you and your company.

 

Peter Roisman (37:45)

Sure, sure. You can get in touch with us at rev-leasing.com and you can request a demo. It's a good way to find out about what we do. And I guess if you had to take one golden nugget from this, I'd say don't ignore leasing. It's something that's not, know, that's really hasn't gotten the focus, the attention of the marketplace. I go to conferences and I hear talking about cost savings all the time and I'm not...

 

diminishing the value of saving costs, it's always very good to consolidate when you can, but nobody, and I mean almost nobody is talking about how to grow revenues in a realistic way. And so why not have your people be trained as well as they can and capture all the revenues you can.

 

Jason Hull (38:30)

There you have it, Peter Roisman , awesome. So don't sleep on leasing and go check out rev-leasing.com and you might be able to grow your revenue.

 

Peter Roisman (38:43)

I think they can.

 

Jason Hull (38:44)

All

 

right, Peter, appreciate you coming on the show. So, all right, for everybody else that's watching this and listening, if you felt stuck or stagnant in your property management business, you want to take it to the next level, reach out to us at doorgrow.com. Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners at doorgrowclub.com. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. And until next time, remember the slowest.

 

Peter Roisman (38:47)

Thanks.

 

Jason Hull (39:13)

slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.