A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

I’m Obsessed With My New Travel Router

Last week in a conference hotel, I tested out this nifty little travel router:

GL.iNet GL-MT3000 Beryl Wi-Fi Travel Router

I plugged it into the ethernet cable that was going into the TV and got 600Mbps down/up on Wi-Fi across all my devices (with no captive portal/login). Very slick.

Instantly going on my "must-have" list for frequent travelers. And apparently if there’s no ethernet cable/plug available, you can simply log in to the hotel’s Wi-Fi portal once on the router, then all your devices connect with no captive portal (eg - my Kindle, Apple Watch, etc).

What makes this all 100x better is setting up the travel router with the same network name & password as your home Wi-Fi. Then all your devices connect instantly once the router is online. I can already tell this is going to be magical when traveling with the family (all the tablets, laptops, phones, watches, kindles etc WILL JUST WORK). Spectacular.

Buy it here on Amazon. Goes for about $98 as of this writing.

-Peter

Misc Updates Around the PM World

• Peter & The Wolf Live returns this Thursday. The topic: AI & Property Management: What’s Actually Working for Us. Sharing our latest wins implementing AI into our property management businesses.

• Crane applications close again this Thursday. Last chance to apply. If you bank with Enterprise be sure to mention that.

• LeadSimple is introducing something called “LeadSimple One” during a live webinar on Thursday. Register here for access + recording.

• I started a TikTok to share behind-the-scenes property management content. Still experimenting with formats. Check it out and give me a follow there. I only have 112 people so far.

Survey responses from last week’s newsletter poll.

Why Maintenance Keeps Coming Back From the Dead

I've solved the same maintenance problem three times. Each fix worked for a few years, then the Google reviews started rolling in, and I'd find that eight of the ten changes we put in place had quietly stopped happening. On our recent episode of The Crane Podcast, Mark Brower and I get into why maintenance is so much harder to systemize than leasing or rent collection:

We also cover occupied maintenance vs. turnovers, how Mark's Mason AI knew more about a flood repair than the assigned property manager, and what happened after I released the API Grader (six vendors have already told me they're making improvements).

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Last month it was Buildium increasing ACH fees (again), so I had to bring this masterpiece back out of the meme vault:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. My 8 takeaways from the AppFolio FUTURE conference.

2. Podcast with Tracy Streich (NARPM Treasurer & 2027 President-Elect).

3. EliseAI raised $350M at a $4B valuation.

Readers Respond

I’m trying something new this week: real replies and responses to previous newsletters (from readers like you)

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The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

My 8 Quick Takeaways From AppFolio Future

Just regaining my bearings after a whirlwind week in San Diego with ~2,500 AppFolio customers, team members, and vendor partners. It was great to see a lot of familiar faces, and make to some new friends as well. Property management immersion therapy (AKA, an industry conference) always reenergizes me.

Here are my initial takeaways from the event:

1. AppFolio spent 2026 improving & expanding their existing product suite. In ‘24 they introduced Realm-X, and in ‘25 they added Performers (agents). Rather than another headlining another new product, the company chose to spend this year expanding the capabilities of what they already have (a goal I will almost never disagree with).

2. The average property manager has a LOT of room to run with their existing platform. The educational content was aimed at this crowd and I think that was smart on AppFolio’s part. They obviously have granular data on the usage of their own product and decided to focus on the basics this year. As a property manager, I’d rather use something built-in to my main property management software than pay for something extra—but that only works if I know about it in the first place!

3. AppFolio has a small handful of primary strategic partners (eg - Column and Second Nature), and they’re choosing to elevate them in very public ways. From the stage to the vendor floor, it’s clear that AppFolio isn’t afraid to spend reputational and financial capital to steer customers toward their partners. One can be sure that AppFolio stands to gain from their success (in the case of Second Nature, they’re part-owners; in the case of Column, one can only speculate). “Non-primary” partners are left to wonder about their status moving forward.

4. System-of-Record platforms (like AppFolio) and their point solution software (Stack) vendors will always be in tension. As AppFolio and its Stack partners continue to expand their capabilities, particularly in the areas that touch transactional revenue, expect friction and eventually fractures. Put yourself in the shoes of a Stack partner like Property Meld or LeadSimple—AppFolio is on stage bragging about AI-powered product enhancements aimed squarely at eliminating the problem you solve for your customers. It’s got to be tough to stomach.

5. The competitive dynamics at play right now between AppFolio & its competitors are mostly opaque to their customers. That’s not an issue as long as everyone’s incentives are aligned (ie, AppFolio wins by making a superior product, which benefits its customers). But the market for B2B software is evolving, consolidating, and AI is decimating existing moats with unpredictable results. It’s not clear to me that delivering a superior product is sufficient to satisfy AppFolio and/or its shareholders as a strategy. There are… other strategies at play which have nothing to do with product quality. I don’t love that for AppFolio’s customers (to be honest I doubt AF execs love it either, but they clearly believe it’s required to compete, and maybe that’s true). I don’t really have any answers here, but as a property management operator, I think it’s worth paying attention to and thinking carefully about.

6. Far from the sloppy AI transfusion into other platforms, AI is in AppFolio’s DNA. On stage yesterday, Dom Beveridge described “AI-First” as a philosophy that “Puts AI at the core of decision-making, product design, and workflows, not as a secondary add-on or efficiency tool.” I think that’s a legitimate characterization of AppFolio.

7. We had nearly a dozen Crane members & partners on stage throughout the week, including Stratton Vantage PM (Damon Stratton) who got featured in a keynote and their press release. You love to see it. By the way—applications for Crane membership are open for six more days. We’ve received over 50 applications already, but are capping new memberships at 60 companies until next year. Submit yours here.

8. Want my real-time thoughts on their specific product announcements? Catch the upcoming episode my of my podcast, featuring AppFolio’s VP of Product Marketing Daniel Waas, recorded live from the tradeshow floor. He turned the mic around and interviewed me! And thanks again to the AppFolio team for putting me on stage, and tolerating an opinionated non-customer at your largest annual event!

AppFolio’s Daniel Waas and yours truly, AppFolio Future 2026

______

Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from PMs. Submit your idea here.

If AI made self-management easier, how many of your owners would leave?

Property managers guessed 36%. Owners said 79%.

That's a little sneak peek at some new AppFolio and NARPM research Tracy Streich is presenting at NARPM National (he gave me an early look on the podcast).

Tracy is NARPM's treasurer and president-elect for 2027, so most of our conversation is about what's changing inside NARPM: the move to MCI, the Executive Director search, and why I think NARPM should spend some of its millions taking bad landlord laws to court.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• Remote-managed furnished rental business in Tulare County, CA (asking $745k, $565k gross revenue)

• 40-year property management and property services business in Fairfield County, CT (asking $420k, $456k gross revenue)

• Established property management firm in Western Montana (asking $145k, $146k gross revenue)

• Boutique residential PM firm in Denver, CO (asking $549k, $562k gross revenue)

Sponsored by Boom. Leads go cold between your CRM, your showing tool, and your screening tool. Boom puts all three in one platform: capture the lead, book the tour, and screen the applicant. See why over 25% of Peter's Top 40 PMCs use Boom.
Book a demo.

Industry News & Events

• AppFolio announced a slew of improvements to their product, mostly around Realm-X and AI Performers (agents), at their annual 2500-person Future real estate conference this week.

• EliseAI raised $350M at a $4B valuation. Rumors are swirling of a property accounting platform in development.

• Google announced a Google Business Profile (GBP) update having to do with data collection & verification. “Google may occasionally reach out using automated messages via call, text, or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your profile.”

• Tickets to the 2027 Elevate Sales Kickoff Event just went on sale. Early bird pricing is just $295 ($150 off). My marketing guy went last year and told me he had a great experience.

• Delray Beach property manager accused of over $100K rent scheme targeting immigrants. “To cover up missing payments, she altered numbers in the Yardi software and shifted funds from paying tenants to delinquent accounts. In some instances, she forced tenants to move units or filed false eviction paperwork to write off debts and make her thefts disappear from the ledger.”

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Missed It? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. What’s the deal with group rate internet?

2. Podcast with Lisa Horner (AppFolio)

3. AI-powered PM network?!

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

I’m scaling my 700+ door property management company with…

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

Note: I’m in San Diego this week, at AppFolio Future. Say hi if you see me!

What’s the Deal With Group Rate Internet?

Group-Rate Internet (GRI) is one of the fastest-growing resident benefits in property management, and something I'm seriously considering adding at my company. But what is it actually? And how is it different from internet offered to residents by utility concierge companies?

GRI mechanics:

The GRI provider negotiates a wholesale rate with major internet providers, generally in the $40s/month for gig-speed fiber service with no install/equipment/data-cap fees. The property manager enters into an agreement with the provider to purchase internet from the provider at some or all of the properties that they manage. Then, the PM sets a markup and offers to include it in the lease for qualifying properties, typically price-locked for a few years.

Before moving on let’s define some terms, because this is slightly confusing:

• Bulk internet is what millions of large apartment units run on. The owner signs a long contract (often 7 years) and commits specific units, so it's a mandatory program. Conservice offers this, mostly to multifamily owner-operators. It doesn't really work for third-party managers, because we can't commit an owner's units for that long.

• Group-rate internet (GRI) is more flexible: no 7-year term and no minimum unit commitment. Second Nature appears to have pioneered this SFR-geared alternative to Bulk Internet.

• Internet Concierge providers have been around forever in our space (think Citizen Home Solutions and similar). They simply negotiate affiliate deals with the ISPs, handle setup for/with the resident, and share the ISP affiliate revenue with the property managers. Importantly with these programs, the PM is not billing residents for internet; they pay the ISP directly. It’s a one-time transaction, not a billing & tech support relationship like the above 2 programs.

Importantly, how GRI is offered to tenants isn't always as straightforward as it seems on paper. Eg - can you make it required? Should you? How much should you charge; can you make a real profit on it without gouging residents?

So I did some research and put together some key info on group-rate internet, with a few things to watch out for before you offer it at your company.

NOTE: This is not a sponsored post, and there are no affiliate links. This is just a topic I’ve been curious about.

The critique 

I’ve heard some interesting feedback from PMs who have already implemented GRI, and one vendor even pressure-tested these programs against real address-level pricing and brought some interesting points to my attention:

1. Across hundreds of test addresses and 20+ PM companies, this vendor has “never found one priced below the ISP's direct rate at that address.” They report that typical GRI markups run anywhere from 10–65% over ISP retail pricing. NOTE: this is a small sample against millions of rental properties and ~31k PM companies, so weigh accordingly.

2. Recent data shows that only about 32% of American households actually have gig-speed internet, per FCC data. This vendor’s internal data is slightly lower, showing roughly 30% of users picking full gig speeds when given the choice.

3. The wholesale rate itself isn't always a bargain compared to direct ISP promo pricing. The vendor claims its direct-purchase data shows advertised promo prices are usually honored as billed, not inflated later, and are lower than most GRI pricing.

4. They argue that, while some GRI pricing only pays off over multiple years of service, tenants typically sign one 12-month lease at a time. A resident who leaves after one year will have paid the markup in full without ever seeing the multi-year value the pricing was built around.

A caveat on the source. This vendor sells a concierge model, so it has a real stake in how GRI gets perceived. I haven't been able to validate its data. Weigh the claims above with that in mind.

I’ll address these points one at a time: 

First, the gig-speed number is probably understated. Per this vendor's research, most tenants with a real choice land at 100–939 Mbps. But 939 Mbps is what ISPs consider gig service, and the vendor's “30% pick gig” figure seems to leave those plans out. And even if the average tenant chooses a 300–500 Mbps plan, the price gap between half-gig and full-gig is often deliberately small (an ISP upsell), and a fair markup on GRI can make up for that.

Second, internet needs are changing. Work-from-home file uploads, posting on video social apps such as TikTok, video calls, and livestreaming all require substantial download AND upload speeds. While cable/copper internet often looks fine on download speed, it usually fails to deliver on upload. They are NOTORIOUS for this; it’s outrageous. In fact, until I made some big changes a couple of months ago, the cable internet at my house AND my office both had upload speeds below 40Mbps. Fiber (where most full-gig speeds are offered) runs near-symmetrical, something I learned when I switched my own Columbus office this year.

On promo reliability: fair, and I can't counter it with my own data. But Broadband Facts exists because promo pricing wasn't reliable enough for the FCC to leave undisclosed (more on this later). If group-rate flat pricing is genuinely more honest than that, it strengthens the case for GRI, as long as the markup stays reasonable. As I understand it, GRI covers additional install/equipment/data-cap fees, which is often more transparent than ISP promo fine print or buried Broadband Facts.

On lease term vs. tenancy: pricing off a 12-month legal minimum doesn't reflect how PMs operate. RL's average tenancy is 4.5 years, close to the industry norm. I'd rather price based on how long the average resident who stays past year one pays, even though nobody can promise that at signing.

These are just my thoughts. I still encourage everyone to do their own research in their own market. Concierge programs still have their place and are undeniably simpler to implement. I personally know dozens of property managers doing very well with those programs. Don’t consider this an full-throated endorsement of GRI; I’m just exploring the concept and sharing what I’ve learned during research.

Check the broadband numbers yourself

Since April 2024, ISPs must publish a standardized "Broadband Facts" label: the real price, including what it becomes after a promo. Almost nobody checks it. I pulled one for a Columbus address: $50 promo at checkout, $110/month on the label, plus $20 activation and $50 install. This is where direct ISP pricing can be tricky. Sometimes it's transparent and straightforward; other times, a million fees or stipulations are buried in the actual pricing. With the help of AI, it's easy to do a quick check for local ISPs in your area. Here’s an example:

As you can see here, once we hit the $65/month flat fee (a $25 markup from the PM), group-rate internet starts to be less competitive than other options in my area. Again, pricing varies by state and market, so pull your own numbers. 

A few suggestions:

1. Check the prices yourself. Pull the Broadband Facts label for your own addresses across multiple ISPs rather than taking anyone's number at face value.

2. Position it as included, with an opt-out. Second Nature suggests copy along the lines of “high-speed internet comes included with the home at an exclusive group rate,” with residents free to opt out. Make the opt-out option clear in the listing, application and at lease signing.

3. Set a fair markup, so your GRI is at or below the best retail pricing available (and tell residents this).

Andrew Smallwood, CSO of Second Nature, told me that with GRI “our customers have consistently seen properties lease up to 2-5 days faster than those without group rate internet. We've never had a product launch with more demand, the value is incredible.”

Expect more companies to begin offering GRI, and more property managers to begin adopting it. Will you be one of them? Answer in the poll below.

-Peter

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• We’re only taking 60 more memberships for Crane this year(!), and 41 people have already applied. Get yours in now.

• Rentvine and Blanket both launched owner Owner CRM products recently.

• AppFolio announced Column as its “Featured Banking Partner.”

• Rising Tide, led by CEO Blake Mohseni, raised a seed round to “Build a network of independent property management companies powered by AI and shared technology.”

Podcast Archives: From Last Year’s AppFolio FUTURE Conference with Lisa Horner

I'm at the AppFolio FUTURE conference in San Diego right now and wanted to share the live podcast I recorded with their CMO, Lisa Horner, at last year's conference:

We discussed AI hype vs. real impact, why understanding your customer beats clever tactics, and how AppFolio keeps engineers on the tradeshow floor to stay close to operators. We also touched on branding (it starts with "who are we?"), leadership transitions, and how to prep for AI-driven change without panicking.

Available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts

P.S. I'm recording another one of these with Daniel Waas at the conference this week, so stay tuned!

Meme Tuesday:

I really did do this…

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Crane applications are open until Oct. 8 (limited spots available)

2. AI platform advice from Brian Lovin.

3. How to spend $1,300 on tokens in two days.

Did someone send you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

Crane Applications Now Open, But Limited To 60

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you've heard me talk about Crane plenty (sorry, not sorry). If you're new here, Crane is the private community Wolfgang Croskey and I built exclusively for PM business owners & operators who are tired of figuring all of this out alone.

Applications opened to our waitlist earlier this week, and as of today, they're open to everyone.

April was our biggest round yet (100+ new members joined), so this time we're keeping it smaller and limiting the round to 60 new companies. Applications are already pouring in, so if you've ever been interested in joining, now's a good time to apply. (NOTE: if we hit 60 before the window closes, that's it until next year.)

What's New In Crane

Two recent big additions I'm excited about:

First, Sagan is now building AI agents for Crane members. This used to be available only with a Sagan membership. You bring a problem (or pick from their list of agent ideas built specifically for SFR property management), and Sagan's team handles the discovery, scoping, build, and ongoing maintenance. You aren't stuck figuring out how to wire it all together yourself, which is where most AI projects die (trust me, I’ve been there).

Second, PlanOmatic has joined as a Crane Partner, which makes great listing photos a much easier call on every rental. Members get:

• PlanOmatic membership fee waived ($240 value)

• 3 free AI virtual staging images on every order

• 15% off all services

• $600 in photography credit for new PlanOmatic clients

What I Actually Want For You

When we started Crane, I set two personal goals for every member, and they haven't changed:

The first is that you get at least 10x the value of what you pay. If you're not getting that, something's off, and I want to know about it.

The second matters more to me: I want you to take a real Crane Break every year. 
1-4 weeks where you fully disconnect from your business. No Slack, no email, no "quick check-ins." Watching members do this for the first time, and seeing their companies run just fine without them, has been one of the most rewarding parts of this whole thing for me.

Membership is $5,000/year (we offer a monthly plan also). You can use Enterprise credits!

If you own a PM company with at least 150 doors under management, I'd love for you to apply and see if there's a place for you inside Crane: APPLY HERE

-Peter

______

Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from PMs. Submit your idea here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY APPFOLIO

The Event Where Real Estate
Makes Its Next Move

FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is four days tailored to operators who want to turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance.

San Diego: September 28–October 1, 2026

Hands-on training, live demos, and time with the operators, investors, and innovators setting the pace in real estate. Leave with a playbook, not just a notebook.

Keynotes from Dr. Maya Shankar and Andre Agassi, plus live music from a living legend. See you there!

Register Now

Have you ever spent $1,300 on an AI agent in two days?

Jon put a $300/month Grok Bot subscription on his card and blew through it in three days. Then he turned on overages, looked up, and he was at $1,300. The culprit: four agents checking four inboxes every 15 minutes with a heavy model, work a webhook does for free (oops).

On our latest Lazy Leverage ep, Jon and I get into the fix: why the hierarchy of leverage applies inside the technology layer too, how one team used a free open source model to sort interior photos from exterior ones before anything expensive touched the job, and why a human-labeled test set is the whole ballgame.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

Buying or growing a property management company? Enterprise Bank & Trust* helps operators offset fees, manage trust accounts, and get financing without the runaround. Check out their PM lending solutions if you’re going to buy one of these companies:

• Investor-focused property management firm in Austin, TX (asking $180k, $418k gross revenue)

• 103-door residential PM company serving the Muscogee County, GA (asking $220k)

• Full-service property management business in Wisconsin (asking $550k, $781k gross revenue)

• Investor-focused property management business in Rogers, AR (asking $189.9k, $417k gross revenue)

*Sponsored

Industry News & Events

• AppFolio FUTURE conference is next week in San Diego (I’ll be there).

• NARPM’s National Tradeshow & Conference is rapidly approaching (Oct 13th in Vegas). They just announced that HUD’s Assistant Secretary, Craig Trainor, will be speaking.

• New: I’m experimenting with long-form YouTube videos about property management. I’m offering special introductory pricing for sponsors since this is brand new. Get in touch if interested.

• This newsletter just hit 25,000 active subscribers!! Thanks for being one of them.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. The first-ever PM API report card.

2. Why PM software must adapt (or die).

3. “We don’t know what the rent is.”

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

Introducing the PM API Report Card

Ask any software vendor in our industry about their API, and you'll get the same answer: "Oh yeah, we have one, and it’s great!"

But as anyone who has tried to do real work with a vendor’s API can tell you—they’re not all created equal. Can it write data, or only read it? Can you hand an AI agent a limited key and shut it off when you're done? Is it gated behind a higher price tier? That's where the answers start to vary.

So today I'm officially launching my pre-release PM API Report Card - a free, public grading page for the APIs behind the software we all run our businesses on.

Here’s a quick video from me on what it is and how it works:

Why I built this

These days, we all run our PM companies on advanced technology platforms, which are glorified relational databases on the back end. Every owner, tenant, and vendor record we have lives inside them, and for years that was a fair trade. We log in, point, click, get the work done.

Then Claude and ChatGPT showed up and completely reset expectations on the value and utility of our data. AI agents and/or vibe-coded software can now do a real chunk of the day-to-day work, and will be doing so for most of us in an extraordinarily short time from now. And that runs best through a great API. If an agent can't reach your data, it's useless (or slow and expensive).

Setting aside agents for a moment—have you plugged any of your PM software API keys into Claude or ChatGPT? If you haven’t tried doing this yet, drop everything and do it now. Then ask it a few questions about your company. You. will. be. blown. away. It takes SECONDS to gain deep insight into your business with these tools when pugged into a handful of APIs. Build a dashboard. Get weekly reporting. Identify bottlenecks. The sky is truly the limit. That’s why I’m so passionate about making sure these APIs are great (and free). This is OUR DATA!

How the grading works

Click through to see the preliminary scores.

I didn't grade these by hand. Researching every API to death would have taken me years (and would not have been objective). Instead, we wrote one grading prompt and ran it against every platform. Same criteria, same process, every time. The grade is automatically assigned—it’s not a judgement call by me. (Credit where due: I borrowed the idea from SaaStr's API Report Card for B2B SaaS.)

The rubric covers five categories:

• Functional coverage: Can you get the data and take the actions your business runs on, and change them?

• Design and reliability: Will your code, no-code tools, and agents behave predictably, or break?

• Access control: Can you safely give an app or agent a limited slice of access, then revoke it?

• Documentation and AI-readiness: Can a developer, or an AI coding tool, build against it easily and correctly?

• Accessibility and cost: Can you get in without a sales call or a forced upgrade?

Every platform gets probed once, then graded by the AI three times independently. When the runs disagree, the disagreement gets settled against the evidence (not just averaged), and anything that can't be settled gets published along with what the score would have been under the other reading.

You can even download the grading file and run it yourself (prompts and instructions included on the grading guide page). Grade a platform we missed, or check our work! You should land very close to what's on the page (and if you don’t, I want to hear about it).

What happens next (and a note for vendors)

These are preliminary scores, and you’ll see that a lot of them are low.
Naming and shaming isn't the point. The point is transparency, competition, and trust.

Over the next 60 days, expect two things:

• First, I’d love property manager feedback on the weighting and scoring methodology (I made judgment calls on the relative importance of pricing vs. technical capability vs. access - and I'm open to changing my mind).

• Second, I encourage vendors to fix their low-hanging fruit (eg documentation), because some of these scores can jump with very little effort.

60 days from now, I will rerun everything and lock in initial scores. Then I’ll re-grade roughly every 6 months after that. If every vendor's score goes up, everybody wins. You get to brag about your API, and we get to actually use it.

So go check it out, click into your platforms, and review or download the full reports. If you spot a factual error, let me know, and we'll fix it right away. If you make changes to your API that will affect the current grade, that will be picked up when we re-run everyone 60 days from now.

The goal here (as always) is to help property managers run a better business. These are preliminary scores because I want to hear from YOU, property managers and vendors, about any mistakes and/or suggestions for improvement.

-Peter

Correction: I Missed a PM Franchise

A reader flagged a fifth new PM franchisor that didn't make last week's franchise update: Pro X Property Management, out of Pittsburg, Kansas, franchising since 2022 through Pro X Franchising, LLC.

Per its June 2026 FDD it has two franchisees (Springfield, MO and Winter Haven, FL) plus three company-owned offices in Kansas, Missouri and Northwest Arkansas. $49,500 fee, 7% royalty. Notably, its Item 19 shows actual P&Ls for every location, including a franchisee doing $505K in revenue and $182K net profit on 387 doors. Small, but more transparent than the big four. FDD here.

What I’m Reading Right Now

• Mercury Bank has launched a Quickbooks killer called Mercury Books.

• A 30-second cold blast at the end of your shower cuts sick days by 29 percent, a 2016 trial of 3,018 adults found.

• Nervous system reset: How to Unclench.

• We don’t know what the rent is.

Is Your PM Software Holding Your Data Hostage?

Your PM software is the hub of your entire business. If AI tools can't get in and work with that data, it quickly turns into a bottleneck. On our recent episode of The Crane Podcast, Mark Brower and I dug into what that means for choosing a platform.

Mark has switched PM software twice, and API openness was a big factor both times. His bet: platforms that wall off your data from AI will get their lunch eaten. The other camp says run everything in one system and let that vendor build the AI. I can argue both.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Why maintenance is the hardest part of our job.

2. Fantastic podcast with Doug Moe (Touchstone PM).

3. RentScale is now Keyrenter’s official new training partner.

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The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

I Attended a Property Maintenance Conference

I spent this week in Rapid City, South Dakota (yeah), attending Property Meld’s annual MX Summit event. As far as I know, it’s the only property management conference exclusively focused on maintenance.

Property management is really 3 main things when you break it down:

1. Leasing and related activities like lease renewals

2. Rent collection and related activities like evictions

3. Maintenance and related activities like unit turnovers

Handling maintenance is the hardest part of the job, in my opinion. Leasing and rent collection are essentially solved problems at this point. Let’s break down why, and figure out what’s been holding maintenance back from being “solved” in the same way.

When business owners think about fixing some problem in their company, their default scapegoats are software and/or people. How many times have you heard a property manager complain about one of their software vendors or one of their team members? Implicit in their complaint is the idea that “if only my people and/or my software were better, my problems would be solved.” It’s not true, though!

Root-cause problem solving requires you to think about your business using this hierarchy:

Policy —> Process —> Tech

Your company’s policies should define its processes, and those processes are then encoded into technology (software). If you don’t have a well-defined process, no amount of technology can fix that. And in order to have a great process, company policies must be determined and documented. Your people mostly operate at the process and technology level.

Back to leasing and rent collection. You ever hear someone say “Begin with the end in mind”? You can’t write a policy for something with no clear end state. Well, leasing and rent collection both…

…have clearly-defined end states, and

…have a narrow range of activities that can be used to achieve the end state.

The end state of leasing is “The unit is occupied with a great tenant.” What do you do to achieve this? List the unit, process applications, and sign leases. That’s it.

The end state of rent collection is “We have the rent in full (or the tenant is out).” What do you do to achieve this? Post late fees, send rent reminders, and run an eviction process if needed. That’s it.

But maintenance and unit turnovers have poorly-defined end states and a nearly unlimited set of activities that could be employed to achieve them.

For example, a tenant calls in with a maintenance request. Your first instinct is, “Well, that end state is easy to identify. Fix their maintenance issue.” But not so fast. Is this a valid maintenance request, meaning it’s actually a landlord responsibility? If not, the correct end state is “do nothing.” Nowhere in leasing or rent collection is “do nothing” a valid end state! No leasing or rent-collecting team member could get in trouble for “not doing nothing”, yet that’s an everyday possibility for someone working in maintenance coordination. “You shouldn’t have dispatched a vendor for that!!!”

OK, let’s return to that example, but now it’s been determined that it is a valid maintenance request. Their A/C isn’t working. Great, our end state is “Working A/C”. PM dispatches a vendor, they recommend a repair, and it’s correctly executed. Owner sees the bill and calls in furious — “Why didn’t you send back the company that installed the A/C less than a year ago, before I turned over the property to you!” Oh no, our end state was reached, but we still did it wrong. Once again the poor maintenance team is in trouble for… solving a maintenance problem. But not in the “right” way.

It’s a nightmare. There are so many edge cases and so many different ways to solve maintenance problems that it’s nearly impossible to document a cohesive and complete set of policies, let alone turn them into processes. That’s why maintenance is still so difficult, while leasing and rent collection are (mostly) a non-issue for experienced PM companies.

It also explains why there’s AN ENTIRE CONFERENCE dedicated to maintenance (but not leasing or rent collection), and it draws hundreds of attendees every year. People are desperate for answers! We need help! We’re trying to crowd-source a better way to do all this.

My hat’s off to CEO Ray Hespen and the entire Property Meld team for building world-class software that does an impressive job tackling this wicked problem (we’re customers), and for bringing thought leaders in the space from around the country to help PM operators level up their game. Let’s keep cranking on this together, and hopefully, it will soon be “solved” for everyone!

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Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from PMs. Submit your idea here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY PLANOMATIC

The data shows that most property managers are still shooting their own rental listing photos. I think that's a mistake.

It’s almost impossible to do while scaling your business because of all the hidden costs: trips to the property + time on-site shooting + photo management/QA time - all consume a ton of time and energy your team could spend elsewhere, and it doesn't end up being as efficient as you think.

I've been using PlanOmatic for my rental listing photos for years now, and they handle all the coordinating and management, and even sync photos to Buildium for us.

If you are even a little curious about switching to professional photography, I highly recommend a quick demo of the services and their platform, no commitment required. 

Learn more about PlanOmatic

Should a 90-minute onboarding call cost you business on purpose?

Doug Moe thinks so. He built Touchstone Property Management to 700+ doors in two years without spending a dollar on ads or hiring a BDM. His weapon of choice: a 90-minute-plus call he runs before he'll even send the PMA.

I brought him on to break down that call, why he's fine losing deals over it, and how he's running commercial CAM reconciliations through a shared Claude workspace.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• This remote-managed furnished rental business in Tulare County, CA is still available (asking $745k, $565k gross revenue)

• Established residential PM company serving the Columbus, GA metro (asking $220k, ~103 rental doors under management)

• Long-running property management firm in Western Montana (asking $145k, $146k gross revenue)

• 24-door residential PM portfolio in Hall County, GA (asking $195k, $444k gross revenue)

Sponsored by AppFolio. FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is where operators turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance. Join me in San Diego, September 28–October 1, 2026. Register now.

PM Company & Vendor Updates (normally Tuesday, but I’m behind from being at MX Summit!)

• JWB names Melissa Gillispie as their new COO.

• RentScale landed a sales training & coaching deal with Keyrenter

• ShowMojo, in partnership with Super, launched an outbound AI voice agent that “automatically contacts syndicated leads who expressed interest in a property but did not immediately schedule a showing.”

• Steady announced an “investment” and new leadership. Ryan Collins is in as CEO.

• NARPM National Conference: Second Nature is giving away a free conference ticket plus a 2-night stay at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino to 30 property managers who meet with them. Apply here.

• Crane applications open one week from today, but the waitlist gets access 1 day early. We added over 100 new members in the spring, but we’re capping it at 60 this time.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. PM franchise growth update.

2. How to build a company brain (that gets smarter).

3. A few words on imposter syndrome.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

Still true at my PM company.

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

The Four PM Franchises, Three Years Later

In October 2022 I compared the four major property management franchises, exploring their costs, RPU, location counts and other publicly-available data.

At the time I was exploring a franchise alternative concept with Jon Matzner called “PM Business in a Box” that didn’t end up going very far. However, my interest in property management franchises hasn’t stopped.

Three years on, I pulled every FDD (Franchise Disclosure Document) each of them has filed since (straight from the Wisconsin and Minnesota regulators; links at the bottom) to see what actually happened.

Short version: the category grew about 30%, the two big systems hit a wall, and the smallest one is the only franchisor willing to tell you what its franchisees actually earn.

Growth

Outlets open at year end, from Item 20 of each system's FDDs.

Real Property Management (Neighborly brands, owned by PE group KKR) added 90 outlets since 2021 and sits at 450. But 2025 was rough: 31 openings against 28 closures (19 terminations, 7 non-renewals), for a net gain of three. Signed-but-unopened deals fell from 21 to 11.

PMI is at 408 with a similar story. 57 openings in 2025, but 50 outlets left the system, 38 of them tagged "ceased operations - other reasons" with no explanation given. Anecdotally there’s been a lot of M&A within the network; my guess is a good chunk of these were sales to existing franchisees. My 2026 interview with the CEO of PMI, Steve Hart.

Keyrenter went from 40 to 76 outlets, including 20 openings in 2025 alone. Their press releases say 101 "locations." The FDD says 76 open plus 11 signed. Press releases count territories. My 2026 interview with the CEO of Keyrenter, Nate Tew.

All County keeps plodding along at 91, but 10 of those are now company-owned, up from 2 in 2019.

1,025 outlets across the four systems. RPM and PMI are 84% of the category.

Are the franchisees making good money?

Still mostly a mystery, which was my complaint in 2022. Only Keyrenter discloses profit. For their franchisees open all of 2025, median "net owner benefit" (operating income plus owner add-backs) was $112K on $371K of median revenue, and $139K for offices open 3+ years. A single $4.5M location drags the average up to $172K. That’s probably typical of all the franchise systems if I had to guess, and not great IMO.

RPM still reports only revenue per unit: $4,552 per year, roughly $379/month including maintenance, up 26% from the $300/month I cited in 2022. The catch: the median RPM franchisee now manages 123 units, down from 182 in 2021. More but smaller.

What each system's 2026 FDD Item 19 discloses. Definitions differ by system; read the footnotes.

Franchisor Revenue

I called the 7% royalty expensive back then; that figure has only gone up. All four raised their initial fee (RPM and PMI both landed at $69,900, from $59,900 and $55,000). In case you didn’t already know, typically most or all of those fees are paid to the business broker who sells the location. They are also highly negotiable and these figures are likely not representative of what franchisees are actually paying.

PMI's audited financials show $19.6M of franchisor revenue in 2025, and 55% of it came from franchisees buying products and services from PMI (more than from royalties).

New entrants!

Three new PM franchisors have appeared, none with traction: TrueNest (South Florida, franchising since 2024), Whole Property Management (Virginia Beach, part of John Hewitt's Loyalty Brands; zero franchised units open, one Denver company store doing $1.7M), and Nexus (Rhode Island, a handful of franchisees). Renters Warehouse, which quit franchising a decade ago, was bought by Japan's GA technologies in 2024 (a story broken by yours truly) and recently rebranded RENOSY.

My opinion: These franchisors need to figure out how to be profitable without taking so much gross revenue from their franchise partners. They need to cut better deals with the software companies and pass along ALL those savings to partners.

The 2026 FDDs if you want source data: RPM, PMI, Keyrenter, All County, Whole PM. Prior years are on Minnesota's CARDS search.

-Peter

What I’m Currently Reading

• PMs Waste 20 Hours on Marketing Agencies for Few New Units - ProfitCoach’s Chris Cannady

• Official Grok Bot Cheat Sheet

• How to Build a Company Brain That Gets Smarter Every Week

• How To Train An Agent To Clear Spam From Your Email Inbox - Kaustubh Deo

POLL RESULTS: What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?🍦

Moose Tracks deserves an honorable mention from “other” comments. I’m a Vanilla man myself.

I Told Mark I've Never Had Imposter Syndrome.
He Didn't Believe Me.

Mark Brower and I get into leadership hiring on the new episode of The Crane Podcast, starting with the story of his first real leadership hire, made after weeks of working until 2 a.m. He cried in that interview and still got the job.

We also dig into when you actually know it's time for a big hire, what a real growth VP costs today, and why residential property management may never produce a true national brand. Then I told him I've never once felt like a fraud running my businesses. He thinks that's suspicious.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Rentvine just got a new CEO…

2. …and my podcast with their former CEO.

3. Crane applications reopen soon.

Did someone send you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

AppFolio's Moat-Builder Just Became Rentvine's CEO

Rentvine named Nat Kunes its new CEO yesterday, replacing founder Dave Borden.

Borden moves to the board, and co-founder Jonathan Ewen stays on as president. The rest of the press release is thin, but the real story is that Nat Kunes led product & strategy at AppFolio for years and years. In fact, he helped them grow from pre-revenue to $600M and co-led their IPO motion. Nat was Executive in Residence at Mainsail Partners (Rentvine’s investors) for 6 months prior to stepping into his new role this week.

I spoke with Dave on Wednesday evening, and he spoke highly of Nat and Rentvine’s future under his leadership. Dave expressed optimism about Nat’s dynamic background and hands-on approach to product.

Deep Background

In early 2024, an investor-research interview started circulating: an unattributed sit-down with a "former senior AppFolio executive" walking through, in remarkable detail, exactly why AppFolio's grip on the sub-1,000-unit market was essentially unbreakable.

It's anonymized. But the details (14 years at the company, personally building out payments, screening, and insurance, then standing up the Investment Management business) point squarely at Kunes.

So now we've got a genuinely funny situation: the most confident case I've ever heard for why a company like Rentvine can't win, made by the guy who just took the job of making them do so.

From the anonymous 2024 interview

What he said the moat actually is

Switching costs. And every property manager knows this intuitively.

He pegged AppFolio's churn at under 3% a year, which implies a roughly 20-year customer lifetime. He says Propertyware once had a week-long outage where customers couldn't even log in to manage their properties, carried an NPS somewhere around negative 80, and still churned under 3% that year.

What else contributes to AppFolio’s moat, according to the interview?

• Depth of stack. AppFolio became its own payment processor, its own credit-reporting agency, and its own insurance carrier instead of taking referral fees through partners. He contrasts that with Buildium, which leaned on partnerships — and notes AppFolio was doing around $100M in revenue while Buildium was stuck near $12M. More margin dollars means more to plow back into product and sales.

• Regulation as a feature. Years of state-by-state compliance work (security-deposit interest, local tax quirks, FCRA, AML) that a challenger has to rebuild from scratch before it can even sell into half the country.

• The price of admission. His estimate to build a real competitor: north of $100M, a serious roadmap, about five years, and AppFolio taking its eye off the ball. Hand him $50M to go kill AppFolio, and he says he wouldn't even try to pry existing customers off it — he'd chase greenfield, because head-on displacement is "incredibly time-consuming and expensive."

So why take the job?

My guess? AI.

Every moat he described is a switching-cost moat. And AI is the one thing that could actually collapse a switching-cost moat, because it can handle data migration, onboarding, and the soul-crushing compliance and accounting grunt work.

If the painful part of switching gets automated away, that 20-year customer lifetime starts to look a lot shorter. And Rentvine is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Beloved by customers and embracing the Open-API future since long before Claude hit the scene, it’s hard not to root for them.

-Peter

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Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from PMs. Submit your idea here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY UTILITY PROFIT

A simple form that actually sets up utilities

Here's a free product from Utility Profit that I want to highlight again - because it's a true automation resulting in verified account numbers. And it's just cool.

When a tenant signs a lease, they get a single link. They click it, fill out one form, and Utility Profit automatically sets up their electric, gas, water, and internet accounts directly with the providers.

No phone calls. No chasing tenants for confirmation. No screenshots that may or may not be real.

The part that got my attention: you get confirmed account numbers pulled directly from the provider. Not self-reported. Verified.

Free for you, free for the tenant.

See a Demo

Speaking of Rentvine…

I recorded this podcast with Dave Borden (Rentvine's founder, now on the board) before this week's leadership change to talk about the open-API bet that's now at the center of Rentvine's whole AI pitch.

Dave walked me through their new AI maintenance agent, why their MCP is still in a careful beta instead of a full rollout, and his case for building revenue around AI features rather than subscription hikes. Timing aside, the conversation lines up almost too well with the “moat” argument above.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• 30+ year commercial property management company in Suffolk County, NY (asking $2.8M, $2.32M gross revenue)

• Thriving residential PM business in Houston, TX (asking $250k, $858k gross revenue)

• Property management and remodeling business in Cape May County, NJ (asking $540k, $650k gross revenue)

• Tech-enabled short- and mid-term rental manager in Cook County, IL (asking $185k, $150k gross revenue)

Sponsored by AppFolio. FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is where operators turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance. Join me in San Diego, September 28–October 1, 2026. Register now.

Industry News & Events

FALL CONFERENCE SEASON IS HERE!

• I’m at MX Summit next week, speaking about the PM Trends 2026 report. Come say hi if you see me! Tickets still available. Crane members, make sure you RSVP for our Monday dinner.

• I’m also attending AppFolio Future the week of the 29th. Crane members, make sure you RSVP for Sunday’s dinner, which I’m unfortunately missing.

• Moses Kagan’s Reconvene “Un-conference” is Oct 6-8 in Santa Monica, CA. Use discount code “RESEED26” for $500 off before 9/20/26. I’ve gone twice; it’s an outstanding event for real estate operators, especially those looking to raise capital.

• NARPM National is the week of October 12th. Make sure you register for the AF + SN party on Tuesday night, and Second Nature’s VIP experience. Not sure if I can make it this year.

ONE MORE THING…

• Crane applications re-open in 13 days. Join the waitlist for early access. Must manage 150+ doors to qualify. We added over 100 new members in the spring, but this time we’re limiting it to 60 new members max.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. Automating owner draw prep with AI.

2. Why saying “no” is important.

3. Turn by Revlli.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register for a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

How I Automated Owner Draw Prep With AI (in One Afternoon)

Preparing for monthly owner draws used to take our financial controller HOURS.

Buildium's "Owner draw by EFT" page shows a number for every property called Available for payment. At my company RL Property Management, that page is 624 rows long. And for a chunk of them, the number Buildium proposes is the wrong amount to send the owner.

Not because Buildium's math is broken, but because Buildium doesn't know what our team knows about owner funding requests.

When an owner sends us $8,000 to fund a turnover, that money lands in the trust account and immediately shows up as cash available to disburse. If nobody catches it, we pay the owner's own turn money right back to them on the 10th, then have to ask for it again. Same story for draws that should be held while a project wraps up. We track all of that in an Airtable table called Funding Requests, and every our controller, who runs our disbursements, has been reconciling Buildium against Airtable by hand before she pays anyone. It takes hours.

Last week I replaced that manual reconciliation with a script. It took one afternoon with Claude Code.

What the job does

At 6 AM on the 10th of each month, a small Python script runs on our server and:

1. Pulls every active property and owner from the Buildium API, along with GL balances, reserves, and unpaid bills. About a dozen API calls, 20 seconds total.

2. Rebuilds Buildium's "Available for payment" figure for each property.

3. Subtracts unpaid bills.

4. Pulls the open funding requests from Airtable and subtracts the owner-funded money that's still earmarked for work.

5. Writes it all to a Google Sheet, one tab per run, grouped by owner exactly like Buildium's page, and pings our controller and me on Slack with the link.

Rows where the adjusted amount differs from Buildium's default turn yellow. Everything else is pay as-is.

On the first run, 61 funding requests accounted for roughly $296,000 of owner money that would otherwise have been paid right back out. That's the size of the problem this thing catches every month!

The Airtable side

Our Funding Requests data, which lives in Airtable, has one row per request: a status (Sent, Received Funds, Complete, Cancelled), the amount requested, a "Hold Draw" checkbox, and an optional withholding amount. The rule the script applies is simple:

• A request counts if the funds have been received, or if Hold Draw is checked.

• Hold back the withholding amount if someone filled it in; otherwise hold back the full amount requested.

• Never let the payout go below zero.

Every request has to match a Buildium property by ID (we store Buildium's property ID on each Airtable property, and a separate monthly job keeps that current). No fuzzy name matching. If a request can't be matched, it lands on a Summary tab for a human to look at instead of silently disappearing.

How it was built

I did this with Claude Code using Fable 5.1 and it was basically a one-shot. I described the goal, it read the code from my earlier Buildium projects (a weekly trust-account check, a monthly reserve sync, a daily bill checker), we agreed on a plan, and then it [did a bunch of computer and coding stuff that I’m mostly ignorant of]. Done. My contribution was answering questions about business rules, like what "Hold Draw" should do to the number.

These tools have gotten insanely cheap and fast. Your PM software's API, if you have access, probably exposes more than you think. Pick the monthly ritual that you hate doing the most, or sucks up the most time, and start there.

-Peter

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY APPFOLIO

The Event Where Real Estate
Makes Its Next Move

FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is four days tailored to operators who want to turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance.

San Diego · September 28–October 1, 2026

Hands-on training, live demos, and time with the operators, investors, and innovators setting the pace in real estate. Leave with a playbook, not just a notebook.

Keynotes from Dr. Maya Shankar and Andre Agassi, plus live music from a living legend.

Register Now

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• Isaiah Turner launches RentOS, an AI property manager for landlords who don’t want to hire an actual property manager. Reminds me of TurboTenant Autopilot and Hemlane. Mark my words these types of companies are going to be our biggest competition in the years to come.

• AppFolio put out a press release announcing the renewal of their contract with Pure HomeRiver. No door count given by Pure HomeRiver, and they were suspiciously absent from the Top 40 list this year.

• Zillow announces they have “reported nearly 2 million on-time rent payments to credit bureaus for free since launching its rent reporting program in 2024.” Apparently tenants can enroll directly (ie, without the involvement or even knowledge of their property manager or landlord) through their partnership with Esusu.

• Revlli launches a new service called Turn. I’ll give you a guess on what it’s aimed to help with.

The 65 Doors I Turned Down (there’s a good reason)

A prospect once tried to hand me 65 doors. It would have been our biggest account. Then came the catch: four furnished units that he wanted to run as medium-term rentals. I said “no” to those, and we lost the account. On the latest Lazy Leverage ep, Jon and I get into why that was the right call.

It’s the same reason McD’s doesn’t sell Tic Tacs or Red Bull: staying simple and predictable is better for business. We break down the exact order I run every exception through (values, policy, process, tech) and why most operators would be better off saying “no” more often than it may feel natural to.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Crane’s 2026 AI in Property Management Report (free)

2. Tenants trying to sue PMs using ChatGPT

3. Goodjuju corroborated my PM company estimate

Did someone send you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

How 280 Property Managers Are Actually Using AI

Conferences, social media, and even casual lunch talks make it seem like everyone is using AI in their property management business. I hear it constantly: someone built an agent that does X. Someone else swears by a tool that does Y.

Honestly? A lot of it is just vibes and weekend-project screenshots, not real numbers on what's actually happening inside real businesses across the industry.

So Wolfgang and I decided to go get some. Crane surveyed 280 property managers (Crane members and non-members) on where AI actually stands in their businesses today. Not what they tried once and abandoned, but what's actually running. We compiled everything into the 2026 AI in Property Management Report.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

1. AI is mostly a founder's hobby right now. 

46% of owners say that only a few people (including themselves) use AI on a regular basis. 12% said they're the only one at their company using it at all. It seems like even though most of us are driving adoption, we still haven't figured out how to get the rest of the team doing it the same way.

Responses to “Who's using AI regularly at your company?”

2. Cost is not what's slowing people down.

Only 2% named cost as their biggest barrier to using AI. The real blockers are not knowing where to start (23%) and not having time to learn it (20%). Most operators don't need a bigger AI budget - they need a clearer starting point and 20 minutes to actually learn the thing.

3. Claude is the clear daily driver.

46% vs. 35% for ChatGPT. What I found more interesting is that Claude users are shipping full end-to-end workflows at more than 3x the rate of ChatGPT users. Not sure yet if that's causation, or just more sophisticated operators picking Claude in the first place.

4. Vibe-coding and agents aren't taking off as fast as the hype suggests.

Two-thirds of respondents haven't touched either one. But the group that's built their own agent is further ahead on basically everything else we measured - spend, policy, team-wide adoption. If you're doing one, you're probably doing all of it.

There's a lot more in the full report: where operators are spending money, where they're headed next, and 140 specific examples of workflows that are actually saving real time and real dollars.

Grab the full report here: https://www.joincrane.co/crane-ai-report/

-Peter

P.S. Crane members are collaborating on AI best practices inside our AI Lounge, and sharing their property management AI projects inside the AI Garage. Plus, we just rolled out done-for-you AI Agent builds.

Not a Crane member? Join the waitlist for early access — applications re-open in 19 days!

______

NEW: I’m looking for guest articles from property managers. Submit your idea here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY COLUMN BANK

The PM Trends 2026 Report is clear: property owners expect their PM company to be a financial partner. Real-time reporting, faster payments, proactive financial management.

Column is the bank built for that future.

Open APIs for the AI era. Reconciliation that runs continuously. Disbursements that move in seconds. Trust account structures designed to keep you compliant.

And behind all of it, a banking team that deeply understands PM operators and what it takes to scale a portfolio.

Your owners expect a financial partner. Column is how you become one.

Meet the Bank Built for PM

Has anyone tried to sue you using AI?

Adam Willis came back on the podcast, and he told me something that's stuck in my head ever since: his team is now fielding a wave of AI-generated lawsuits and security deposit disputes. Tenants are running their cases through ChatGPT and showing up to small claims court pro se. He's winning them all, but it's eating up real time and morale.

We also got into rebuilding tenant and owner comms around a single phone number and inbox (RIP knowledge base), why he brought his real estate brokerage in-house under one brand, and a comp plan he tried and had to walk back.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• Absentee-run property management company based in San Jose, CA (asking $120k, 12 properties under management, $270k gross revenue)

• Association and condo management firm in Washington, DC (asking price not disclosed, 1,691 units, $1.39M gross revenue)

• This semi-absentee property management company in Travis County, TX is still available (asking $180k, 59 doors under management, $107k gross revenue)

• Absentee-run real estate and property management brokerage in Scottsdale, AZ (asking $250k, $715k gross revenue)

• Full-service STR property management in Pinellas County, FL (asking $499k, $271k gross revenue)

Sponsored by Findigs. Say goodbye to resident applicant processing. Western Wealth cut a 4.5-day decision to under 30 minutes with around-the-clock application acceptance, making them a 24/7 leasing office. Book a demo.

Industry News & Events

• Property management company used to steal millions from association owners, Miami-Dade sheriff’s office says.

• Bay Management Group settles a case with the Maryland AG for $30k over “clean criminal background check” language used in rental advertisements, which the AG claimed was in violation of disparate impact laws.

• Building a business that runs without you: That’s the topic for next week’s Peter & The Wolf show! Register here for the live event + recording.

• Landon Murie (goodjuju) got REALLY curious about the 31,000 PM companies figure I revealed recently, and tried to independently corroborate it by coming from a totally different angle. This all turned into an interesting new report.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. All about CLOZR, a pay-per-door BDM alternative.

2. New podcast by ProfitCoach.

3. A new, very orange way to celebrate PMs.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

You Bring the Leads. They Bring the Closers.

You’ve heard of pay-per-lead in property management (eg All Property Management), but have you heard of pay-per-DOOR?

Earlier this year Jeremy Pound, CEO of RentScale whispered to me they had something new cooking. Instead of hiring you a BDM, they would actually close the owners for you. Frankly it sounded like a dream come true—I send you money, you send me signed PMAs!

That’s Clozr, a new company birthed from the secret labs at RentScale.

Clozr’s CEO Jennifer Merrit spent years running RentScale alongside Jeremy. Now she’s part-owner of RentScale and majority owner of Clozr. This came up while she and I were going over Crane benefits recently, and I realized I had no real idea how the thing actually worked. So I asked Jennifer to get on a call and walk me through it on the record. It’s the most genuinely novel sales model I’ve seen in our industry in a while.

Note: This article is NOT sponsored (main articles never are) and I have no affiliate arrangement with RentScale or Clozr. I just think it’s interesting! RentScale is a Crane Partner.

The model: done-for-you closing

Plenty of PM companies can’t justify a full-time BDM, or have simply never wanted to deal with recruiting, onboarding, training, and managing one. Clozr’s pitch is that you don’t have to. You bring at least 10 leads a month, their closers do the rest, and you pay $590 per door that actually gets signed.

What makes it more than renting a warm body is that it takes the sales management off your plate. Most PM owners are operators-first, and managing a salesperson (or team) is a completely different muscle. Clozr absorbs that whole function.

A few numbers from Jennifer I found interesting:

• It takes an average of 13 touches from new lead to signed agreement, over a 30–45 day sales cycle.

• Each closer covers up to five clients. The average closer works ~60 leads a month; her top performers handle roughly double that.

• She’s at 45 clients and 12 closers right now, with three more closer roles open.

Leads, notably, are not the constraint. “Everybody in this industry is screaming for leads,” Jennifer told me, but across her client base the leads are already there. What’s missing is the capacity to nurture and actually close the ones already coming in.

BDM-vs-AE

Jennifer argues our industry has smushed two different jobs under one title. A real BDM develops business: outbound prospecting, relationships with developers, that whole motion. An account executive closes inbound leads. Most PM “BDMs,” she says, are really just AEs. That’s true for my own BDM here at RL Property Management; we provide the leads and expect him to focus exclusively on closing them.

The interesting part falling out of her math above is that if your BDM is actually an AE (ie, only working inbound leads) but telling you they’re slammed at 40 or 60 a month, look into it because several of Clozr’s closers are easily handling 100+ leads/month. I’m not saying they’re lazy — but it’s a fair prompt to ask whether you’re giving that person scalable systems, or whether they’re spending half their day hand-updating LeadSimple. (If you’ve got a true BDM out there prospecting and building relationships, ignore all of this — that’s much more time consuming.)

The price

• $3,500 calibration fee up front: a custom ~40-page playbook, a built-out CRM pipeline, AI discovery-call packets, and a marketing consult 30 days in.

• $590 per signed door, billed once a month. I find this price VERY reasonable if I’m being honest. I can’t imagine it will stay this cheap actually.

Owners can set a door threshold — say, anything over 8 or 16 units — so the larger, negotiation-heavy MF or large-portfolio deals get handed back to you to close rather than billed.

The ownership swap

Who actually owns Clorz; is it part of RentScale?

Clozr stands on its own — separate company, separate cap table. Jennifer owns the majority of Clozr, with her business partner Jeremy Pound as a partner. And as part of the same transition, the reverse is now true at RentScale: Jeremy holds the majority there, and Jennifer is a partner.

Jennifer told me she floated the concept at RentScale’s 2025 annual offsite, it went nowhere, and it sat on the whiteboard until a March epiphany where the whole model clicked at once. She went to Jeremy and told him, in her words, “I’m doing this with or without you, but I’d love to have you in it.” He was in. That’s how Clozr was born.

Check out Clozr.

-Peter

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• Pest Share has launched “The Orange Shoe Movement” to celebrate outstanding property managers

• ShowMojo just released their Q2 2026 Data Talk report—The OG leasing data folks are back with the latest trends and new findings.

• ProfitCoach just launched a new podcast called Beat the Benchmark, where “Real PM operators… walk through a specific financial turning point in their business. The moment something wasn't adding up, what the data showed them, and what they changed because of it.”

• I’m now on TikTok!

POLL RESULTS: How do you obtain rental listing photos at your PM company?

Podcast Archives: The $200K Kickback Scheme Hiding in Plain Sight (it took a consultant to find it.)

Deb Newell had a client who'd lost 12 employees in a single year and couldn't figure out why. She started digging. What she found: the client's #2 was running a kickback scheme with vendors, skipping owner invoices and pocketing the difference. Nearly $200K missing before anyone caught it.

That's the kind of mess Deb untangles for a living. Two decades in, she's seen it all: job titles nobody can grow into, owners who won't let go of loyal-but-stuck employees, and the messy reality of actually selling a PM company.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Update: Beagle vs. AppFolio lawsuit.

2. Zillow takes a walloping from the FTC (finally).

3. $210 discount to MX Summit ends today.

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Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

August 2026 Update: Beagle vs AppFolio

Beagle and AppFolio’s legal battles continue. I last updated you back in April which was a while ago, so let’s check in. Plus, I needed an excuse to pull out the cutest graphic of all time:

A quick recap: Beagle sells insurance-related services to property managers, and most of its customers run their properties on AppFolio. After being denied access to a “real” integration via AppFolio’s Stack marketplace, Beagle had customers create logins that let Beagle work inside their AppFolio accounts. This isn’t uncommon for vendors without a proper integration, by the way (and is not unique to AppFolio), and there’s nothing nefarious about it even if it technically violates every platform’s TOS.

Nevertheless, in late 2025, AppFolio cut that off, saying it broke AppFolio's rules and let Beagle quietly access data and even set up billing charges. AppFolio had also moved onto Beagle's turf earlier in the year — selling its own competing insurance product, and in April 2025 investing $75M in one of Beagle's rivals, Second Nature (in-depth reporting on that here). AppFolio sued first, in California state court, claiming Beagle falsely told customers it was "partnered" with AppFolio and improperly misused the system. Beagle then sued in federal court, essentially arguing this is a dominant player illegally crushing a smaller competitor (plus lying about it to customers). AppFolio later folded similar claims, including computer-misuse claims, directly into the federal case. So both companies are suing each other, spread across a federal case (C.D. Cal. 2:25-cv-12248), a state case (Santa Barbara 25CV07670), and an appeal (9th Cir. 26-769).

So far, nobody has landed an early knockout, and the momentum is roughly even. Every request for a fast, emergency order has been denied. Beagle asked the federal judge to force AppFolio to turn its access back on immediately; the judge said no, partly because Beagle's own CEO had told a customer the fix was "simple." AppFolio, for its part, twice asked the state court for an emergency order against Beagle and was turned down both times. The practical result is that AppFolio's shut-off of Beagle stays in place for now, Beagle is appealing that outcome, and the case is otherwise just getting into the slow, evidence-gathering phase, with an actual trial not scheduled until September 2027. In the meantime, AppFolio won permission to add its counterclaims, and it's backing them with concrete evidence: internal emails and a tally of 800+ unauthorized accounts, including short-lived "ghost" accounts that (in three sampled cases) set up 633 recurring resident charges worth about $9,575 a month. That gives it real ammunition.

As for how this likely ends, the most probable outcome in disputes like this is a settlement rather than a dramatic courtroom verdict, and there's extra pressure toward that here because neither side got the quick win it wanted and this kind of litigation is expensive and slow — a negotiated deal (some sanctioned, paid form of access, or each side simply walking away) would surprise no one. The judge has already nudged them that way, ordering both sides into private mediation by November 2, 2026. If it doesn't settle, the pieces point in mixed directions: Beagle's appeal is a genuine long shot, because there's a real question whether an appeals court is even allowed to review this type of emergency ruling, so Beagle probably stays cut off for a good while regardless. On the core merits, Beagle's "monopoly" argument faces a headwind because AppFolio itself says it holds under 17% of the market with larger competitors above it, and AppFolio's computer-misuse counterclaims now look evidence-heavy — but Beagle has a serious, legitimate defense that the customers, not AppFolio, own their data and freely chose to let Beagle in.

In the meantime, the case has caught the attention of Brendan Keeler, the “Health API Guy”. Brendan is putting out some amazing content on the topic of Systems of Record (eg AppFolio, Buildium, RentVine etc), and who owns customer data.

He just put out a full article on the Beagle vs AppFolio case and it is a must-read.

He unearthed this notable quote from AppFolio:

Go read his full article if you want to hear from someone smarter than me on all this!

-Peter

______

Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from PMs and vendors who have something worth sharing. Submit yours here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY PLANOMATIC

Earlier this week, I asked how you obtain rental listing photos at your PM company. The most common answer was in-house, and the most common vendor was PlanOmatic, at nearly one in five of you (full results in next Tuesday’s newsletter).

I am in that second group, and I've been using PlanOmatic for years. I used to manage photography in-house until I realized it's impossible to do while trying to scale, because coordinating photographers and managing photos consumes a ton of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere.

PlanOmatic has local photographers in 100+ cities, photos sync directly into your PM software, and units lease about six days faster on average.

Learn More About PlanOmatic

Podcast Archives: The Data Problem Nobody in Screening Wants to Touch (still true)

Digging back through the archive and replaying this one because so many moments still hold true. Janine Steiner Jovanovic, CEO of LeaseLock, came on to talk about security deposits, tenant screening, and why the industry still has almost no real data on what predicts a “bad tenant.”

And if you skip to around the 28-minute mark, you'll catch one of the earliest times I talked publicly about Zillow's grip on single-family listings. My take then: if Zillow ever decided renters had to run through their own screening to stay listed, we wouldn't have a choice. Still think that's true.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• This remote-managed property management business in Tulare County, CA is still available (asking $745k, $565k gross revenue)

• 24-home property management portfolio in Champions Gate, FL (asking $299k, $270k gross revenue)

• Boutique residential PM firm in Denver, CO (asking $649k, $562k gross revenue)

• Semi-absentee property management company in Travis County, TX (asking $180k, 59 doors under management, $107k gross revenue)

Sponsored by AppFolio. FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is where operators turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance. Join us in San Diego, September 28–October 1, 2026. Register now.

Industry News & Events

• Zillow takes a walloping from the FTC 😢 and agrees to terms that “preserve the existing syndication partnership between Zillow and Redfin while requiring Redfin to relaunch its independent rental advertising business within six months.” COMPETITION!

• MX Summit - with speaker Mike Rowe - is next month. Anyone looking to improve maintenance operations at their property management company should attend. Grab $210 off with this link, but must purchase by MONDAY! You’ll see the discount on the checkout screen. Last year I tried to ride a bronco at the rodeo (yes, there is a rodeo) but they stopped me. I will be trying AGAIN this year.

Closing Thought

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. Finally… the answer to how many PM companies there are.

2. Second Nature’s VIP registration for NARPM Nationals this Fall

3. Why giving everyone Claude won’t make you more money

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

What I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

We Finally Know How Many PM Companies There Are

Ever wonder how many property management companies there are in the United State? Yesterday I polled my LinkedIn followers to see what they’d think:

Once or twice a year, I go looking for an actual number.

Here's what I’ve always found: Nothing. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever actually counted the residential property management companies in America.

That bugged me, because it seems like something we should know?

I finally got sick of wondering and pointed a small army of AI research agents powered by Fable at every data source I could think of (Census, SEC filings, HUD surveys, license rolls, vendor counts, directories, etc), had them attack each other's work, and then verified every important number against the primary source. This took a while.

Importantly, I only counted companies whose core business is managing long-term single-family and small multifamily rentals (under 100 units) for third-party owners. Companies like my own RL Property Management. Not HOA-only managers, not the institutional apartment giants, not STR/Airbnb management companies, and not brokerages where PM is a small side hustle.

The answer:
31,000 Property Management Companies

(The high-confidence range is 26,000 to 36,000.)

Why nobody could count this before

The government tries. The Census Bureau's category for us (NAICS 531311, "Residential Property Managers") counted 39,404 employer firms in the 2022 Economic Census. Sounds authoritative, except that code also includes HOA management companies, on-site apartment management offices, and vacation rental managers. Meanwhile, thousands of real PM companies are invisible because they're classified as real estate brokerages. So the official number is simultaneously too big and too small.

And the numbers you'll find by Googling are worse. The "300,000 property management companies" stats floating around the internet count every tax filing with a property-management flavor, including hundreds of thousands of self-managing landlords and side gigs. I pulled the actual nonemployer records: 252,918 solo "property manager" filings in 2022. Nearly half reported less than $25,000 in receipts. Exactly 10 of them cleared $1 million. Ten, in the whole country.

Three ways in, one answer

The only way to get a real number is to triangulate, so I built three independent estimates:

• Down from the Census. Start with 39,404 employer firms, subtract the HOA-only companies (the community association trade group counts 9,000–10,000 of those), subtract the institutional apartment managers (Harvard's Joint Center counts roughly 12,000 firms managing 50+ unit properties), subtract vacation-only managers, then add back the PM companies hiding under brokerage codes and the legitimate solo operators. You land in the high 20,000s to mid 30,000s.

• Up from the vendors. AppFolio's latest 10-K reports 22,096 property management customers, all by itself. Layer in Buildium, Rent Manager, Rentvine and the rest, strip out their HOA, big-multifamily, and DIY-landlord customers, and gross up for companies not on any major platform: low 20,000s to high 30,000s.

• From the doors. This one is my favorite, because it runs on data that didn't exist until this year. The 2024 Rental Housing Finance Survey (released in February) separates, for the first time, properties managed by a management company from properties managed by staff the owner employs directly. Result: 22.3% of single-unit rentals and 14.3% of 2–4 unit properties are with a management company. Work through the housing stock and you get roughly 6.9 million third-party-managed doors in our segment. Divide by average doors per company and you land right at ~31,000.

What the 31,000 look like

Here’s how the 31k PM firms break down by likely units under management:

Our industry is extremely fragmented. About 6.9 million doors across 31,000 companies averages out to ~220 doors, but the median company runs fewer than 100. Even after years of roll-ups and PE money, the largest firm in the country holds well under 1% of the national market. There is no consolidation endgame in sight.

The blurriest line in the whole exercise is deciding when a broker managing a handful of doors becomes a "company." Draw that line differently and you move the total by a few thousand in either direction.

Further reading: The NEW 2026 list of the largest property management companies.

-Peter

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY BOOM

Your best lead called after hours. BoomCRM picked up.

BoomCRM's Leasing Agent answers every inbound call, 24/7:

• Answers questions about the property and availability

• Captures the lead and books the tour

• Sends the application link before they call the next listing

• Logs every call with a transcript on the lead record

Screening runs on the same platform, so identity is verified once and carries straight into the application.

That's the Leasing Operating System: cut response time to seconds and decision time to hours. 

See why 25% of Peter's Top 40 PMCs choose Boom.

Book a BoomCRM demo

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• DoorLoop named Ronnie Gurion to its board of directors (Gurian is President and COO of Clio)

• ImmoAdmin recently launched an “all in one platform designed for rental property owners and professional property managers”. Notable as there are very limited PM software options in Canada.

• Second Nature’s VIP registration is live for NARPM’s national fall conference & tradeshow coming up in October. Well worth your time to register if attending the show.

Giving Everybody Claude Won't Make You Money

Our leasing manager got Claude to help with rental listings. Saves her two hours a week. Saves the company nothing. Turns out that's the norm right now. Jon found an interesting parallel in a 1989 paper about factories that swapped in electric motors and saw zero productivity gain, because nobody redesigned the floor.

On the latest Lazy Leverage, Jon and I get into why most small businesses are stuck at "phase zero" with AI, plus the Fortune 500 company quoted $80,000 for one agent that Jon's team built for free.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Now that it’s almost September…

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. ServiceTitan updated its TOS to restrict automated/AI-agent access

2. Podcast with TurboTenant CEO, Seamus Nally

3. PropertyMeld promo for MX Summit ($240 off)

Did someone send you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

ServiceTitan Tightens Access: AI Agents & Ecosystem Control

A couple weeks ago, ServiceTitan (they’re basically the AppFolio of plumbing, HVAC and electrical companies) updated its Terms of Use to restrict automated and AI-agent access:

Their new TOS defines “AI Agent” broadly (AI agents, autonomous agents, browser agents, RPA, bots, scrapers, etc.). It bans sharing credentials with any third party (including AI Agents), configuring accounts to enable such access, bypassing security measures, or using these tools to extract data on a customer’s behalf. API Terms further require that any AI system use stay within predefined, disclosed, and approved scope.

ServiceTitan CEO Ara Mahdessian replied in the thread:

Customer impact is real

ServiceTitan just ended the long-standing integration with Podium, citing Marketplace standards, and gave shared customers (roughly 1,000) only a few weeks’ notice during busy season. Podium’s CEO said they were blindsided; ServiceTitan said it declined certification. Owners of the affected businesses are left scrambling.

This fits a broader pattern. ServiceTitan’s help docs already list other integrations no longer supported (HubSpot, Customer Lobby, FleetComplete, Review Inc., and others). Its App Marketplace now emphasizes certified apps only; “tunneling” (third parties using customer App Keys) is prohibited. The platform is shifting from relatively open partner access toward controlled, auditable pathways while accelerating its own agentic tools.

Parallels in property management are clear

AppFolio is embedding its own agentic layer (Realm-X Performers) while maintaining controlled API access (charging both customers and vendors to use it). Both vertical platforms treat their systems as mission-critical systems of record. As agentic AI rises, they prioritize security, auditability, and capturing value from the agent layer rather than remaining open data pipes for external tools. Limited or gated APIs sometimes push integrators toward credential workarounds—the exact patterns ServiceTitan’s language now closes. AppFolio pushes vendors to the Stack marketplace ($$$$), but carefully selects who has permission to join.

As for those vendors who are not allowed or not present on the Stack marketplace? Well, it’s an open secret that customers can simply create a login for their vendor to use, set up scheduled report exports, or both. That works great until it doesn’t (big updates on the Beagle vs AppFolio lawsuit coming soon—stay tuned).

Back to ServiceTitan—I like Gokul Rajaram’s commentary on Twitter/X:

Further Reading

This is playing out across many verticals, not just property management and home services.

Brendan Keeler wrote a manifesto on systems of record from the perspective of healthcare, and it’s one of the best things I can remember reading all year. If you want to know the forces at work in our industry, how the players are positioning themselves and where this is all going, get comfortable and dig in.
______

Have a scoop, lesson, or win to share? I’m looking for guest articles from property managers who have something worth sharing. Submit yours here.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY BOOM

Most operators run four systems to sign one lease. We just launched BoomCRM to bring it down to one.

Listings, leads, communication, and screening live in separate tools, and leads go cold somewhere in between.

BoomCRM runs on BoomScreen, Boom's tenant screening platform, so a lead's identity is verified once and carries straight into the application. No duplicate charges. Boom's AI Leasing Agent answers every call, 24/7, books the tour, and sends the application link.

That's the Leasing Operating System: cut response time to seconds and decision time to hours. 

See why 25% of Peter's Top 40 PMCs choose Boom.

Book a BoomCRM demo

Why 40% of New Landlords Still Won't Hire a PM

On this week’s podcast, I chat with Seamus Nally, CEO at TurboTenant. They just crossed 1 million landlord users on their platform, and we got into how they built that on a free core product, why 40% of new signups are still on the fence about hiring a PM, and the logic behind Autopilot, their new managed-service play that puts them in direct competition with people like us.

And this is cool: since we recorded this, TurboTenant officially announced it's acquiring TenantCloud, one of the exact competitors Seamus and I name-check in the episode. Good timing.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• This remote-managed property management business in Tulare County, CA is still available (asking $745k, $565k gross revenue)

• 30+ year commercial property management company in Suffolk County, NY (asking $2.8M, $2.32M gross revenue)

• 60-door turnkey property management company in Park City, UT (asking $275k, $157.5k gross revenue)

• Residential rental management business in Spring, TX (asking $191k)

Sponsored by Findigs. Legacy screening doesn’t cut it anymore. Findigs is the only decisioning platform that underwrites each application against your policy, returns an automatic decision, and keeps your leasing team focused on other revenue-driving work. Talk to an expert.

Industry News & Events

• Property Meld is running a promotion: $210 off MX Summit, their annual maintenance conference coming up next month. You’ll see the discount when you reach the Order Summary page. I’ll be there, trying to sneak my way into the rodeo (again). Highly recommend going yourself or buying a ticket for those in your business who handle maintenance coordination or run in-house maintenance. More about the conference. Must buy tix by 9/1 to get the discount.

• EliseAI is rumored to be closing a $300M round valuing the company at $3.7B (that’s half of AppFolio’s market cap). Wild.

• Boom announces a $15M Series A and the launch of BoomCRM.

• TurboTenant acquires TenantCloud from PropertyTek.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. 2026 Update for Top 40 Largest PM Companies in the U.S.

2. Webinar replay on hiring your first executive assistant.

3. Another look at why maintenance teams should use smart glasses.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

The 40 Largest PM Companies in the United States 2026 - Presented by Boom

For several years now, I’ve collected and published data on the 20 Largest Residential PM Companies. This data was self-reported, reviewed by yours truly, and published on my website. This year, thanks to 390+ of you who submitted your numbers, it's grown to the Top 40 Largest PM Companies!

And for the first time, we've got enough data to break it down by state!

If you run a PM company and have ever wondered what "big" actually looks like (how the top operators structure their teams, what software they run, how they're built), this is the closest thing our industry has to an answer.

The Top 10 Largest Overall

Click through for all data and the full Top 40 list. Here are the top 10:

Notable omissions from the 2026 list include Pure HomeRiver, which we know was 40k doors in January; and Northpoint, which was 6.4k last year but lost a large account recently. Leadership from both companies declined to submit for 2026.

Top 10 by State

For the first time, I had enough submissions to rank a Top 10 in almost every state. If you click the image below, you’ll find this cool map. Click on your state for a quick overview, then click again for the full state list with all data.

What They Run, and How They're Organized

AppFolio alone accounts for more of the list than every other platform combined, but Rentvine’s performance here surprised me the most. Their growth is impressive. Next year we’ll have much better trended data for this.

Todd O will be happy to learn that nearly half of all submissions run a departmental org structure:

But if you go a layer deeper, the median size of companies by software and organization is fascinating:

Even though more companies operate departmentally, a pod-department hybrid organization seems to support PM companies better at scale.

Who Grew the Most?

Here's the year-over-year change for the top three fastest-growing PM companies from 2025 to 2026 (click through for the full top 10 list):

Methodology

• Based on 390+ companies that submitted for the 2026 ranking.

• Figures are self-reported.

• Only third-party-managed doors are counted.

• Covers SFR and small multifamily only, under 100 units.
  No HOAs, no big multifamily.

NOTE: I'm sure a few numbers are rounded generously, and I have no way to independently verify every single submission. But self-reporting is the only way to see this corner of the industry at all. Nobody else is tracking scattered-site SFR portfolios closely enough to rank them, and the alternative to asking operators directly is to have no list at all.

—

Submissions for 2026 are closed, but I'll continue to update this list every year. If you missed the deadline, keep an eye on this newsletter for callouts to make next year’s list. And thanks again to Boom for sponsoring this year’s list.

-Peter

P.S. Do you like my new website?

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY LDGR SYSTEMS

You've heard about how LDGR helps Property Managers automate accounting with AI. Today, we'll cover what it's actually like to work with their team.

Recently, a Property Manager with 12,000 units asked LDGR to automate their end-to-end Accounts Payable process. The firm's CFO was tired of duplicate entries, late fees, and painful back-and-forth with vendors.

The LDGR team spent a few days observing how things were done and identifying the key data sources. Then, in under two weeks, the LDGR team built AI tools to replicate existing workflows. Now, every single one of the Property Manager's invoices is processed and coded within 5 seconds of receipt.

The result? No more late fees, no more duplicates, and hundreds of hours of manual work saved each week -- all for 50-75% less than the cost of an FTE or outsourced solution.

If you've got a labor-intensive process holding you back, talk to LDGR Systems and kick off a free trial:

Book a Call

I’m Currently Reading

• Property Management Is Overlooking the Usefulness of Smart Glasses

• When the Theory of Constraints Meets Reality

• There Will Be Bundling - Might be the best thing I’ve read all year.

POLL RESULTS: Do you read the NARPM Magazine "Residential Resource" ?

Click for a full archive of past issues.

Webinar Replay: How to Hire Your First Executive Assistant

Most PM owners talk themselves out of hiring a personal assistant because they think they don't have enough work to keep one busy. Wolf and I get into why that's the wrong way to look at it. An EA's whole job is to buy back your time as the owner, not to add another position to justify on a P&L.

We also get into what's safe to hand a new hire early on, what a highly qualified EA actually costs, whether AI can take over the inbox instead of a human, and the one thing Wolf and I completely disagree on when it comes to training someone up. Check it out.

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. AppFolio’s $75M Investment into Second Nature.

2. New HUD rules threaten to weaken fair-housing enforcement (not good).

3. Crane Podcast with Mark Brower - all about churn.

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The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

AppFolio’s $75M Investment into Second Nature

Remember 2025 when Appfolio was riding high?

The property management software firm had stellar second quarter earnings and its shares shot like a rocket to an all time high of $319. For a moment, it seemed as if the property management software firm – which had always lagged giants Yardi and RealPage – could leap into the top tier. 

Taking advantage of their soaring stock price at the time, it purchased a $75 million stake in Second Nature in April. The two firms said they would partner together to integrate Second Nature’s suite of offerings, including stuff like group rate internet and renter’s insurance. Second Nature themselves had been purchased by private equity company Great Hill Partners in 2022 at a 9-figure valuation.

For Second Nature it was a chance not only to garner investment but gain access to an enormous potential customer base in one fell swoop. But what did Appfolio get in return? Let’s get to that in a moment.

2026 has been a far rockier year for Appfolio. The company’s stock has dropped by as much as 50% from that August 2025 highpoint as it has been swept up in the SaaSocalypse: the broad panic that software firms everywhere will crater because of cheaper code written by artificial intelligence. 

Let’s get real for a moment: Appfolio’s business doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but up. In the first half of this year, revenue grew almost 20% to $543 million compared to the same period in 2025 and net income per share rose to $2.36 from $1.85, a nearly 28% increase. 

Wall Street analysts at Guggenheim gave Appfolio a buy rating and set a price target for the firm’s shares at $232 over the next 12 months. Appfolio stock is now trading around $200. “AppFolio is well positioned to, at minimum, preserve its relevance despite the emergence of AI,” Guggenheim wrote in the July 22nd report. 

AppFolio’s ability to simultaneously retain customers and expand revenue-per-customer is catnip for wall street. The later is where Second Nature fits in.

So with plenty of momentum all on its own, why did Appfolio pour $75 million into a relatively obscure partner?

Let’s start with the fact that property managers – myself included – love resident benefits packages. They allow us to purchase value-add products and services for residents in bulk (such as air filter replacement, pest control, internet, and renter’s insurance) and sell them to residents at a profit.

Meanwhile, AppFolio’s growth has slowed. It revealed it added 100,000 new units in the second quarter, down from 300,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025. 

No wonder Appfolio’s CEO Shane Trigg shouted out the partnership with Second Nature during its recent earnings call. Integrating Second Nature means opening new channels of revenue, and potentially gaining insight into competing platforms who also use Second Nature. It also gets them closer to the flow of tenant revenue (ie, fees) at a time when their unit growth is slowing compared to transaction revenue. When a Buildium customer signs up for Second Nature, AppFolio directly benefits.

“Second Nature, a partnership we announced last year, is gaining strong traction,” Trigg said. “Renters insurance, group rate internet, and other essential services activated in one seamless flow, turning a moment that used to be administrative into a value-generating experience for the resident and the operator.”

I chatted with Second Nature’s CEO Thad Tarkington and though he was reticent to chat directly about the Appfolio partnership for confidentiality reasons, he said that Second Nature labors to provide host of services and products that offer value to renters and convenience to property managers like me.

“Our product strategy is: what are the high impact events in a property manager’s life, the things that go wrong and how do we solve them in a way that delivers value to the resident and investor,” Tarkington said. “Our product experience, pricing, service– it’s all purpose built for the property management ecosystem.”

In case you missed it, AppFolio’s pace of acquisitions & investment has increased drastically since Shane Trigg took the top job in 2023:

• LiveEasy (buyout, Q4 2024, $80M).

• Lula (minority non-controlling, Q4 2024, $2M) - Unconfirmed but 90% certain Lula was the company invested in here. SEC filings confirm the amount but don’t name the company.

• Second Nature (minority non-controlling, Q1 2025, $75M). One source told me Second Nature went on to acquire Citizen Home Solutions in Q3 2025.

• Nomad (minority non-controlling, Q2 2026, $10M) - Unconfirmed but 90% certain Nomad was the company invested in here. SEC filings confirm the amount but don’t name the company. Nomad’s claim to fame is guaranteed rent. Coincidence that AppFolio recently announced they’re backstopping move-in funds?

As the walls of AppFolio’s walled garden are being slowly dismantled, their strategy is necessarily evolving. If AppFolio can no longer keep competitors out, they want to participate meaningly in the clear winners (or at least place bets). And… Shane’s background at Salesforce, a highly acquisitive company, surely plays a role here as well.

Four targets in 18 months… who’s next?

-Peter

Why One in Five Owners Doesn't Make It to Year Two

Ray Hespen at Property Meld shared a stat that stopped me: roughly 1 in 5 owners cancel in year one, and that number's swung hard since 2021. 83% retention, down to 75%, back up to 81%.

Mark Brower and I dig into it on our recent episode of The Crane Podcast: 
Is this just market forces or something we're doing wrong? We land on the "ninety days, no maintenance request" theory of retention, plus a wild pricing idea Mark pitched: $7,500 upfront for free management, forever.

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• Boutique property management firm with recurring revenue in Denver, CO (asking $649k, $562k gross revenue)

• Turnkey 60-door property management company in Park City, UT (asking $275k, $157.5k gross revenue)

• 15-unit multifamily portfolio in Conway, AR (asking $2.5M, nearly fully occupied)

• This turn-key property management company in Arizona is still available (asking $525k, $1.01M gross revenue)

• Fast-growing PM franchise managing 1,000 doors in Coral Springs, FL (asking $300k, $342k gross revenue)

Sponsored by Findigs. Legacy application processing doesn’t cut it anymore. America's top owners and operators outsource application review from end-to-end to Findigs so they can fill more units with residents who pay. Talk to an expert.

Industry News & Events

• ServiceTitan just cut off access to Podium’s integration. If you’re not familiar, ServiceTitan is basically the AppFolio of the trades (plumbing/electrical/HVAC). They are huge. This comes on the heels of changes to their ToS. Ominous. I’ll have more to say about this next week.

• Multifamily Dive has a great new tracker that centralizes all their reporting on the algorithmic rent-pricing lawsuits. Dig in.

• Tenant screening company RentGrow is facing a $2M penalty and injunction from the DOJ, apparently related to reporting accuracy and disclosure compliance.

• New HUD rules threaten to weaken fair-housing enforcement nationwide. Here’s a specific example from Houston, with details. Not good.

Closing Thought

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. How to design a process people actually want to use.

2. Why you deserve to waste a little time.

3. Hiring your first executive assistant (replay out now)

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

How To Design A Process People Actually Want To Use

Here’s a collection of concepts that I use when thinking about building a great process:

• Confirm you actually need a true Process (vs a reference document/Notion page)

• Get crystal clear on what triggers the process to start

• Start with low-tech

• Enforce a culture of daily task completion

• Contort your business to the tools

• Standardize terminology, punctuation, and verb tense

• Involve the right team members throughout

• Use as few tools & technology as possible, but no fewer

• Eliminate & re-order steps at every opportunity

• Don’t overlap with another process

• Don’t manually enter data at runtime if only used once

• Just enough process - don’t overengineer

• Build for the common-case, not the rare exceptions

• Minimize (but don’t eliminate) conditional logic

• Put HOW to do it, WHERE you do it (self-documenting)

• Make it easy & fast to start the process

• Build in a few hours and deploy immediately. Capture the momentum

• Improvements should be incremental

• Process depreciation is real: you’re never “done” with a process

Watch me build a process in real-time.

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY LDGR SYSTEMS

Last week I flagged the accounting process that makes every property manager wince: the AP pile, the late utility bills, the reconciliations nobody fully trusts. Here's the part I didn't get into: how LDGR actually works.

They're not asking you to rip out your tech stack. LDGR sits on top of whatever you're already running (Yardi, AppFolio, Buildium, RealPage, doesn't matter which), so there's no new system to learn and nothing to log into and babysit every day. It just runs in the background.

The moment an invoice hits your inbox, LDGR processes it, codes it, and inputs it into your PM system exactly the way you or your CFO want to see it.
Want to check their work? Full audit tracking is built in for visibility.

They're already doing this for ~40,000 units, at 50–75% less than the cost of an FTE or an outsourced solution.

If you've got a process like that eating your week, tell them about it and kick off a free trial:

Book a Call

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• OneSource Real Estate has acquired 1 of 100 Property Management in Atlanta

• PMI Daytona Beach has acquired PMI Daytona Flagler

• Tomorrow: Sharing what I've learned from 3 years of working with a personal assistant. Catch Peter & The Wolf live, register here.

Why Entrepreneurs Are So Bad at Relaxing

Jon sent me a video on why leisure is a skill you have to build, and it kind of got under my skin. It breaks “leisure” into three categories: learning things you don't have to, deepening relationships nobody pays you for, and getting spiritually deeper. Good list, but something's missing…

Turns out "wasting time" might be the skill you're missing. My grandfather, who puttered around his Maine cottage with coffee or a cocktail for weeks every summer, knew how to do this best. Not enough entrepreneurs know how to do this, but they should all give it a try.

(Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. ACH Deep Dive for Property Managers

2. Great podcast with Stephen Glover of Peak PM

3. Level Up Your AI webinar with Wolfgang Croskey (Thurs. @ 2pm ET)

Did someone send you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Not interested in the Tuesday Edition? Click here to opt out. 

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

ACH Deep Dive for Property Managers: Your Questions Finally Answered

It's Wednesday. You ran owner disbursements on Monday. Three owners have emailed asking where their money is, one of them twice. You log into your software and there is nothing to see: no status, no ETA, no tracking number. The money is somewhere between your trust account and your owner's checking account, and you have no idea where.

I've been on the receiving end of this, and I've seen probably hundreds of PM business owners complaining about it online. Inevitably someone chimes in talking about “NACHA Files”, whatever those are. Then someone else asks: when are we getting Same-Day ACH? And by the way, how on earth are tenants sometimes able to reverse ACH rent payments months after the fact?

I decided to figure out what the hell is actually going on. Warning: This is long.

Tenant Rent Payments - How Long to ACTUALLY Clear?

Let’s explore how ACH works when tenants pay rent, because it’s a little simpler and will frame this up nicely. Tenant ACH payments settle in one to two business days, and Nacha rules give their bank two business days to reverse it.

One terminology note, because these two things sound the same and aren't. Nacha is the organization whose rules govern every ACH payment in the country, including rent payments. A NACHA file is a specific format you hand your bank to send payments yourself. Everything follows Nacha rules, but nothing about a tenant rent payment involves a NACHA File, and ~nobody recommends using them for that purpose. More on those files later, though.

Sound good right? Cleared easily within a week, so what is going on when a tenant is able to reverse a payment 6 weeks or even 6 months later??? Check this out:

Note this chart is on a Log scale!

• Nacha rules allow tenant “unauthorized charge” reversals within a 60-day clock that starts at the settlement date.

• Regulation E (federal consumer protection rule) runs a different clock, starting from the date the bank sends the statement the transaction appears on. A rent debit that settles August 1 may not hit a statement until the cycle closes August 31, mailed September 1. The consumer's Reg E deadline is then roughly October 31. That's day 91. Fun!

• Reg E reversals work like this: first, the tenant tells their bank the debit was unauthorized. Their bank investigates and reimburses the tenant. That bank is now out of pocket, so it files a breach of authorization warranty claim against your bank, on the grounds that your bank warranted the debit was properly authorized. Your bank pays, then debits your account under your origination agreement.

• Nacha’s warranty claim window runs two years from the settlement date on a consumer account (omg) plus a separate carve-out that lets the tenant's bank reach any entry falling within 95 calendar days of the first unauthorized entry, even if that one settled more than two years ago. Oof. Got all that?

Bottom line: The vast majority of ACH rent reversals you’ll see occur within 60 days of settlement. In rare circumstances, a tenant can pull back rent up to two years later.

Paying Property Owners - Normal ACH (e-Pay)

When you pay an owner using ACH through your PM software, your money does not go directly to your owner. It goes to your software's payment processor first (that’s the batch-pull you see on your bank statement), and THEN to your owner. Two separate ACH transactions, with the third-party processor holding your owners' money in between:

1. The Pull. You approve the disbursement batch in your PM software. Your software's payment processor originates an ACH debit against your trust account and pulls the money out. Note the direction: the processor is reaching into your bank account. You're not sending anything.

2. In Between. The money sits in the processor's account — typically a pooled "for benefit of" account holding funds for every property manager on the platform. Held for some number of business days, depending on the processor, the PM software, and their perception of your credit risk.

3. The Push. The processor originates an ACH credit out to each owner's bank account. This settles overnight (fast).

The Pull is a debit, which can be returned. The Push is a credit, and once a credit settles, it's gone — irrevocable, no clawback. So the processor is in an obvious spot: if it pushes money to your owners but then the pull from your trust account bounces, it's out the money. That's the reason for the hold. The processor wants to be sure its debit against you stuck.

Importantly, if your owners see funds hitting within one to two business days of initiating disbursements, your PM software and/or their processor is actually extending quite a bit of credit to your company and taking on risk (in some cases, initiating the Push before the Pull has even cleared).

So that all makes pretty good sense. Property managers reporting a wide range of owner disbursement timelines (I’ve seen anywhere from 1 to 5 business days) are on the other end of policies and credit decisions by their PM software, and that software’s payment processor.

Speculation: The processor’s clearing policies are influenced by their ability to earn interest on the float, which is presumably used to offset fees the processor charges your PM software. If your PM software is willing to pay more fees to the processor, they’ll relax the hold day requirements. Your software’s willingness to do so may vary.

NACHA Files and You

Some property management software allows property managers to export a small file that you can upload to your bank to initiate a direct ACH Push to your property owners. This is called a NACHA File. It’s an alternative to the PM software’s built-in ePay/ACH for doing owner disbursements. Not all software supports it, and most of the ones that do don’t make it easy (or force you to choose between their native e-Pay and NACHA files).

A NACHA-file ACH typically settles on the next business day. If you submit before a same-day window cutoff time, it can land the same afternoon. And starting September 18, 2026, standard next-day ACH credits have to be available to the receiver by 9:00 a.m. local time on the settlement date, regardless of when the file arrived.

NACHA File transfer shown in green.

Sounds great, right? Well, there are a few things to consider before jumping on the NACHA File bandwagon:

1. The file is plain text with no encryption. Open it in Notepad and read every owner's name, routing number, account number and amount. Yikes.

2. Sent the file to your bank with mistakes? You literally pay for any errors. Bank origination agreements are unambiguous: you pay for any entry you transmitted "regardless of whether the Entry was erroneous in any respect."

3. Your ledger and your bank can quietly disagree. The software posts the disbursement when you create the batch; the money moves when the bank originates. If the upload fails, your software doesn't know.

4. Control totals are supposed to verify the batch, but they're calculated from the entries in the file itself — edit the file, recalculate, done. And the entry hash only covers routing numbers, so changing an owner's account number changes nothing. The file still balances.

5. Dual control: some banks let you require a second approver. Better than nothing, but most approval screens show a batch total, not a payee list. Swap an account number, leave the amount alone, and it sails through.

Both safeguards watch the money. Neither watches where it's going. The only check that catches this is a human comparing the file's payees against a report from your software. Still light years from the security of native ePay through your PM software.

Why Don't the PM Platforms Make NACHA Files Easy?

Here is where facts end and informed speculation begins. My guesses:

• Every disbursement that moves to your bank is on a rail where it stops controlling the failure mode, but still gets the support ticket when it creates an accounting headache or your bank rejects a file.

• Transaction fees (like ACH fees) are a big source of revenue for most of the PM software vendors, and growing faster than subscription fees. Giving property managers a way to avoid some of those fees is probably not high on the priority list.

• Letting property managers easily export an unencrypted list of all their property owners’ bank account details is risky no matter how you slice it.

In Conclusion

None of this is a scandal. It's a series of decisions about risk, float and fees. That said, understanding how it all works is powerful for three reasons. First, it lets you set practical policies for rent payments and owner disbursements. Second, you can research and shop property management software intelligently. And finally, you can clearly advocate for yourself and your property owners when speaking with your current PM software and payment processor.

-Peter

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY APPFOLIO

The Event Where Real Estate Makes Its Next Move

FUTURE, the real estate conference by AppFolio, is four days tailored to operators who want to turn technology, strategy, and data into measurable performance.

San Diego · September 28–October 1, 2026

Hands-on training, live demos, and time with the operators, investors, and innovators setting the pace in real estate. Leave with a playbook, not just a notebook.

Keynotes from Dr. Maya Shankar and Andre Agassi, plus live music from a living legend.

Register Now

Level Up Your AI with Wolfgang Croskey

Wolf is my co-founder at Crane. He's spent the last year doing the real work: building AI into a property management business, watching what holds up and what doesn't, and having the compliance conversations people are still avoiding.

On August 13, he's doing a free, public session with Second Nature's Andrew Smallwood where he's sharing all of it. His tech stack, his AI stack, the wins he can put numbers on, and the mistakes worth learning from. Plus what every PM needs to know about Fair Housing, TCPA, and FCRA before letting AI communicate on their behalf.

Register here for the live event + recording.

Can you really control how (and when) you lose owner clients?

Stephen Glover and I have crossed paths at NARPM events and masterminds for years, but this was our first time on the podcast together. His stat stopped me cold: Peak Property Management went roughly 5 years and 700-800 units without ever losing a client to dissatisfaction. Every departure was a planned asset sale.

We get into how he built that reputation (he's turned down 4,000+ units over the years), a leadership philosophy rooted in Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership after training alongside a Navy SEAL community, and what happened to his churn numbers the moment he let go of the reins.

Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• Montana property management firm with over a decade in business (asking $145k, $146k gross revenue)

• This full-service property management and remodeling business in Cape May County, NJ is still available (asking $450k, $650k gross revenue)

• Recurring-revenue property management company in Denver, CO (asking $495k, $562k gross revenue)

• Semi-absentee 3-unit multifamily investment in Miami, FL (asking $650k)

• Established PM company in Western Wisconsin (asking $550k)

If you plan to buy one of the property management companies above, I recommend using Live Oak Bank’s Property Management Lending Team to finance the deal.

Industry News & Events

• Enterprise Bank just announced an AppFolio Stack partnership, the first in AppFolio's new Banking partner category.

• RentEngine’s Q2 leasing report is finally out. It’s so good. Grab it here.

• Zillow is laying off 500 people.

• Next week—sharing what I've learned from 3 years of working with a personal assistant. Catch Peter & The Wolf live, register here. We’re regularly cresting 100 live attendees, it’s a vibe.

• Not sure what this is or who is behind it - check out Folio. Flat-rate PM system that purports to do everything your PM software does, all on a single platform. Hard to tell but it looks like it might be custom-built for each customer.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. The industry’s first real Operations Benchmarks (from ProfitCoach)

2. $300 smart glasses for your maintenance team?

3. KKR / Avenue One breakup meme.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly briefing for the property management industry.

Our Industry is About to Get Its First Real Set of Operations Benchmarks

For years, property managers have had plenty of dashboards to stare at.

What we haven't had? How to know if the numbers on those dashboards are actually good!

For example, knowing your time-to-turn doesn't mean much on its own. Is it fast? Slow? Average? You can't answer that without a common standard to measure against (benchmark), and until now, our industry hasn't had any for operations.

Needless to say, I've been tracking this problem closely and talking to lots of people in our industry about what we can do about it. Finally, someone is stepping up. Enter ProfitCoach: they're launching operations benchmarking platform for residential property managers.

ProfitCoach solved a similar problem back in 2018, building the industry's first financial benchmarks off the NARPM Accounting Standards. Then, two years ago, they went after operations, launching the PM Operations Standards (which Crane sponsored). It’s a framework that breaks core PM workflows into standardized milestones. Measure the time between those milestones the same way across every company, and you finally get apples-to-apples data instead of everyone's homegrown metrics.

Now they're taking it a step further: the first live operational benchmarking platform built on those same standards.

They're looking for operators running LeadSimple, Aptly, or Realm-X Flows to submit operational data (never shared, sold, or identifiable once it's in the benchmark) in exchange for a free operations benchmarking dashboard once it goes live this fall. This isn’t going to be some vibe-coded weekend project; ProfitCoach is going hardcore mode and making this a cornerstone of their offering moving forward. They’re taking their time to get it right.

For now, access is limited to ProfitCoach clients and Crane members while they build the founding dataset. The next group gets invited soon. If you want to be in that first wave and get the dashboard at launch, you can join the waitlist.

You'll get notified the moment the waitlist opens. And your contribution helps build the benchmark our industry uses to measure operational performance for years to come.

-Peter

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY LDGR SYSTEMS

Every property manager I know has at least one accounting process that makes them wince: AP that eats a day a week, utility bills that pay late because nobody owns them, reconciliations nobody fully trusts - the list goes on.

LDGR builds AI-based accounting automation for PM companies to solve these problems. 

Share your most manual, most painful process with LDGR, and they'll automate it at no cost, no strings attached. They can even deliver results in as little as two weeks with their pilot program. Just pick a process, building, or vendor, and they’ll automate it to your company’s specific operational needs. No lengthy onboarding. Just valuable, measurable results in two weeks.

LDGR customers report saving 50-75% of their accounting costs using their AI solutions.

Their offer: tell them your most painful process, and they'll build automation for it. Their customers are seeing real results. 90% save more than $50K a year after switching.

Curious what that could look like for you? Run the numbers in their ROI calculator. It only takes about thirty seconds.

Try the Accounting ROI Calculator

PM Company & Vendor Updates

• LeaseLock announced they have passed $17B in leases secured and added two A-Rated insurance carriers to their platform. Check out my interview with their CEO Janine Steiner Jovanovic.

• Apartment List joins AppFolio Stack with a pay-per-lease model.

• PMI Greater Nashville has acquired PMI Greater Dickson.

• Keyrenter Naperville has acquired Keyrenter Chicago North.

Would you give $300 glasses to all your maintenance technicians?

Jon bought a pair of Meta Ray-Bans to snap pictures of his kids without digging his phone out. A few weeks in, he's dictating voice memos hands-free and texting commands straight to his AI agent through them.

On this new Lazy Leverage ep, Jon and I get into the backdoor that routes Meta's whole ecosystem to whatever agent you're already using, plus what it means for crews: before-and-afters without chasing footage, a master plumber troubleshooting a junior tech's job from one photo, and basically a body cam for your business.

Also available on Apple Podcasts.

Meme Tuesday:

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Friday’s Newsletter:

1. Big news on the KKR / Avenue One split, affecting ~10k SFR units.

2. Zillow is gating renter leads behind a sign-in wall.

3. A great breakdown by Propexo on unit count by PM Software.

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The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.

A no-fluff, twice-weekly publication for the property management industry.

KKR to Avenue One: We’ll Take it From Here

There’s a major shakeup underway in single-family rentals that’s going to impact hundreds of property-management jobs: Wall Street giant KKR, one of the largest players in the space, is ending its asset-management relationship with Avenue One and taking things in-house, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. Avenue One managed about 10,000 SFRs for the PE firm, mostly in the Southeast.

Founded by Ryan Stroker and William Martiner, Avenue One was one of the beneficiaries of the pandemic-era SFR frenzy. In 2023, the startup raised $100 million at a ≈$1B valuation, per Bloomberg, drawing investors such as WestCap and MetLife. KKR had also previously invested in the firm. Avenue One’s pitch was helping institutional players identify, acquire, renovate, and manage properties using their local partner network. It provided the sourcing, infrastructure, and local operator connections necessary to scale.

Today, however, much has changed on the ground. Legislation passed this summer imposed new restrictions on large investors, and the policy back-forth took a toll on investor enthusiasm and may hurt portfolio pricing. Meanwhile, many of the largest asset managers have been looking to insource property management; The Promote reported in February that Blackstone’s multifamily unit LivCor had informed some of its PM vendors, including Bell Partners, of its decision to do so.

Avenue One recently notified four of its property management partners that the KKR relationship would be winding down, in some cases within the next 30 days, per two sources with direct knowledge. Mynd managed ≈ 4,000 of the homes, Evernest 3,500, Northpoint 1,500, and PURE HomeRiver (a product of the Jan. merger of PURE Property Management & HomeRiver Group) 1,000.

KKR will now look to its subsidiary My Community Homes (MCH) to oversee the portfolio. The division, which was created in ‘21, isn’t seen as a profit center; it allocates actual costs back to the funds it manages on a pro-rata basis, SEC filings show. 

MCH, in turn, will assign property-management responsibilities for the bulk of the doors over to its preferred provider, Darwin Homes. Purchased by Pagaya in 2023, Darwin is one of the nation’s largest SFR property managers (≈20K doors as of ‘25), working exclusively with institutional investors. My two sources said that MCH is retaining Mynd, but not the other three managers.

The move follows a broader shakeup inside KKR's real estate business. In early ‘25, KKR merged its real estate and infrastructure groups into a single "Real Assets" platform under infrastructure chief Raj Agrawal. At the time, Bloomberg reported that KKR's flagship Americas real estate fund posted third-quartile returns, below its threshold to earn a promote. New leadership with a mandate to fix returns tends to go on the cost-cutting hunt, and an outside asset manager layered on top of four property management firms is an obvious place to start.

Northpoint and Evernest will be helping secure roles for those impacted by the likely layoffs, and we’ll have more information as it comes to light. Northpoint is losing ~30% of its total door count and will restructure to diversify its focus to include small multifamily assets, one of the sources said. Evernest and PURE HomeRiver are likely to lose roughly ~15% and ~3% of their portfolios respectively, according to my own estimates.

The situation highlights the risks of property-management firms that tether themselves too closely to institutional investors. Be careful out there.

-Peter

THIS ISSUE PRESENTED BY PLANOMATIC

ICYMI: PlanOmatic just launched Work Orders, so you can now place a Work Order directly with them and bill your owners for photography once it is complete. I posted about this on LinkedIn, but it's worth mentioning here as well: I think this new workflow is going to be a game changer, and I can't wait to have my team try it out.

We're running about 25 active listings at any time, and PlanOmatic's speed and direct integration with our PM software already made them our go-to photography vendor. Adding Work Orders for easier owner billing on top of that just eliminates another handoff my team used to do manually.

Same great photos, one less step for your team, and better accounting for your internal operations.

Learn More About Work Orders

Marriott wants to be your landlord?

Marriott just put its name on rental apartments. First time any national hotel brand has tried this, and Mark Brower and I spent a chunk of the most recent Crane Podcast picking it apart: genius move, or brand disaster waiting to happen?

Hotels run on consistency, so you know what you're getting every time. Rental housing never has. Can Marriott pull that off once it's managing tenants instead of guests? We also got into vendor kickbacks - would you be fine if your owners saw a quarterly report of exactly what every vendor paid you for their business? That question kicked off the episode, after some pushback on an article I wrote calling kickbacks what they are. Check it out.

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify

Property Management Companies For Sale This Week

• This mid-term housing management business in Tulare County, CA is still available (asking $745k, $565k annual revenue)

• Established property management company in Western Wisconsin (asking $550k)

• 5-unit rental portfolio in Lehigh Acres, FL (asking $1.65M)

• Turn-key property management company in Arizona (asking $525k, $1.01M gross revenue)

Sponsored by AppFolio. 77% of property managers expect their portfolios to grow in 2026 - even with rising costs and vacancies. See the data-backed moves they’re making in the AppFolio 2026 Benchmark Report.

Industry News & Events

• Zillow is now requiring renter leads to sign in before submitting interest in a property.

• Yardi Breeze announces a user conference called REfresh. October 6-8th in San Diego, CA.

• NARPM Texas Style is September 14-16th. I hear this is a ton of fun. More info.

• Propexo did a new fascinating breakdown of unit count by PM Software. AppFolio comes in at 9.5M, followed by RealPage (Buildium + Propertyware + OneSite) at 9M.

• NARPM announced the 2027 Board of Directors slate. Tracy Streich has been named the President-Elect. Crane member Stephanie Michael joins the board as a Director.

Closing Thought

Twitter tweet

Did you miss it? 3 highlights from Tuesday’s Newsletter:

1. List of Largest PM Companies (2026 deadline was yesterday, but you can still submit here if you missed it)

2. State of AI in Property Management survey.

3. Why you should always read the fine print.

🤖 PeterBot Question of the Week

You shouldn’t have to work on the weekends (unless you’re PeterBot).

You can now register a free Delphi account for unlimited chats/minutes with PeterBot, my AI clone. It saves your conversation history so you can pick back up where you left off. If you've got a PM question you're stuck on, go chat with it (try the audio mode). It's trained on nearly everything I've ever written or said.

Software I’m using to scale my 700+ door property management company:

Note: These are affiliate links, but I’ve been recommending all these companies long before any financial arrangements came into place.

The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. I may have consulting agreements with, or financial interests in, companies mentioned in this newsletter. Additionally, some of the links included in this newsletter are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links. Always perform your own due diligence before making any financial or business decisions.