Are you a property manager? Is maintenance your biggest cost or time suck? Does it keep you from growing your business? You can't expect to grow a company when you're stuck in the operations piece of it every day.

Today, I am talking with Ethan Lieber of Latchel, which helps property managers with maintenance and growth. You can get stuck where you have to hire and hurt your margin or you're growing and just can't keep up. You're behind on work orders and that's not good for anybody. It's not good for your business, tenants, and property owners. Latchel builds solutions and services to try and fix that problem.

You'll Learn...

[07:10] When thinking about the growth of your business, that comes from the way you acquire your customer scalable and how you get scalable lead generation. [08:00] Frontend/Backend Scalability: If you're only bringing in new customers and increasing units, there's going to be a problem if your operation can't handle that growth. [08:25] Latchel focuses on making maintenance scalable; grow without worrying about creating your margin or being able to fulfill any promise you're giving to customers. [08:45] Latchel realized that technology is support for a process, but it can't be the process; so it offers maintenance software backed by an actual human-based service. [14:00] 3-step process for a call: 1) Determine if it’s an emergency or not; 2) Send possible emergencies to in-house team member; 3) Send out a vendor/contractor. [15:35] Companies should create a preferred vendor list/network to send out vendors that they partner with when bandwidth is not available. [16:35] Human Side vs. Automation: Beautiful thing when you can combine expertise and the human mind with technology; use technology to reduce inaccuracies. [18:55] Types of transformations of early adopters that implemented Latchel to offload maintenance with phone calls and coordination. [22:35] Property managers are careful about giving something up; if they want to grow, they have to delegate, give up control, and use a vendor network. [26:10] When Latchel works with any customer on taking over maintenance, Latchel builds boundaries to work under and sets clear expectations. [41:00] Latchel makes life easier for maintenance coordinators by earning trust; transparency becomes important, especially through documentation. [44:50] Latchel works with property management software through an add-on service, but is looking into API connections to integrate with existing systems.

Tweetables

Latchel builds technology to make its human process more efficient

Latchel frees you up to grow but keep your margins healthy

It’s a beautiful thing to combine expertise and the human mind with technology

Resources

Latchel

Homey

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Property Meld

SuperTenders

EZ Repair

AppFolio

Propertyware

Buildium

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Rentec

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