TurboTenant is an all-in-one rental property management platform that helps landlords find, screen, and manage tenants effortlessly—completely free. From listing syndication and tenant screening to lease creation and rent collection, it streamlines every step so landlords can maximize efficiency and keep their income truly passive.
In this episode of the SourceForge Podcast, we discuss the evolving role of landlords and the impact of technology on property management with Harrison Stevens, VP of Marketing at TurboTenant. The conversation highlights the challenges independent landlords face, such as managing listings, tenant screening, and lease agreements, traditionally done manually. TurboTenant offers an all-in-one platform to streamline these tasks, making it easier for landlords to manage properties efficiently. The discussion also covers the integration of AI in property management, helping landlords with maintenance requests and improving tenant experiences. Harrison shares insights into TurboTenant’s mission to support independent landlords by providing affordable and comprehensive solutions, emphasizing the importance of customer satisfaction and the personal relationships landlords have with tenants.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Independent landlords often manage too much by hand.
- All-in-one software replaces fragmented tools and tasks.
- TurboTenant was built for small, independent landlords.
- Most landlords own just one or two properties.
- Tenant-paid screening made free landlord software possible.
- Centralized systems save time and reduce legal risk.
- Digital leases help landlords keep up with local laws.
- Automated rent collection creates cleaner boundaries.
- Software helps landlords act more like professionals.
- AI improves listings, screening, support, and maintenance.
- Maintenance triage is one of AI’s biggest opportunities.
- AI works best when paired with human review.
- Most independent landlords are not “slumlords.”
- Many landlords are everyday people building long-term wealth.
- Education is as important as software for new landlords.
Chapters
00:01 – Intro to DIY Landlording and Software
02:35 – Why TurboTenant Was Founded
06:23 – The Pitch to Independent Landlords
08:04 – Time Savings and Daily Efficiency
09:05 – Fragmented Tools vs One System
12:39 – How Software Solves Key Pain Points
18:52 – AI and the Future of Landlording
22:54 – Where AI Makes the Biggest Impact
27:47 – Rolling Out AI Carefully and Correctly
32:20 – Misconceptions About Independent Landlords
38:26 – What Surprises TurboTenant About Landlords
42:26 – Why Education Matters Alongside Software
44:12 – Where to Learn More About TurboTenant
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:00.77)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Now for a long time, being a landlord, especially an independent one has meant doing just about everything yourself, your posting listings, your screening tenants, your drafting leases, your collecting, right, you’re keeping track of expenses, there’s there’s so many different things that are involved with being a landlord. And traditionally, that has been pretty manual, you know, you’ve had paper leases, you’ve had spreadsheets for keeping tabs on the books.
There’s checks or cash that you have to collect for rent and then you have like emails and text messaging just scattered around Trying to keep things organized and that DIY approach I think can work for a while But I think it also gets really complicated really fast, especially as landlords take on more properties or have to deal with changing regulations It seems like every city state counties is different and has their own way of doing things and rules to abide by
Over the past several years, though, we’ve started to see more technology enter the rental space. Software platforms are helping landlords bring all those various tasks I listed earlier into one convenient all in one place. And that’s really where today’s guest enters the chat stable be talking with Harrison Stevens, Vice President of Marketing at TurboTenant. And I’ve got a bunch of questions to ask him about his company and the all in one platform they’ve built specifically for independent landlords to help them manage all sorts of things from listings and tenant screening to lease agreements, rent collection, and ongoing property management all through one system, right? And Harrison is a landlord himself. So he understands firsthand the challenges that come with managing properties. I’m also a live-in landlord. So I’ll be taking some serious notes during this conversation.
But we’re gonna get into kind of go big picture and talk about how the role of the landlord is, is evolving, how software specifically is changing the way rental properties are managed and also what the future might look like. You can definitely bet I’ll be asking him about AI and what it’s doing, to kind of take the burden off of landlords shoulders. So with that introduction behind us now, Harrison, let’s bring you in. Welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Harrison Stevens (02:15.469)
Thank you for having me. Definitely cringed a little bit as you talked about the spreadsheets and all those things because that’s what I was doing years ago. And it’s really great to support all of these independent businesses technically across the nation to build something that makes it just so much easier.
Beau Hamilton (02:35.242)
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we’ve all been there, right? We’ve all used those those, those spreadsheets, those dreaded spreadsheets. I want to start at the beginning when TurboTenant was first founded back in 2015. Is that right? Yeah, what what problem was TurboTenant like originally, you know, setting out to solve for landlords? And I’m just curious, like how that mission has, you know, evolved over the past, you know, decade plus now that you’re catering to? Saw it 900,000 plus landlords. That’s pretty, that’s quite the evolution, quite the growth there.
Harrison Stevens (03:10.381)
We actually just hit a million. Things change that fast. So yeah, 10, almost getting close to 11 years ago, our founder had owned a few rental properties and software like ours did actually exist. So he went to them and said, hey, I’d really love to use the software that you have, but you’re charging $50, $60 a month per property that doesn’t make sense for me. And they’re like, well, you need to have 50 properties to work with us, which now eliminates 80, I don’t know, I’m making up a percentage, but a high percentage of number of landlords out there that only own one, two, three, four, five properties. So the software was always catered to these enterprise level clients, give them all the tools to be even more successful so they can keep buying more properties.
And if you have just a few, you’re kind of on your own. So he was pretty frustrated by that. And he realized when he did the math, if you don’t charge anything for the software and just charge the tenants for the application and screening process, which is what they are paying for anyway, you can actually make a good amount of money off of these smaller landlords without charging these fees. They laughed at him. So he was the kind of guy that says, well, now I’m going to go build this.
So in his part time, because he’s an air traffic controller, which is one of the most stressful jobs out there. So add that onto it. He decides that he’s going to go build a software company and he ends up finding the right people and building out a software that, know, historically up until maybe a few years ago was completely free for landlords. TurboTenant would make money off of screening and application processes, which the tenant would pay for. And at one point we even had a small fee for ACH transfers for the tenant to pay as a convenience fee.
Then three, four years ago, we started adding our premium subscription product, which waived that fee, made the fees lower for tenants a ton of other features for landlords, including accounting services and bookkeeping. We offer different move in, move out features so that the walkthroughs can be digital. We have close to 100 features now for landlords and tenants. We built an app for just tenants. We built an app just for landlords.
And we invested a lot in the experience so that, you know, you can be a successful business operator or landlord with and compete with these enterprise level solutions at a fraction of the cost. Our most expensive plan is $200 a year, which compared to our property management company is less than what you pay them for a month. So really wanted to make it affordable. And we also don’t charge right now for more properties. So if you’re successful and you want to buy another one, it’s even more affordable because we’re not charging you for that second, third, fifth, fiftieth property. We’re just trying to make it so that you can scale and be successful.
Beau Hamilton (06:23.01)
Really interesting. Yeah. inception point there and founding star, story at hearing your founder, you know, being a landlord himself, noticing the problems and the business model and kind of switching it on its head a little bit, with the, the kind of enterprise market and, kind of industry and how it was set up prior to, turbo tenant is interesting. And how, how is he able to, start a company while being an air traffic controller? That’s pretty amazing.
Harrison Stevens (06:53.391)
He, like most businesses, you end up finding the right people. Uh, so he, he found some people that helped get it started up and then he ended up, um, working with an agency and then the leader of that agency that was building some of the things he invited the entire agency to then come work for him. And a year later offered that person to become our CEO as he stepped back. So our current CEO was our head of product building a lot of this stuff who also is a landlord and, under Seamus’s leadership, we’ve been able to roll out all of those features products. We do releases daily of new features, improvements, and every quarter something new comes out that I think is meaningful to the landlord population that we serve that makes it better or to the tenants. Better ways to report rent to credit bureaus so that a tenant can earn, build more credit for just paying their rent. Now these are just things that we think of, of just.
There’s so many aspects to the landlord journey and the tenant experience. Can we make every one of them better? Let’s focus on the ones that impact the most people, build those out, test them, then go on to the next one and keep moving along.
Beau Hamilton (08:04.92)
Yeah, absolutely. And having an all-in-one system, I think, exciting to work for a company and for a software platform that has an all-in-one system, because you’re constantly building out new features and new tools. I’m sure when you started, the platform probably looked completely different than what it looks like now and the feature set. And I’m sure you’ve got a whole list of features to implement in the future, especially with lot of these automations and AI, you know, tools coming down the pipeline, which I want to definitely get into. But I want to first kind of take a step back and, you know, talk about, like, what’s your pitch to landlords? I think you obviously mentioned some of the benefits of having this kind of all in one system. But for landlords who are still managing things the the old fashioned way, you know, juggling with the spreadsheets and collecting rent through, let’s say, cash or check, what is your pitch to landlords, you know, with your solution you guys have to come up with.
Harrison Stevens (09:05.072)
Yeah, I’m definitely excited to talk about AI later. So definitely stick around for that. So the pitch, the landlords, you know, it’s one of those, it’s a weird marketing opportunity for me and challenge of, know, there’s the saying, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. But there’s a lot of things that aren’t working well that aren’t technically broken. And that’s kind of the landlord operating system that a lot of landlords have been doing for a long time of, know, I had a Google, a Google sheet with every single payment. And I’m collecting rent through two different methods. Zelle, would get half the payment and then I have to wait two days to get the next half of the payment because there was a limit. There’s all these things going on. And then I’m texting with them. Apparently one tenant was sending me WhatsApps, which I didn’t use.
So a year later I log in, there’s all these asks. There’s all of these fragmented systems. And there’s all these, you don’t know what you don’t know situations, especially with leases. And I’ve had that even blow up in my face one time and fortunately I walked away reasonable out of it, but there’s a lot of things that are going on that are challenging. And then I was just on vacation with my in-laws and hearing him talk about going to drive to collect a check drives me crazy. There’s all this time, there’s time and lack of knowledge and convenience. And then there’s also the expectation for the time they’re expecting to pay on their phone. They’re expecting to communicate through their phone. They’re do everything honestly on their phone. So the pitch to landlords is, we’re gonna simplify everything for you. We’re gonna make your business more successful. We’re gonna improve your margin because you’re not paying a property manager to take it off your plate. And we’re gonna make it so that everything is organized and give the experience your tenant expects.
And when you act like a professional, there’s kind of an expectation that if the tenant doesn’t treat your place right, there’s going to be consequences. If you act like a friend and you cut corners and you you let the tenant cut corners, move out might be rough for you. So trying to protect your investment, make your day-to-day life easier and make you more successful is all part of the story that we’re telling to people and the way you’ve been doing it is inconvenient and causing potential risks for you, try us out for free. You can actually use this free still indefinitely if you want to, and still just pay us, have the tenant pay us those background check and application fees.
Beau Hamilton (11:45.006)
Gotcha. Yeah, think there’s a lot of benefits of having an all-in-one kind of solution. I think we’ve seen that sort of trend gain momentum and steam with a lot of industries. think we’ve had lot of guest talk about the ERPs and CRMs out there with having this centralized approach. And it’s neat to hear that the property management space seems to be headed in that direction as well.
You’ve mentioned so like, when you have listings applications and rent everything kind of in one place, the saves a lot of time, it’s it makes the process of managing properties much more efficient. I’m just curious, like to have you do have much how much time has landlords have landlords, you know, saved using your system? Do you have any like maybe metrics to that attract these sort of time savings or things to, you know, compare it to?
Harrison Stevens (12:39.809)
Yeah, I mean, historically, we try and have it so the landlord spending about an hour a month managing their property. And I think the then it all depends, you know, how many hours are you spending on on your property is the question. And for me, it was, you know, when I was managing it all myself, I was probably only spending two or three hours a month and then randomly five to 10, something popped up and I think that’s where AI really comes into play with maintenance, which we can talk about later. That’s where like, I really hated being a landlord is when the issue popped up out of nowhere, because it never was a convenient time. Like I’m walking out of an important meeting to triage why whatever is going on is happening. And those are like the parts that really made me question, is it worth it? And that’s.
Beau Hamilton (13:31.618)
Yeah, because not every landlord wants to be involved in every little detail, right? And then like you were saying with your founder, it’s like most landlords have other jobs, other responsibilities to do. This is kind of like something that’s, I don’t know, for lack of a better term, it’s like a side hustle, or it’s just one more thing on top of their plate. And maybe they view it as an investment, they just prefer to have it run in the background, right? Yeah.
Harrison Stevens (13:57.296)
And one other thing also is like my tenants I knew their names their kids names like it was It was more personal than a typical business would be and they were my customer. It was a service that I was providing I When they’re late, you know because of XYZ like I’m thinking of their family and I like that part of you know, it’s how I lead my team. There’s their people But then I’d make bad business decisions, which would then hurt everybody long term and never really made major mistakes. But that’s another part of the software experience of like, you’re paying rent to TurboTenant, which then gives the rent to the landlord. It’s not this, and if there’s a late fee, it automatically applies and there’s no getting around it. It’s just part of what you signed. It’s a contract. Then I’m not the bad guy all of a sudden. It’s the software. And software is just what the software does. And I think that also relieves a lot of my own stress of it’s a lot less personal. I’m sorry.
Beau Hamilton (14:57.528)
That’s a really good pro. That’s, that’s a really good thing. Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that. Cause having that middle man there to kind of offer that buffer is huge. mean, I’ve, have that same issue where it’s, it’s, I mean, as a live in landlord who rents out a couple of rooms to, friends and who, know, friends of friends and family, it’s like, it can get a little bit kind of awkward, right? When, when it comes time to collect the rent.
And so having that middle man there is a nice little buffer and they can send the reminders, they can collect everything and I can kind of stay out of it and just remain the friend or family member.
Harrison Stevens (15:34.896)
It is, especially in situations like yours, like there’s a lot of value in not being the bad guy. And, you know, we, automatically collect the rent and we automatically do the late fees and also the communication. If it happens on the platform, then it’s all written down in a secure area where it’s not the conversation you have during dinner in your situation. Maybe it’s the conversation happening on the platform where if you get into real issues, it’s all written down.
Beau Hamilton (16:02.702)
So, what’s like going kind of big picture and macro, for a minute here, I’m curious, like, what have you seen? like how has technology specifically helped landlords kind of get ahead of the issues around, late rent and vacancies paperwork, maintenance requests, all those fun things, like in the past, was all about doing everything manually, collecting everything, and calling the maintenance crew by the phone. So how has technology helped tackle these issues?
Harrison Stevens (16:37.934)
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot. We’ll start with the journey. You have a place, now you need to rent it out. So the way I did it the first time was I handed it over to my realtor and she went out and found somebody, she put on the MLS and there goes a full month’s rent because half the month goes to the realtor you’re working with, goes to the other one. So that’s a huge, huge cost. Now, you know, these days, a lot of people will go and list it on different listing sites. You want to list it on five listing sites, you’re setting up five profiles. Some of them might charge you a little bit. You’re putting in all the pictures, and that’s a lot of time. With us, you put it on one site, and we syndicated out to about two dozen different places. The old way, you’re now logging into each. Did I get any leads? Now they’re all coming into one place. Do you have leads? They’re all in one area, yes or no.
So there’s that. Then, you the application process. You might have to go find an application. We have one provided for you that is built off of the terms of the lease you’re looking for, certain pre-screener questions. We’re also protecting you from saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong question. You can’t ask questions that discriminate against people. It’s fair housing violations. So we protect you that way and we automate it.
If they’re applying online, they’re gonna fill out the application online, you’re gonna get it all in one place easy. So time saving and protection legally. Then every state has its own unique laws for renting out and what can, renting out a property and what can be in a lease. Some counties have unique laws, some cities have unique laws. Those laws change often. I am guessing you’re not an attorney.
You’re probably not paying attention to, you could have been, probably not paying attention to every law that changes like we do. So we have AI that’s monitoring it and then we have legal people that are also monitoring it and checking things. So our lease is update within about a few days of a law changing. We try and get it on the day that it takes effect. Cause usually the law comes out and we know about it and then we make sure that it’s the day it’s in fact, you’re covered on a new lease. So huge risk, you know, avoidance there with technology and just a huge headache. I don’t even want to get involved in the boss and I work at this company. So, you know, a big opportunity there. Then rent collection. Some states require you to provide receipts in rent when you collect rent. And if you don’t, you could be in trouble. Then there’s also the book keeping part of it. Organizing everything and putting it all in one place and having it so that it’s almost automated. Your expenses are all easily documented and tagged.
So that you can, at the end of the year for taxes, you can hit a button and get us a report out to give to your accountant. That’s a huge game changer for you financially. could save money on the long-term from just hourly rates of paying an accountant, but also you’re giving all the right information and tagging correctly. You can do the right deductions. There’s a lot of opportunity in that. then I’ve mentioned it a few times now, just kind of lean into a little bit with AI.
I mean, think about the maintenance requests, you know, we can do maintenance requests on our platform. The tenant can submit the request, put in information. We find the information is all over the map on what they’re providing. Toilet’s broken. Which toilet? What’s broken about it? Is it leaking? Is it falling over? Is the seat coming off? Is it not flushing? Our AI can ask those questions for you. it’s the master toilet.
The seat’s coming off. Okay, that’s an easy fix. Here’s a guide on how to fix the toilet for the model you have. Maybe the landlord doesn’t even get involved. The AI can handle that. it’s leaking. All right, can you turn off the water? You don’t know how to turn off the water? It’s the little knob in the back behind. Turn that off. Is it still leaking? We can triage all this information. If the toilet needs a plumber, now you’ve woken up, you get this maintenance request, you have all the information you need, all the information a plumber is going to ask you, you can send that information over to the plumber, get a real accurate quote. Maybe you even have pictures because we prompt them to take pictures. Now the plumber is walking in with exactly what they need. The tenant’s getting the fastest support possible and you’re barely involved as a landlord besides approving the payment and making sure that this is your responsibility and things like that. know, that’s already out.
That’s the kind of stuff that I talked about earlier. That’s the part that I really hated, is in the middle of a meeting, toilet’s flooding. Not just leaking, flooding. Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? I didn’t want to bother you. Well, now you’re really bothering me. If you knew that you could talk to something that would, an AI, that would solve your problem instantly and communicate it anytime you need, wouldn’t that feel better?
Beau Hamilton (21:42.784)
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s exciting to see kind of what AI is able to do here in this front. I, I, it’s interesting to, so you sounds like you’ve used, you have technology, you have these features that cover basically every pillar of problems, that a landlord, you know, has to go through and navigate. and, and so like, I’m glad you brought up the AI, cause this is a, this is a fun topic. I like to talk to every guest about.
And talking about the automations of what’s possible here with AI is really fascinating. It’s very industry agnostic, I would say. So you mentioned these features being able to kind of troubleshoot some of the maintenance requests, clogged toilet, water damage. What are some of the, like, is this, this is probably the biggest area you guys are moving into in terms of like incorporating AI into all these different facets of your platform, right? are you trying to, what’s the big focus? Are you trying to save time? Are you trying to, like, mostly navigate some of the maintenance issues? What’s kind of the, were you seeing AI start to make a real difference for landlords?
Harrison Stevens (22:54.106)
Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot of things. Again, I’ll start with the landlady during the first thing is I want to list my property. You write something out. Not all of us are marketers. Not all of us know the right language. So you write it down and then our AI says, all right, can I spruce this up for you? Can I take all the information on your property and spin it into something that excites a potential tenant? When people use that, we see significantly higher response rates.
A lot of areas in our country get an average of 28 leads for each property. And a lot of it has to do with the right description. Also, are you putting enough photos? Are you putting too many photos? There is a threshold of too many photos. AI will analyze all that stuff and give you information back. So now we’re going to get you a tenant quickly. Then maintenance, think, is the biggest. And the tenants are pretty incredible, important part of this process. Without a tenant, you’re not a landlord.
You just have a vacant property and you’re a hobby. This maintenance part is a lot more time saving and it can also save you some money if you get the right information. And it also just makes a better tenant landlord experience. So that’s a big part of it. And a lot of the other things we’re looking at is just how many things can we eliminate a need for a property manager for? Because that’s really who we’re trying to phase out, honestly, that’s our competition in a lot of ways is do you need a property manager? Property manager’s gonna charge 10 % of the rent. We’re gonna charge significantly less. Can we handle everything? Can we do remote showings for you? Can we actually trigger the event to capture the information and then request the plumber for you and then just have you approve?
These are the things that we’re looking into. Some of that stuff is already live. Some of that stuff is in investigation and testing phase because it needs to be a better experience, not just an AI experience. think there’s, AI can be incredibly powerful, but my belief with AI is you need to train the AI to solve the exact job that you’re trying to solve. And we have, we use all of these different models. We have Claude, use ChatGPT. We use all of these different things for specific things that they are only good at. And you might actually interact with three models at once for some of these things because we’re picking and choosing the right one and testing it because it’s good at that one thing. And I think that’s the approach we’re taking. It’s been really successful. It’s also not the fastest route, but I’d rather get it right the first time than create an experience that creates doubt because the end of the day,
If we’re talking about removing property managers and all these other things that we’re trying to create a better solution for, we’re having to build confidence. That’s what we’re selling. If you are confident you can do this yourself with our software, then we are succeeding in our mission to making you a better landlord. And if we get it wrong with AI, then you’re losing confidence. So that’s a big part of what we want to do.
Beau Hamilton (26:04.046)
Yeah. And so much about this space is customer satisfaction, right? When you’re a landlord, you like you live off of your reviews and your relationship with your tenants. And you obviously want them to have a good experience. They’re living in your property. This is their home. And so when something goes awry, let’s say like you, you know, like I get back to the kind of plumbing issue. Let’s say you’re, you know, you log on to the to the platform and you start talking with this AI chatbot, you obviously want it to be incorporated well and actually capable of solving the problem without causing too much layers of frustrations. implementing AI in this way is something you probably have to take a cautious approach to, so that don’t rub tenets the wrong way. You don’t cause things to be more convoluted than they need to be.
And then also being able to like, you know, sometimes I’ll go in and to a chat bot and I just want to talk to a person. just want to like talk to a customer support agent or somebody who actually can get into the, the, solving the issue I have. And I don’t necessarily like get a lot of value from the chat, but other cases, like there are some, there is some useful information that’s able to cater to me. And, I think that is getting better, especially with, with some of these anthropic, open AI, datasets and LLMs that are able to actually really tackle the problem. I imagine you guys are kind of cautious trying to like implement some of these AI tools without going too far too fast. Just kind of waiting to see kind of the, you know, hear some feedback before you go all in.
Harrison Stevens (27:47.824)
Yeah, and it’s two things to that one. Uh, we have a human monitoring all of it. You know, that’s her job is her job to train the model. And the first one of the maybe second or third thing that we did for it with AI, uh, was the, the support chat bot. Yeah. I think that’s the checkbox that every company thinks we should do. We did it. And, know, after a few months, it’s now doing the work of four people. And then after a few months, now it’s, it’s doing a little more and now it’s at 16. It’s taking the volume of 16 humans and has a higher CSAT score for support. We’ve hired more humans because of it. And I think that’s something that I’m kind of proud of and something that you were saying as well is because we have the chat bot taking care of all of the straightforward high volume work, our humans are handling the challenging stuff. They’re on the phone walking through complicated situations. And we have the capacity now to support people at an even higher level because their time is freed up.
And I think that’s just one of the ways that AI is powerful is you don’t have to reset passwords. You don’t have to explain how to log in. You know, you don’t have to do all these things that are just easy and that a bot is great at. Our bots are now capable of reading your lease and explaining, yes, your tenant can have a pet and based on your state, here is the most amount you can charge for a pet deposit. That stuff is actually black and white. But we used to have someone go and look up a lease, read through it, find the section and say, it’s this. All right, state, it’s California. What’s the, we used to have to do that. Now we can answer that question in two, three seconds. And it’s the same answer every time because it’s the same process every time.
So that’s the stuff that is awesome. That’s what I love AI for. You know, my tenant has this really specific problem and you know, I’m concerned about this. That’s a human conversation right now. And it should be until that conversation happens a couple hundred times. And we do have certain aspects of the business where the AI suggests it, the agent reviews that and approves it. If that approval rate gets above 99% now it’s automated. So we do have systems that will train the model and go in real time, but they have the human check until we don’t need it.
Beau Hamilton (30:20.302)
Gotcha. Yeah, I think it’s interesting you mentioned how you’re actually hiring more people after kind of rolling out these AI features. And I think that it’s just shifting. The societal effect is just shifting. You’re just changing the roles, I guess. Nobody really, I don’t know, grows up and thinks, I want to be a customer support representative and to comb through someone’s lease and look for, you like obscure information. It just seems like a task that is just ripe for automation, like to be automated. Because it’s just something that nobody really wants to do, right? So if you’re able to kind of free up that job and kind of maybe even move some of those people into tackling more demanding, rewarding problems, I think that’s all the better. Yeah.
Harrison Stevens (31:13.488)
Yeah, that’s what we think the real value in AI is. And I mean, we’re even getting to a point now where it’s, hey, my tenant wants to renew. I want to change the rent and make it $200 more a month. All right, well, which rent, which lease? You know, that’s always the question that everyone forgets to say is which lease do you want to update? Oh, this one? Okay. Based on the information I have in your lease, you’re charging $2,800 for rent. Now you want to charge $3,000. Is that correct? Yes. Great.
I have now gone and updated the lease. One of our team members is going to approve it and then send it out to you to approve and send out for each side. We’ve gotten to the point where now someone’s approving it. Now if the bot again gets it right, AI gets it right almost every time. Now it’s going to be, Hey, we’re going to send it out to you to just sign. And those mundane tasks are helpful, but it’s really more of the personal interaction that the support team loves to do. Not just the business.
And I think that’s the part where AI is exciting because it lets people do the people things and it lets automation do the automation things.
Beau Hamilton (32:20.098)
Very well said, very well said. it’s an exciting time to witness and see how all these tools are being rolled out and making the whole process more efficient. If an AI can make landlords keep better taps on their properties, make renters happier, nurture those human relationships, then I’m all for it, right? Now, flip side of things, right? There’s obviously some growing concern around AI, the ramifications that this has on society. I also think that there’s probably, I’m sure, a bunch of different misunderstandings around the rental world as well. People have strong opinions about landlords and the industry. I want to give you a chance to maybe dispel some incorrect understandings. You’ve heard mentioned a lot in your maybe day-to-day work in the industry. What’s one misconception about this space that you run into a lot?
Harrison Stevens (33:17.828)
Landlords, I mean, I see they get the news. This person is just terrible to their tenants and they’re just out to make a buck and you can’t trust them. I mean, I’m dealing with, we have a million landlords that have used our software now, 990,000 of them are plus. They’re people that have found a way to buy a property, which isn’t easy. You have to put some money down or they inherited or something like that. And they’re trying to build wealth. But they’re really everyday people. There’s teachers, there’s plumbers, there’s marketers. I got a few on my team that own property. They’re analysts. They’re people that this is their way to invest in something. for them, it’s typically very personal. A lot of them talk about dropping off Christmas presents and my tenant wanted to paint their room purple because they were having a baby girl. And I had to repaint it afterwards, but I remember that. I’m like, of course, do that. These personal relationships are what our landlords have. It’s why they actually want to separate a little bit. And their margins are hundreds of dollars.
This is not so they can go fly around a world in a private jet. This is their kids’ college fund. This is their retirement strategy. They care. They often care too much and then they make bad business decisions and that’s where we try and educate them to be fair and direct and kind. That’s the bulk of who’s investing. And you get these one or two people a year that make the news, that make the story all about landlords are not helping people is false. It’s a service business. They’re treating people like you expect to be treated at hotel. It’s a service business. That’s their customer is a customer business relationship. And I think that’s the story that we want to tell often. And a lot of these people think that, you know, this is scary. It’s hard to manage this property. And that’s where we’re building confidence for them.
And oftentimes problems arise because they have a lack of information. And that’s also where our software kind of provides guardrails where they can’t say, you know, no women in my property or something like that. they, don’t allow, we don’t allow them to even try. I think that’s the kind of stuff that they’re doing it out of ignorance by accident sometimes where they can get a bad, bad situation. And that’s again, where the software really helps.
Beau Hamilton (36:08.908)
Yeah, it’s just a few bad eggs kind of ruin it for everyone else and kind of set a bad, ruins the reputation, right?
Harrison Stevens (36:16.976)
It’s a total different demographic than the enterprise corporate landlords where they have investors and the dollar doesn’t matter at a different scale. And I mean, they have successful businesses and they’re, you know, they’re setting at least a good standard of quality of living for these people that, you know, the places are nice. They know, you know, good upkeep is good business, but they’re taking a totally different business approach we’re taking a much more personal approach with independent landlords.
Beau Hamilton (36:47.886)
I love that distinction. Yeah. And because a lot of the, you talk you hear about is that property management companies or just large investors, companies buying up homes and kind of turning them into rental properties or, and just kind of fueling the housing crisis. And that is something kind of separate from obviously the kind of independent landlord space where you have it’s being operated, like you said, by teachers, plumbers, everybody you’d expect in your community. Everyone’s just trying to have an investment and just nurture. They care more about the individual relationship, I think, with their tenants.
And sure, they’re trying to use it as an investment opportunity, but I think they still focus on the right kind of priorities of maintaining and nurturing a good relationship as opposed to just the bottom line with some of these big investors and corporations coming into town. great. Thanks for dispelling that sort of misconception there with the slumlords. I haven’t heard that term recently. So that’s enlightening. Now, when you talk, when you spend a lot of time talking about with landlords and building tools for them, you probably start to notice patterns about how they think and what they care about and you start tracking kind of the data behind it. What’s something about landlords or maybe the market at large that has really surprised you and has stood out? Is there anything that might come to mind?
Harrison Stevens (38:26.195)
I mean, I guess surprised me before I worked here is how many people just own one or two properties. If you look at rental properties in the United States, the bulk of them are actually owned by people that own one or two properties. That’s the largest group. That’s why we cater to them. It’s the biggest target addressable market, Tim. That was a little bit of a surprise. I would have assumed it’s the enterprise and the enterprise is a pretty large chunk still. So that was surprising. lot more people just inherit or just become accidental landlords than I expected. But then again, I became one too. Like I bought a property and I was like, I rent a little more than I, the mortgage is a little more. And then my friend’s like, I’ll move in. So I became a landlord kind of as you’re describing for yourself. like, I had a room, I had a friend.
I didn’t want to him live for free. So I started charging some rent and then all of sudden I became a landlord and I was collecting a check by walking across the hall. I had the worst agreement ever written. It worked out because he was a good friend. know, like there’s a lot of that and really interested to see as mortgage rates drop where there’s so many people that have these 2.83 % mortgages, but they might not love their home.
Once they can get out, do they keep it and they try and rent it out? And we are most successful in new landlords. People that are expecting technology to help them have enough confidence to give it a shot and are looking for a complete all in one solution. That is our best market by far. It’s the people that we described in the beginning, like they have all of these fragmented systems that you have to peel away one by one. Those are the hardest people to convert because they’re
They’re convinced that their way is working well enough. I just spent a weekend with landlords, as I said, hearing about how rough it is, how much work the 15 to 20 hours a month he’s putting into being a landlord for one property. It drives me insane. I’m wearing the shirt next to him. like, you want me to pay for it for, you know, that’s the stuff that they’re, they’re setting their ways. And the analogy that I heard the other day is like, you can have soup with a fork. It will work. It’s just not going to be as good as a spoon. And what we’re trying to do is convert people to using spoons for soup. You know, it sounds crazy, but that is what people have been doing for, for decades is this fragmented process. And the easiest way to get them in is the tenant screening part, because that they always had to outsource. And then we let them discover all this other opportunity. And it’s different marketing strategies for different types of people.
Beau Hamilton (41:16.47)
Yeah, it made me think of, you know, the, there’s the crowd of, of renters out there. they’re typically, younger who are looking, saving up, trying to buy a home. And then once they buy a home, they realize, there’s so much work. There’s a lot more work involved than I realized. Right. And I think that same thing could be applied to, landlords who are, you know, just, just getting into the space and realizing, there’s actually a lot more moving pieces and things that I didn’t realize I had to keep tabs on that are kind of complicating the whole process and making me think twice. But I think they, obviously there’s a kind of a learning curve and you don’t know what you don’t know and hearing kind of some of the solutions you guys offer, think is gonna obviously help those landlords out. also what you were saying too with kind of the how one enters the landlord space in the first place. I think a lot of people, you know, the classic case is like, you know, when a kid turns 18, let’s say, you know, the parents start, kicks them out or they start charging rent, you know, got to go get a job, you got to start paying. And in a way that’s, you know, they sort of become landlords in a sense, right?
Harrison Stevens (42:26.416)
There’s a lot out there. And one thing we didn’t talk about, and it’s not technology, it’s not AI, it’s just education. We have a lot of content we produce that’s just educating people for free. And I think that’s something that we invested in early because, I mean, our founder was, among all the other things, he also taught real estate. he just, some people have that endless drive to do more.
And, you we, put out a lot of podcasts to be a better landlord podcast. And we also have, um, the landlord lens, which talks a little bit more about current events. And it’s just providing information and some guidance of, you know, what are the things to look out for? What are red flags in an application process? What are all these things that like experience is the only way to learn and why not just get the experience from the community that we have? That is something that we thought would be a great idea to do. we get a lot of people asking questions, engaging. We used to do a lot more in the webinar space, but we kind of took a step back and focused more on the high volume specific questions and answers kind of content. But that has been really helpful for our audience to learn from our mistakes and our experts mistakes and things like that.
Beau Hamilton (43:45.952)
Absolutely. I think that’s great way to kind of wrap this conversation up. And I’m curious, like for those interested, they’re maybe landlords themselves and they’re thinking about, you know, making the switch to a software all-in-one platform like the one you guys offer. Where’s the best place to visit? And then where’s the best place to go to just learn more, get some more information, like you were saying on this subject.
Harrison Stevens (44:12.176)
Yeah, I mean, the best place is TurboTenant.com. There you can sign up for free. You can play around with the platform. It’s not a trial. You can do a lot of things that we talked about in the free version. And just check it out from that perspective. We have all the social media channels that provide a lot of the education. I’d probably go to YouTube first and search for TurboTenant. We have a variety of different content styles that are more educational versus entertaining.
And then you can learn a lot more about just what we’re trying to accomplish as a company. But first place, I would say is TurboTenant.com. It’s got tons of information about all of our features. And if you go to pricing, you can see all the features that Free has, as well as that most expensive plan, which comes out to about $200 a year. That is it. That is what we charge. we keep it pretty simple because it should be pretty simple. Like, landloring doesn’t have to be a hard part of your life and neither should picking the plan.
Beau Hamilton (45:14.862)
Fantastic, well said. Harrison, this has been really an incredibly insightful conversation. think landlords listening and prospective landlords are gonna walk away with a lot of valuable insights. So I appreciate everything you shared with us and your time today.
Harrison Stevens (45:31.076)
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s always fun to chat with another landlord as well.
Beau Hamilton (45:34.862)
Absolutely. I’m going to scale up my empire here after this episode.
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software-related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.