How Jennifer Beadles Uses AI to Lease Units Faster and Scale Real Estate Investing

Jennifer Beadles (00:00)
And they work hand in hand. They’re absolutely incredible. I wake up in the morning and I get, you know, sort of, this is what we did while you were sleeping, sort of reports. But ⁓ because that KPI that we have at the portfolio level is, hey, number one priority is vacancy, It’s managing our occupancy, making sure that our units aren’t sitting, you vacant. So they determined that we could start using some of this AI technology to reduce our lease up time.

Micah Johnson (01:58)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Jennifer, who’s been making some serious moves in real estate investing now for the last 17 years. Jennifer, welcome in. Glad to have you.

Jennifer Beadles (02:10)
Hey Micah, thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Micah Johnson (02:13)
Absolutely. I’m pumped for our call today. You’ve been at this for a while and it has led you to create some pretty cool things and just what you are focusing on, how you’re capitalizing in the markets right now. I’m pumped for us to dig in and I think folks are to get a lot of value out of just how you’re approaching things in your business, especially with AI, different ways to make sure you’re just being efficient. Don’t leave any rocks unturned, especially in today’s market.

So let’s dive in for those who aren’t familiar with you yet. Tell us some more about yourself and what your main focus is right now.

Jennifer Beadles (02:44)
Sure. So again, my name is Jennifer Beatles. I live here in sunny Arizona and gosh, focusing on a lot of things right now. I’ve been, as you said, at it for 17 years.

And we are always kind of taking a two prong approach, right? Is how do we optimize what we currently own? And then also how do we build and scale? So yeah, right now we’ve got a portfolio of about 200 and we just sold a seven unit like two weeks ago in Michigan. So we’re out of Michigan now. But yeah, I think we’re at like 250 doors, kind of spread all around the country. So everything from the West Coast into some of the Midwest, Missouri.

Tennessee, Texas, just got out of Michigan, as mentioned, Idaho, Washington state. ⁓ So yeah, really ⁓ our big focus on the last, I would say 24 months ⁓ has been stabilizing some of the apartment acquisitions that we made a couple of years ago, and then also going back to some of the properties that we already own and building in the backyards. So that’s been a fun journey. actually started with new construction when ⁓

Micah Johnson (03:48)
So.

Jennifer Beadles (03:53)
Gosh, this is back in 2010. We were doing some small multifamily and spec home building just north of Seattle. So we took a six year, I would say pause on building to focus on buying a bunch of apartments. now we’re back to building. really exciting.

Micah Johnson (04:12)
Love that. All the way back then really what led y’all to where you are today. Fill in a few more of those gaps and what those things you’ve built along the way to.

Jennifer Beadles (04:20)
Sure. Yeah. So my journey into real estate began when I bought my first primary residence in 2007 and it was actually a development place. So it was a large short of corner lot that was zoned multifamily. It was a single family home built in the early 1900s. Bought that property, had plans to develop, but at 21 years old, I didn’t really have the ability to execute yet at that point. So what I did though is I went and got hired for a local builder.

Micah Johnson (04:29)
Yeah.

Jennifer Beadles (04:50)
And I did everything from project managing, ⁓ permitting. I learned AutoCAD. I learned how to put budgets together. I would go to the bank and convince them to loan owner projects.

Literally anything and everything related to building and development. ⁓ And the downside to that though is I was still trading time for money. And so I picked up a lot of skills, but I knew that I could go and take those skills and apply it to a business that I owned myself. So I continued to buy

Micah Johnson (05:59)
Right?

Jennifer Beadles (06:08)
I to one or two rentals every year ⁓ while I was again trying to figure out what is my next move. I decided to get my real estate license in May of 2009 primarily so that I could use the commission that I would earn as part of my down payment, get some arbitrage there. And then I found that a lot of investors were reaching out to me and saying, well, wait a second, you know how to do budgeting and estimating and you know the rents on these. Can you help us build our portfolios? So

Micah Johnson (06:24)
Gotcha.

Jennifer Beadles (06:37)
without really intentionally becoming a real estate agent, I became a real estate agent, which was really fun. I had about, I don’t know, maybe 30 clients and they would buy five to 10 properties each every year. So crushed it. Yeah.

Micah Johnson (06:49)
Yeah, that’s how you do it.

I remember my birth investor. That’s how I got started was an agent. And when I realized I could sell this one guy 30 houses instead of 30 people, one house, I was like, wait a second life hack. Also tell me about what you’re doing, sir. I need to know what you’re doing, man. Cause it’s like eye opening. Okay. So I love that. love one thing I want to pause real quick on is I love folks stories where

Jennifer Beadles (07:12)
So, out.

Micah Johnson (07:18)
Even though you did have to trade that time for money, you were at least trading it in real estate. You were using the industry itself to teach you. And I tell people this jokingly, like real estate is the only one that encourages insider trading. Like the more you go learn about the nuts and bolts of it, the more you’re connected to deals nobody else sees, the more you just get to be a part of something and see like, that’s how this works. Cause there’s this idea before. And then you get into that world and you start to see like,

Jennifer Beadles (07:23)
Mm-hmm.

awesome.

Micah Johnson (07:47)
Gotcha. This is how this process goes.

Jennifer Beadles (07:52)
Anyone that wants to get into real estate full time, would highly recommend going that route. Go work for a builder, go work for a property manager. Again, understand the ins and outs to your point, insider trading. Pick up those skills, set those knowledge, and that’s going to help you to the next level, for sure. Great.

Micah Johnson (07:52)
in

Right. Because it’s

just a process. People have been doing real estate for more than 100 years and in America, especially like it’s ain’t something new. The river is flowing. It’s just getting into it and learning the skill sets. And one thing I’m interested to keep going through your story because real estate is a big umbrella and it really lets your full personality out if you’ll let it because you get to grow in it. You typically don’t keep doing the thing that got you in. I don’t see that often where the

that what you started with is what you created your business out of, the thing you really wanted. It always kind of morphs. So take us through that journey for you as you were working with the builders, you were starting to build your own little portfolio. When did it take that next step for you?

Jennifer Beadles (08:53)
Yeah, would say that once I was starting to make a lot of money as a real estate agent through the commissions, then I would take that money and either do some new build projects or go and buy a bunch of more rentals. And it was really interesting, though, another kind of ⁓ unintentional consequence of that was that a lot of these investors were like, well, I’ve got money. Can I just give you the money and you do what you normally do? And that way, you know, I just sort of get to attach to your rocket ship and.

So was really interesting. I started building some private lenders using other people’s money to get into projects ⁓ and really started to scale up from there. It was really, really, really cool to be able to do that. But then there was a point where I said, OK, I’m still so I’m.

like again, working as an agent, flipping some houses, doing some new builds, but I really saw the opportunity to scale with the rental properties. I wanted something that was going to be, you know, making money while I sleep, if you will. I wanted to be able to travel more and like have a little bit more time freedom. And so, yeah, really paused when the building side and said, okay, I’m only going to be buying rentals. And then, ⁓

There was some local constraints in my market just north of Seattle. It’s very expensive and a lot of Californians are coming in. The Canadians are coming down. So the prices started going up

and I saw this opportunity to start ⁓ basically going out of state and was really shocked by the numbers and like, well, wait a second for what it would cost me to get into a small multifamily in these other markets. It would be the same as like a single family house in my own market. So, so yes, he made the leap into out of state investing. It was in 2016.

And it was incredible. The cash flow, again, much higher out of state. I didn’t have to oversee anything. I sort of built these local teams and was really kind of doing that. Then my investor group was like, well, wait a second. Can we follow you to these out of state markets? So again, they were like, well, wait, what is this? So from there, it was really interesting. I ⁓ started my own real estate brokerage and was just

Micah Johnson (11:23)
go through. Wait, we want to go.

Jennifer Beadles (11:34)
being the connector between the investor agent teams that I had to the local investors. And then it really took off to a national level, which is really cool. so, yeah, I mean, helped investors get into, gosh, like three, about 300 sales a year ⁓ on a referral basis. And people were able to quit their jobs, like getting into ⁓ early retirement, you know, through those connections. And so,

So my husband, so I would say the last time I had a W-2 job was in 2009. We were able to scale our rental income enough so that my husband could quit his job. He was about 30 years old. And so that was in, he stopped working in 2014. And, but what do you do when you’re early thirties and all your bills are paid for? It’s like, we could travel. And so anyways, we started.

Micah Johnson (12:27)
Right?

Jennifer Beadles (12:31)
Again, kind of doing apartments and some other projects and bigger projects, just continuing to add to the rental income. During COVID, we took about 18 months off and just traveled with our family. I think in one way, wanting to prove to people that you can actually do it. There’s a lot of people out there that invest in real estate, when you actually ask them how much freedom do you have, I would say very, very small percentage actually.

or living the life that they say can be lived when you have all of the rental income and the passive income coming in. ⁓ So yeah, so that’s kind of been the, I mean, there’s a lot of little side paths, of course we can go along the way, but. ⁓

Micah Johnson (13:06)
Let’s pause there.

want to talk about that point you just made right there.

It’s intentional. You only get there if you do it on purpose. You’re not going to accidentally have that life. And that’s where I find a lot of folks that don’t get it. They just thought it was going to be the byproduct of something else where, no, it’s an intentional choice. You actually have to choose to do it. And then while you’re out traveling, you got to enjoy that too. Like I was on a

Jennifer Beadles (13:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (13:43)
previous podcast, they were talking about, you we all want to become free. We’re all everybody that gets into real estate freedom, freedom, freedom. But are you becoming the person who can be free? That’s the question. When you become that you’re free. It’s not about like, it’s available. You can have it, but are you going to become the person that can participate in it? That’s where that hiccup and that grind gets because it’s not just work harder.

especially when we’re all high performers, like working hard is not a thing. I enjoy doing it, it’s fun. But that without a direction, that’s chaos, that’s struggle. That’s like the nonstop that we’re all trying to avoid. And I’m really glad you said that because one, congratulations. I love telling people congratulations for doing it because you said it, everybody says it in the business, few actually pull it off. And if you wouldn’t mind, just take us through that. What would you…

Jennifer Beadles (14:10)
them.

Micah Johnson (14:39)
credit in that experience with we did this and that made us be able to do this if that’s able to be told. Does that make sense?

Jennifer Beadles (14:47)
Absolutely. So it was a mindset shift and it was a who, not how. So everything that we were doing up until that point was, how do we get this done? How do we do this? How do we continue to build? And then we just took a step back and said, well, wait,

we’re missing some who’s that are actually going to be able to.

operate and come into our portfolio and make sure that everything is handled so that we can go and travel. And I think part of that was back in, it was 2019, we ended up spending 10 weeks traveling Southeast Asia and kind of coming up to that point, it actually forced me to sit down and said, okay, we’re going to be 16 hours different.

What do we need to put in place systematically in the business in order for this to run while we are out having fun, right? We’re not going to be able to be available during that time. So anyways, and I always have a lot of my entrepreneurial friends, I give them that exercise as I say, hey, go like, well,

Micah Johnson (16:23)
Right?

Jennifer Beadles (16:33)
It sort of depends on where they’re at, but it’s like, can you spend four weeks away from your business right now? And will it still run? Like what would happen if you stepped away for four weeks? And most of them say, ⁓ my gosh, if I stepped away for four weeks, wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have a business to come back to, which is a problem. It’s a really big, at that point you don’t have a business, right? You’re self-employed. So anyways, so kind of leading up to that, we said, well, you know, we need some people that are going to be able to operate this on our behalf. And what happened?

Micah Johnson (16:47)
Hey.

Jennifer Beadles (17:02)
is once we set those steps in play, we were kind of expecting the whole thing to just burn down and like all these issues and the business actually grew while we were gone. Which is a really humbling experience when you realize that sometimes you are the constraint or the bottleneck in your own business. So anyway, so yeah, it was a who, how and.

Now that’s what we do with anything in our business. If we want to get to the next level, it’s not how do we get to the next level. It’s like, who do we need inside of the business in order to get to that next level, whatever that might be.

Micah Johnson (17:38)
You nailed it right there. That is the way. Have you read the book, Who Not How? I think it’s Dan Sullivan that wrote it. It is one of the most powerful ones out there, because you start to realize, because that’s how we are, most entrepreneurs are thinking how, how, how, how, how, how. We’re the problem solvers, we’re the ones, action takers. And then when that shift happens, you nailed it, it goes from being self-employed to running a business. It’s something different.

Jennifer Beadles (17:45)
Next? Yes. Love dance.

.

Micah Johnson (18:06)
and it’s a different skill set. You need to work a little bit differently, but like you’re talking about, if that’s what you want, it’s what you gotta put in place. It’s what makes the things run better. And you are not the first person I’ve heard say that when I finally did it, things grew. It seems contra, what is that?

Contradictive, I don’t know how to say it. Seems backwards, counterintuitive. That’s the word I’m looking for. It seems counterintuitive that that would be the way, but it truly is. over and over again, that story tells itself. Because with the right team, you go from two people doing things to six people, however many, and that is not straight math. Humans work in exponential math when we start working together. It’s just what happens.

Jennifer Beadles (18:31)
Yes.

and

And I think a lot of investors think, well, I don’t have a large enough portfolio to bring on help. And again, that’s they’re looking at it the wrong way. Right. So if you’re looking at people as assets versus liabilities, then everything opens up to your point, my guy. You know, somebody is maybe they have one rental or two rentals. You could bring on a part time VA to just make sure that all of your operations are dialed in. They can come in and build systems and processes and SOPs and

Micah Johnson (18:55)
And then we’ll see you

Jennifer Beadles (19:23)
make sure that the marketing is handled. If you have third party property management, they can make sure that the property management company is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Right. I mean, you can do that on a part time basis. Like our team, they handle all of our bookkeeping is in house. Um, our sort of operations manager, he oversees all of our third party property management and he’s got specific KPIs that he’s looking at. So we say like vacancy for example, is number one.

That is the most, the biggest expense we can have on a property level is a vacant unit, right? We’ve got expenses, we’ve got fixed expenses, it’s not producing an income. So we assign a hundred dollars a day as an expense to that. And so he knows that for every day that that unit’s vacant, it’s costing us a hundred dollars a day and he’s going to do everything in his power to fix it. Which when you bring in really talented people like that, then they will find solutions that you probably haven’t even thought of.

Micah Johnson (19:54)
Bye.

Jennifer Beadles (20:15)
And so to your point, the growth is exponential. And I think for investors that, again, maybe are a little bit nervous or wondering how that might look in their business, even with run rental property, you can benefit from a VA for sure, especially if you’re working W2 trying to make this a full-time thing. mean, number one, you should have that person in the business helping you out, making sure that you can focus on the highest income producing activity, which is for most people going to be acquisitions.

Micah Johnson (20:31)
Right.

Thanks.

The people I see do this business well, they built a machine that trades in their desired commodity. They did. That’s how they sleep at night and make money, like all the things. Hope isn’t their strategy. It’s not random. It is a machine. However, one thing I did notice is

Jennifer Beadles (20:56)
Absolutely.

Micah Johnson (21:07)
that the feeling of what you got to solve never seems to change. You’re the one that’s changing, right? Like when you get started, you’re having like you’re the problems that you were solving then when you switch to the, now I need to solve how to hire people. It still feels like a problem. It still feels internal. You’re still going like that’s the part that I feel like hangs people up is it still feels the same. You’re the person that’s changing behind it. Just keep doing what you’ve always done. We only grow as far as we’re willing to problem solve. Like don’t tap out.

keep moving forward, find people like yourself that have done it. People have done it. It’s just getting your order correctly, getting that you said it system process. That’s the shortcut in real estate. Build a system, create your process. It’s just how you win here, especially long term, which is the major point of real estate. It’s not a short term industry. This is a lifelong one.

Jennifer Beadles (21:49)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. I want to sort of on that note, I want to share some things that my team has been doing, which is really impactful for our portfolio. Yeah. So as we were talking sort of before the show is my team is based in Eastern Europe. So our operations director is in Skopje, North Macedonia, which is a little country above Greece. If those are wondering, been there. It’s beautiful. And then he has an assistant that is based in Tirana, Albania.

Micah Johnson (22:06)
Peace.

Jennifer Beadles (22:26)
And they work hand in hand. They’re absolutely incredible. I wake up in the morning and I get, you know, sort of, this is what we did while you were sleeping, sort of reports. But ⁓ because that KPI that we have at the portfolio level is, hey, number one priority is vacancy, It’s managing our occupancy, making sure that our units aren’t sitting, you vacant. So they determined that we could start using some of this AI technology to reduce our lease up time.

And so what they’ve done is they have built a system that virtually stages any vacant unit. So, you know, the local team can go out, take even iPhone photos. doesn’t matter. They’ll send them to our team. Our team will virtually stage, give them back to them. And we found just on the virtual staging alone, a 50 % increase in scheduled showings, which is absolutely insane. Like the

Micah Johnson (23:13)
Wow.

Wow.

Jennifer Beadles (23:18)
But you go on Zillow, the tenants go on Zillow and everything just kind of looks the same. It’s you know, beige box carpet. OK, but ours looks different. And so ours has nice furniture and it’s got good lighting. And so that’s really attracting a lot of tenants there. And then last summer, what they implemented was voice AI. So they built an AI agent. We have a software that does it. They built an AI agent that is trained on this particular unit.

And any tenant, prospective tenant can call in at any time, also send SMS, but could then call in any time, whether that be 10 PM or 2 AM, ask questions about that unit. The voice AI is trained to answer any questions that they have. And then it says, would you like to schedule a showing in order to do so? We have a pre-application. It’s free. takes three minutes, you know, and then from there you can schedule your showing. It sends the

⁓ the caller, an SMS follow-up with a link. They can do it all right on their phone. They can fill out the application. And then on the back end, it conditionally approves them. So we have some questions, things like that. ⁓ If they’re approved, then they get another link that says you were pre-approved to schedule showing. Here’s the link. And so it’s really fun to see this because it’s like we’re just sitting back wherever we are and somebody calls in at whatever, midday. And then within

Micah Johnson (24:34)
Mm.

Jennifer Beadles (24:42)
minutes they’ve scheduled a showing. So they’ve had a phone call. They’re now in our CRM database for follow-up. They’ve been conditionally approved so we have their information. They’ve scheduled a showing and then they also get SMS follow-up reminders for the showings because for anyone you know that does lease up, you know show up right you get five people to show or five people to schedule maybe two people show.

Micah Johnson (25:02)
Right?

Jennifer Beadles (25:06)
So everything is just happening behind the scenes. We’ve beta tested this in multiple markets and we’ve now gotten our lease up time down to about seven days, which is incredible. mean, this is even like, you know, back in November over the holidays where it tends to slow down. And tenants love it. They can call in. It’s funny. You know, a lot of people say, well, is there some negativity around somebody calling in and realizing it’s AI? But as long as the tenants can get their AI.

questions answered and get an immediate answer. Like they don’t, they don’t care. Everything is dialed in.

Micah Johnson (25:42)
I love hearing that of how folks are using AI in their business because currently that’s its game changing features are how it does follow up, how it keeps up with things, how it just follows a pattern where we used to have to do it. All right, answer the phone and click, click, click, click, click, All this time we used to waste doing that. It’s just doing it. And then

It is, it’s what does it, you’re seeing it, especially the fact that you can virtual stage. People are starting to understand in the industry, staging is a huge deal. Most humans cannot fill a space with stuff. It’s the heart, one of the hardest things to do. So when you just give their brain a little bit to see.

All they do is see themselves there. that’s it. You just need someone to picture themselves in that property and you got a high, high chance of getting them to rent it or buy it. That’s the way that goes. it’s changing the game on how you can actually create that life that you want. That’s what it all goes back to is all these tools are coming out for you to hire people. COVID made it completely cool to deal in the Zoom world.

Jennifer Beadles (26:26)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (26:48)
That’s what I love about COVID. That virtual working became, my God, the whole world’s our playground now. For the fact that you can go find someone in North Macedonia, someone in Albania where we can get to talent pools now we never had access to before to do things in our businesses we were never able to do before. It’s kind of like a playground if you’re out there right now. If you’re taking the negativity to heart, you should stop because the opportunity, it’s really everywhere for you to start.

tightening the things in your business, making sure you’re just doing those little things well, because that’s what affects the bottom line. Getting down to a seven day turnaround, that is the epitome of doing the little things well. That is not by accident at all.

Jennifer Beadles (27:33)
Yeah, it’s incredible. I mean, if we, you know, we talk about the monetary value there, of course. But then the other benefit too is now we have this whole like database of tenants that when we have another tenant that’s moving out with a similar unit, we can essentially go reach out to those tenants and say, Hey, we’ve got another one coming up. we pre-leased in Clarksville, Tennessee, where there’s a lot of new construction that have has come on. And you know, the rents have

Micah Johnson (27:51)
Here’s one.

Jennifer Beadles (27:59)
sort of been affected on even our property, the classic units. But we were able to pre-lease based on having all of these tenants already pre-screened and ready to go. anyways, yeah, to your point, Micah, I mean, I could talk about this for hours. It’s so exciting, the technology that is available to us. And the wild thing though, Micah, is that I would say that real estate as an industry is really slow to evolve. For whatever reason, it’s just, I feel like sometimes it’s kind of like,

last to implement new technology. And that is our competitive advantage as investors. So any investor that’s hearing this is like, my gosh, this is available to me. Again, my advice to you would be to hire somebody to make this happen in your business, ⁓ but implement it right away because probably in 12 months, it’s going to look really different. So once everybody starts virtually staging, we’re going to have to find another edge. But for right now, we’ve got some runway here to really make our unit stand out.

Micah Johnson (28:44)
Right.

Jennifer Beadles (28:57)
⁓ so that we can get them filled quicker. And then also, at that point, when you’re producing more cash flow, you have more available capital to go buy your next deal. So really important.

Micah Johnson (29:06)
Right.

This is a conversation I could also have for a long time, but unfortunately we’ve got to pull this one together. But I really want to end it on that last point you made. You don’t do this alone. You don’t have to go build any of this stuff alone. It’s the reason why we bring people like Jennifer onto our podcast. Tap into the knowledge of the professionals that are already doing it.

Jennifer Beadles (29:11)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Micah Johnson (29:27)
That is how every successful person in this industry I know did it. Wasn’t bootstrapping, learning everything by yourself. You wanna take a long time? Do that. You wanna get there and actually be able to build, reach out to people like Jennifer, folks that they’re actually doing this. They’re in the market, they’re getting these things done. So for those that are listening in and watching that do wanna learn more about you, see what you have going on, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Jennifer Beadles (29:53)
You can go to my website, it’s addicted to roi.com and we have a lot of blog posts and articles and links about all of the different software tools that we use and yeah, you can find a lot of information on there.

Micah Johnson (30:07)
Tap into that y’all. Thank you for sharing that with us, Jennifer. Check our show notes. All her links are gonna be there. Again, follow along with professionals. Go watch the videos, go read the blogs, go learn from people who are on the ground doing it every day, especially if they’re leading the life that you actually want. If you listen to the show today and you’re like…

I wanna go to North Macedonia, I wanna be away for 10 weeks, I wanna do these things, then go to the website, right? That is step one. It’s possible, it’s not just for special people, you can do this. So again, thanks for being with us today. I appreciate your time, your story, your perspective. I think we need more folks out there like yourself doing it, building that thing, showing others this is really possible to do. So thank you so much for being here.

Jennifer Beadles (30:53)
Thanks Micah.

Micah Johnson (30:53)
And thanks for

watching y’all. Absolutely. Thanks for watching y’all and being with us. We appreciate every single one of you. If you got value out of today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with someone else you think can get value out of it. And if you’re not a subscriber yet, you know what to do. Click that button, follow along. We got more conversations coming up with operators, just like Jennifer. People out there building a real business in the industry and actually living the life that they want.

Thanks again for being with us today. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.