Home Ladder’s Proven Property Management Strategies | Brandon and Travis

Brandon And Travis (00:00)
One of our property managers came to us with a situation where she encountered what she thought could potentially be a puddle of blood in a move out inspection. And it was a large amount of this ⁓ mystery substance. So she was calling me asking like, should we call the police? Should we file a police report? Luckily upon further investigation, you found out it was just barbecue sauce, but that is one of the things we encountered.

Erika (01:53)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Brandon and Travis, who are running Home Ladder and they’ve been crushing it in the real estate space. Brandon and Travis, it’s so awesome to have you on the show.

Brandon And Travis (02:09)
Thanks for having us, Erika.

Erika (02:10)
So let’s jump on in, you two. For those who aren’t familiar with your work at Home Ladder, give us the rundown. How did you get started and what’s the story behind Home Ladder?

Brandon And Travis (02:20)
Well, Home Ladder was founded two and a half years ago by myself and Brandon here. We both have a long history of property management. We both started actually while we were in college as part-time jobs, fell in love with the industry, and have been sticking with it ever since. On my 24th year, you’re on… 15 years now? 15 years doing property management, so that’s our story.

Erika (02:43)
And with being in the game salon, was there a specific moment that got you hooked and made you say, this is what I’m doing for the lawn hall?

Brandon And Travis (02:51)
I think my first moment was the first time I led a property tour. went out to a 14 story building.

and I was gonna show a four bedroom apartment to a group of college students. I walk up to the building and there is a group of, I think it was 28 or 30 students that were there to go on the tour with me. And they all wanted to see this four bedroom apartment. It just got me invigorated. Like I loved the energy there of 30 people all interested in this one property that I was gonna get to go show. So that’s what got me going.

Yeah, for me, I just had a really great professor when I was at ASU teaching a real estate course and kind of, obviously mostly focusing on traditional real estate, but we have a small section on property management as well. And I just love the idea of being an entrepreneur early on, like running your own business, essentially developing your own network. And, you know, it was kind of by chance that I fell into property management instead of traditional real estate. was young and supporting my wife who was in school at that time too and needed more stable

income, so kind of fell into property management and quickly fell in love with the stability of it. And there’s just, it’s always interesting in property management. You encounter a lot of unique situations, so it was something that presented unique challenges every single day.

Erika (04:02)
Yeah, if you don’t mind, what would you say are some of those challenges or people who are like new to the industry? What are like some like misconceptions that either one of you see?

Brandon And Travis (04:12)
I mean, a big part of it is you become a master at conflict resolution. So, you play the middle man between an owner and a tenant or even a vendor involved in the situation. And it’s up to you to, empathize, to listen, hear both sides of the story, all three sides of the story, reflect and come up with creative solutions where everybody wins or interpreting the law, right? There’s a lot of gray areas in property management, hearing a situation and deciding how best to move forward and keep everybody happy.

And for situations that come up, Brandon said that you never know what your day is going to hold for you. Yesterday, we had a great example of that.

Erika (04:40)
And then, oh, go ahead.

Brandon And Travis (05:34)
One of our property managers came to us with a situation where she encountered what she thought could potentially be a puddle of blood in a move out inspection. And it was a large amount of this ⁓ mystery substance. So she was calling me asking like, should we call the police? Should we file a police report? Luckily upon further investigation, you found out it was just barbecue sauce, but that is one of the things we encountered.

Hahaha

Erika (05:58)
So tell us more about like the kind of properties that you focus on and what’s driving that and how would you say Home letter stands out in that space?

Brandon And Travis (06:08)
Yeah, we focus primarily on single-family homes here. We manage in a great part of Phoenix, so our office is based in Gilbert, so that’s where our primary business is done. We’re looking to attract higher-end properties because we want to work with responsible owners that are going to take care of their properties and attract tenants who are going to do the same thing. Pay their rent on time, maintain these properties to a high standard. It’s a lot more work when you’re managing multifamily class C type properties, lot

more problems to deal with so this is kind of the Class A version of property management.

Erika (06:42)
Yeah, what’s a unique strategy or approach that you would say that your company uses?

Brandon And Travis (06:49)
It’s a you know property management is a relationship based business So that’s what we lean into heavily here like our number one priority Travis and I is taking care of our team We find that if we keep our team happy well informed on the markets with the right resources tools at their disposal They just naturally will take care of our clients and our customers So yeah, I’d say our unique advantage is fostering this team culture here and being the relationship first business our owners our tenants our vendors all have one primary point

in contact so they have a smooth customer service experience. And a tangible example of the experience that we’re trying to deliver is probably our preventative maintenance program. That’s something that none of our other competitors here in Phoenix do. We make sure that we are out visiting the home at least once a year performing preventative maintenance for our not only residents but also owners. It makes the residents feel like the owners really care about the property and care about the home that they’re living in. But then it also saves the owner money and headaches down the road by it by ⁓

taking care of things before they become bigger issues. So preventative maintenance is one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves.

Erika (07:52)
Yeah, that’s exciting. What kind of advice would you give investors when it comes to their properties and just, you know, managing them well?

Brandon And Travis (08:00)
I would say start with your goals, right? Like let’s sit down and find out what are your goals with this property over the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, right? Depending on your goal is how we’re gonna shift the strategy. So whether that’s cash flow, long term appreciation, lots of different avenues to go down there.

Erika (08:17)
So for you guys, how have you seen with networks or building other relationships? How has that been a game changer for your business?

Brandon And Travis (08:25)
yeah, for sure. Maintenance is the number one priority for all landlords out there. If you’re going to make money in real estate, you need to have a great maintenance team behind you. that’s what Brandon and I have focused on in the past 20 years here in the Valley is just building a network of reliable vendors and

The two best ways for that we do that here locally is there’s local real estate investors association where a lot of vendors attend that and try and earn the business of real estate investors because they’re set up to handle that type of customer. And then the other thing is we’re really active in the National Association of Residential Property Managers. There’s a lot of vendors attracted to that sphere of that industry as well. So we make a lot of contacts there and then you treat them right. pay them in full essentially. So that way.

they treat our properties as a priority and our tenants as a priority to keep them happy.

Erika (09:44)
I know you guys are looking to scale and build out your team. What kind of advice would you give to people who are also looking to scale higher? How do you determine if someone is a good fit with your vision?

Brandon And Travis (09:56)
That’s a lesson we’ve learned very early on. For us, we only hire folks in a junior sort of position, right? Like a junior property manager here where they’re more tenant facing, handling, leasing, renewal type things. So we have a long onboarding process with them where we can have training on situations, right? Like present situations to them, how would you handle this? And then just be able to monitor how they manage their book of business, how they interact with their tenants before we decide if they’re ready to take on

portfolio and deal with our investors. yeah, getting them in on the ground floor and kind of watching them grow and develop before you hand them off a portfolio.

Erika (10:34)
Yeah, of you share a moment where you had the pivot quickly or there was something critical and you had to act fast?

Brandon And Travis (10:41)
Hmm. Yeah, I, this was many years ago. This was actually during the last recession. It was probably 2010. It was this time of year. It was the middle of July and I’m going down to a multifamily complex, a really low end multifamily complex in the center of downtown Phoenix. So very bad area. and I’ve got a report from one of my neighbors that, there’s a bad smell coming from the unit. So I go out to the building and I

confirm from the front door there is a very bad smell coming from my unit so I knock on the door no answer knock on the door again no answer so I put my key in and I open the door up and right as I open the door I’m looking straight into the it’s a studio apartment so it’s a very small space as I open the door I’m looking into the bathroom and I can see the tenant lodged inside the shower naked

but also not moving. He is deceased in the shower and he has been there apparently for two or three days. So it has turned into a stinky mess. so that’s the most traumatizing event I’ve ever encountered as a property manager was seeing that firsthand, walking into that, smelling it. You cannot get that smell out of your, out of your brain. so I had to quickly decide what do I do in this situation? The first time I had discovered a dead body. So

called the police who quickly showed up and called the fire department and they actually had to cut the wall out of the side of the building to get him out of the shower because he had been in there for so long and swollen up.

Erika (12:06)
man, with experiencing that, was there anything that you learned with that experience that changes how you handle things now? I mean, hopefully you’re not running into that again.

Brandon And Travis (12:16)
Mm-hmm

I guess one thing we did change based on that was we put in an emergency contact on our lease agreement. So this person died alone, didn’t have anybody that we knew of in his personal life that we could reach out to. So now as a part of our onboarding process with residents, we ask them in the case of an emergency, who in your life should we contact? So that was one thing I pivoted to because I was left dealing with, okay, I’ve discovered this person. Now who do I let know? Who cares about this person?

you

Another really crazy thing that we deal with in this industry is fraud, unfortunately. For me, like a day being interrupted crazy, I’ve had the move-in experience, right? And used to be a leasing agent, show up on site to meet tenants on move-in day, hand them their keys, and when I was with the property, well, on one particular move-in, I showed up to find that a mother had moved in there with her three children. Upon having a conversation with her, she had been scammed, right?

Somebody had reposted an ad fraudulently on Craigslist.

got her to send them money orders and she thought she was dealing with the owner of the property when in reality she had become a squatter. So that was a really difficult and emotional situation like having to tell this woman who said like I gave all of my money to this scam artist like what am I supposed to do where am I supposed to go with my children and you know that I spent the rest of my day then trying to figure out a workable solution where she could go and we could get tenants moved into this property so yeah.

It’s unfortunate, like sometimes you deal with some really emotional situations and finding a path forward there is tough.

Erika (14:34)
Yeah, so that’s really interesting. What did you work out in the short term or the long term in that scenario?

Brandon And Travis (14:40)
For her, luckily, we were able, I believe it was a new leaf. There’s a…

community here, nonprofit organization that takes on people in those type of situations, family, and this one specifically was for single mothers and their children. we were able to get them there. Luckily the tenants still wanted to move in. It took us a couple days to kind of clean the property back up and allow them to move in. But the biggest learning lesson for us was just like having to continually stay ahead of the scammers out there and put tools in place to prevent them from being able to scam people out of their money.

I mean, a lot of what we talked about is doubling down on growth. We actually are excited about launching kind of a separate division of our business where we take on more entrepreneur type agent property managers who are looking to grow their own business. So we’ve been busy working this year to really make our system bulletproof to where any new operator can come in, read instructions, watch a video and be able to perform everything within our workflow system, our CRM, without us having to

offer a lot of training. we’re really excited about growing our business ⁓ through a separate avenue later on this year. And that’s going to be like partnering with a lot of local realtors that are already managing for owners and helping them to grow their business.

We’ve seen with the sales slow down that realtors are experiencing right now that a lot of times during, well, during the last recession, a lot of them pivoted to property management, right, because of the residual steady income. So we’re looking to set Home Ladder up ⁓ as a home base for realtors like that that have clients out there that they can offer boutique level property management service to and those.

truly those relationships that are so valuable, but then have a back-end accounting system and process system to back them up and deliver the service to the owners.

Erika (16:26)
Before we wrap up guys, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more about what you’re doing at Home Ladder, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Brandon And Travis (16:34)
Best Bits on our website, homeladder.com. You can get a free rental price analysis on our property from there or email us. You can schedule a time right on our calendar from there or give us a call.

Erika (16:45)
Awesome. Any ⁓ other shout outs you want to do for anything coming up?

Brandon And Travis (16:50)
NARPOM State Conference. Yeah, we got the NARPOM State Conference, the National Associated Residential Property Manager State Conference. I’m planning the conference this year. It’s September 10th. It’s going to happen up in North Scottsdale at venue 8600. So it’s going to be a full fun day of speakers helping business owners out there, specifically property management companies, but also real estate investors focused on three things growth, efficiency and experience. if you’re looking for something to do in September, join us.

Erika (17:19)
Brandon and Travis, thank you so much for dropping all this knowledge and sharing your journey on the show today.

Brandon And Travis (17:24)
Thanks, Erika.

Erika (17:25)
everyone tuning in. If you got value from this episode, make sure you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pro Show. We’ve got more conversations coming up with heavy hitters like Brandon and Travis who are out there building incredible real estate businesses. We’ll see you on the next episode.