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Show Summary
In this conversation, Hunter Drost, founder of One Tenant, discusses the innovative approach his company takes in property management, focusing on a concierge maintenance model that leverages AI and data to enhance the experience for property owners and tenants. He shares insights on the challenges of property management, the importance of effective communication, and offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in the real estate tech space.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Hunter Drost (00:00)
The best ideas always come out of your own struggles, right? So I’m a small DIY investor myself. I love real estate. I love the ability to leverage and grow exponential wealth through that avenue. But ⁓ exactly what you’re talking about without even realizing it, I ended up picking up my latest multifamily ⁓ in the heart of Reno. And unfortunately, tenants break a lot of stuff.The biggest issue is I really like to live my life but not be beholden to the real estate. What that meant is there has to absolutely be a better way than every one of my vacations, trips, just time that I want to spend with my family being interrupted by the tenants telling me that the sewer’s backed up, that they’ve got a leaking toilet, the door knob’s broken, we’re missing a smoke detector.
Dylan Silver (02:26)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Hunter Drost out of Reno, Nevada is the founder of One Tenant, a concierge maintenance partner, transforming how Northern Nevada investors and owners care for residential and commercial properties. He’s an owner operator with hands-on background in remodels, turnovers, and project oversight. He built One Tenant as the missing operating layer between do nothing and hope and full service management.using data, AI, and a proactive maintenance model to protect property health, uptime, and ROI. You can find him at onetenant.com. Hunter, thanks for taking the time today.
Hunter Drost (03:02)
Thank you so much for having me, Dylan. Excited to share how we’re transforming traditional do-it-yourself property ownership and investing.Dylan Silver (03:12)
When we talk about property management, this has got to be the biggest, if not the biggest, certainly top two concerns for investors ⁓ post acquisition, right? Especially if you’re doing anything with multiple doors, you’re at this point having to juggle a couple plates in the air. ⁓ Walk me through the genesis of one tenant. How’d you get started?Hunter Drost (03:39)
The best ideas always come out of your own struggles, right? So I’m a small DIY investor myself. I love real estate. I love the ability to leverage and grow exponential wealth through that avenue. But ⁓ exactly what you’re talking about without even realizing it, I ended up picking up my latest multifamily ⁓ in the heart of Reno. And unfortunately, tenants break a lot of stuff. ⁓The biggest issue is I really like to live my life but not be beholden to the real estate. What that meant is there has to absolutely be a better way than every one of my vacations, trips, just time that I want to spend with my family being interrupted by the tenants telling me that the sewer’s backed up, that they’ve got a leaking toilet, the door knob’s broken, we’re missing a smoke detector.
All these small kind of trivial things that just…
eat away at your net operating income, eat away at your sanity, eat away at that continued push to the next frontier almost. And I decided then and there that, not sure if it was this smart or not, but I was a little tired of my own tenants calling me for their issues. I said, well, it’s the best way to do it. Let’s handle thousands of these issues nonstop.
So we’re working on that. But the really cool thing is I took a lot of time to be very
introspective and like what are the failings I have as kind of a solo operator. And it was that I wasn’t treating every situation the same. I knew what I needed to do to diagnose, to triage a problem before I sent out a tech or a service provider. And I just, I was getting lazy. I wasn’t doing it. Between my already busy days, I just wasn’t.
going through the checklist of things that should be done, the simple fixes, the can we ensure that this is actually the issue before I spend a couple hundred dollars, thousands of dollars sending somebody out to take care of it. And I just, I was making the conscious decision that I know it can be fixed very simply and I just wasn’t doing it. So I decided there had to be ⁓ a ⁓ happy medium of who can I just enlist to do this full time? And so that was.
That was what I decided and we’ve kind of decided to take it to market.
Dylan Silver (06:58)
When when we talk about all the number myriad of circumstances that come that can come up when when managing a property from I mean just off the top of the head, you know collecting pain rents right to then dealing with delinquencies to dealing with hey, we need a work order to dealing with communication about any myriad of things utilities, right, you know move in move out dates.This is where things become tricky because now you’re either having to do it yourself or you’re having to hire it out. Walk me through exactly when I hear a concierge service, AI. Is this basically like an AI that’s communicating with the tenants that’s then relaying it to the investor or is it something totally different? Help fill me in and our audience in.
Hunter Drost (07:47)
Absolutely, AI is such a buzzword right now that you almost want to write anything off the second year AI, right? I would consider myself a healthy skeptic of anything that kind of has the AI wrapper connotation to it. So what we’ve done is we have a very clear line of responsibility. The property owner that’s looking to not deal with those maintenance headaches, not be…constantly stressed about what the next call, what the next service is going to be. We give our phone number to the property owner or we make the introduction to the tenant ourselves through kind of the online dashboard we’ve built. From there, we are the ones that take all the inbound correspondence. Hey, we’ve got a leaking toilet. Cool. Can you send us additional pictures? We are automatically assigning a concierge, kind of what we call a…
a servicer to that ticket in order to figure out what the issue might actually be. We’ve got our internal flows of how the problem should be diagnosed, what additional steps, what additional information we’re gonna need. Because then what we do is we pre-qualify that lead. And so we’re able to use our history, our records, our knowledge in order to match that with the right service provider.
our pre-vetted provider network that we’re constantly ⁓ doing internal audits to ensure that the right service is being delivered for that particular issue and not overcharging or undercharging anything like that. We’re able to send a pre-qualified lead to that service provider to better book their day, better able to know what they’re walking into to show up prepared to that job. So instead of wasted time, marketing expense, we’re able to actually drive down the cost of that.
lead as well. So it’s a benefit to our property owners who are gonna be the ones kind of picking up that bill. But what’s really cool, and this is where we get to the A, kind of a long-winded way to get there, is I’m a big fan of data, and I think data helps drive a lot of very powerful decisions, especially as we get into things like cost segregation studies, year-end accounting, capital expenditures,
what sort of things make sense to spend money on.
that’s where data really becomes a very, very powerful thing. As we kind of build out neighborhoods and every market’s got their more rental styled kind of neighborhoods that kind of ⁓ attract that attention more than others, we’re able to build kind of almost a profile around neighborhoods using the data that we’re building. So we have a little live language model wrapped in.
that’s constantly kind of scraping the work orders, the diagnostic work that’s going in. So what we’re able to do with a fair level of accuracy is build out, hey, you have a property in this zip code, similar properties have done this issue. So obviously the more data we get, the better we’re able to drive those insights. And that’s really where AI comes in of, hey, here’s the severity of the issues, the property is starting to trend in this profile and help.
guide further decisions and possible capital outlays ⁓ if the year makes sense.
Dylan Silver (11:41)
Yeah.Now, what’s the scale of, ⁓ or I shouldn’t say scale, what’s the size, doors-wise, that this type of service or service one tenant would be ⁓ useful for? Could this be something as small as, I’ve got a long-term, year-to-year, single-family lease, and I would like communication with the tenant there, all the way up to, you know,
several dozen, 50 or 100 doors or is it suited more towards one than the other?
Hunter Drost (12:18)
So we kind of tried to fill that niche where I know larger operators are going to kind of be predisposed to having their already guaranteed maintenance staff. have probably their pre-vetted providers, anything like that. That we are not trying to take that over by any means, but we’re also not the kind to ever say no to a challenge. We’ve built it very flexible in the way that with a little bit of information, we will do everything from the traditional.single family rental, long-term kind of tenant in place. ⁓ But as we kind of went through building this out, we found that it actually lends itself very well to a lot of other modalities. So we found a lot of use for the midterm space, the kind of furnished rentals of tenant changeover. And we took that even a step further and we found a huge market in the short-term changeover where we don’t necessarily have
a tenant dashboard, we’ve done this actually by design to not have to deal with user accounts coming in and out and constantly updated. We ask our property owners for a little bit of information of who do we expect to be kind of calling us to avoid any sort of spam or wasted time. Just if we need to get a hold, try to keep it updated. But if we have people constantly changing over in the unit a couple times a week, that same phone number is gonna work just as well to report the same issue.
So we built it very versatile in that. So currently on the platform, single family all the way up through kind of log diminishing return about 16 units is kind of where it starts making a hard sense to justify kind of our cost as opposed to a full service property manager or doing it themselves. While at the same time, we love our commercial properties as well. We’ve got dedicated service providers geared for
Dylan Silver (13:47)
Yeah.Hunter Drost (14:15)
mixed use commercial ⁓ office, retail, industrial, huge thing out here in the Reno Tahoe industrial complex with ⁓ big names that we all love, Tesla, Panasonic, ⁓ you name it, just huge properties. There’s ⁓ gonna be a little more to get those ⁓ dialed in on a custom pricing schedule, but we ⁓ will assign our concierge and not rely on AI to do it.Dylan Silver (14:44)
Now, when we talk specifically about how it interacts with tenants, is this also a communication method between owners and tenants, or is this more of a reporting and analyzing tool versus communication, or both?Hunter Drost (15:45)
It is definitely a mix. in there, ⁓ let’s say for example, you’re a tenant, you’re renting one of the kind of one tenant serviced ⁓ rental properties, right? ⁓ For this example, let’s say we’re in a duplex. You’re occupying one side, we’ve got another side. If the property owner’s kind of onboard the property says, hey, one tenant, we’d like you to take over the maintenance headache that comes with servicing these properties, we’re happy to do it.we’ll get kind of your name in our system and ⁓ the other side. So when you call us and say, hey, guess what? Our shared wall has a leak in it. That’s not a problem that just impacts you, right? We’re gonna have to coordinate and reach out to the other side and work on triaging those schedules in order to make sure that the issue is addressed properly and that there’s a flow of communication between both sides, right? So while you may not wanna talk to your inhabitant or your neighbor next door,
We’re kind of the ones that are handling the, hey, bounce it through us. We’ll make sure that everybody’s aware of the issue and ⁓ work to get it resolved from there.
Dylan Silver (16:51)
I want to pivot a bit here, Hunter, and ask you specifically about ⁓ launching a company like this and for folks who are maybe launching a business themselves that may have a tech element related to real estate and any feedback that you have for other young entrepreneurs in this space who are trying to be innovative and maybe coming across obstacles or bottlenecks in their business.if they’re in that tech and real estate space, any feedback based on your journey to those type of folks.
Hunter Drost (17:23)
There is such an incredible opportunity just in business in general right now to build a company, to start something new. For a long time, I felt in the camp of there’s not a new idea to be had, right? What we know is we’re in one of the most incredible times in history where this intersection of tech and idea and execution, this trifecta is really what’s going to drive kind of the next innovation. For me, I wasn’t going to sit idly by and notnot capitalize on it. My best advice, whatever you’re doing, just start doing it. You don’t know what the problems are and where we are today is not where I thought we were when I first had the concept around it. I couldn’t even articulate what the concept was ⁓ when we first started mulling this over of how it would look, but just get started and share your idea with as many people as you possibly can. My biggest, biggest supporters, the people I’ve been most proud to call my friends.
Dylan Silver (18:19)
Yeah.Hunter Drost (18:22)
are the ones that have critiqued it the most and they’ve given me the best advice or have you thought about this? Does it lend itself well to this? And just keep an open mind and see kind of where things end up. It’s incredible.Dylan Silver (18:36)
We are coming up on time here, Hunter. What’s the best way for folks to get in contact with you and if they’re interested in learning more about One Tenant.Hunter Drost (18:46)
Absolutely. right now, One Tenant, we kind of really operate primarily in the Northern Nevada space. We’ve got Las Vegas coming here shortly and ⁓ working on the legal.clarity on a couple more states, but we’ll share those at a later date. Working from there, just onetenant.com, fill out a contact us form, or if everything makes sense, click the sign up button, create your dashboard and onboard your first property. If you have any questions, our support and sales team is more than happy to help walk you through and show you how to set up the individual controls based on what property you’ve got going on or what modality instead of ⁓ maintaining cashflow or
long-term hold or slowly improving, we can help walk you through exactly how to customize those controls and how you want to handle issues and set your preset spend limit from there.
Dylan Silver (19:37)
Hunter, thank you so much for taking the time today. Thanks for coming on the show.Hunter Drost (19:41)
Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.
