How to Make Property Management Passive With Dana Dunford

Dana Dunford (00:00)
And so I think for us, we’ve had this internally and we are trying to figure out how much to give to our users with Jarvis, knowing just how powerful he is, because he’s actually much more of like a coworker than just a AI agent.

like a chat where you put something in, he’ll actually do the work for you. And so we’re just, I’m very excited about that to see how we give that to users in the most delightful way, but also as a company.

Quentin Edmonds (02:08)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds and I am excited to be here today. Have another fantastic guest and I cannot wait for you guys to hear everything that she’s involved in. I’m gonna let her say it, but I love how she says she’s in the sexy spot of property management. I hope she won’t mind me stealing that line in the intro where she said it. was like, ooh, I was like, I just love that.

Dana Dunford (02:33)
Please do.

Quentin Edmonds (02:36)
I’m excited for us to peek through the lens today of Ms. Dana Dunford Ms. Dana, how are you today, ma’am?

Dana Dunford (02:44)
doing well. Thanks so much for having me.

Quentin Edmonds (02:45)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here and listen, I want to dive in. I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. Also, maybe a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got into the space where you are now.

And if you don’t mind, I would love for you to tell the people where you are in the world, where you are physically, but also where the business is as well. I’ll leave that up to you if you want to disclose that, but I think it’s kind of fantastic. again, what you’re doing, your origin story and where you are. Ms. Dane, now you have the floor.

Dana Dunford (03:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean that honestly, the segue is great because I am in property management technology. So we help make your property management that much easier. I think most people hate the operation side of it. It’s very stressful. We absolutely love it. We love solving people’s problems. We love making it less emotional for tenants. And we just ⁓ love the

ability to provide tenants with a ⁓ phenomenal home experience. And then obviously, ⁓ the landlords and real estate investors with increased cash flow through it. ⁓ kind of ⁓ starting back in 2015, we had this kind of crazy idea. So this is over 10 years ago, where you could be on Mars and manage your rental properties from anywhere or have if you have a manager ⁓ using our services.

you’d have full transparency into them. ⁓ And what is interesting about that today is I’m not on Mars, but I am in Sun Valley. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, so I’m usually in San Francisco. And then my own personal rental properties are in Florida. ⁓ And so very much holding true to that of being able to ⁓ feel like I’m not locked into my properties having to be right in my backyard. And that’s been a huge passion of ours.

⁓ You know, we’re subject matter experts in property management, long-term rentals, buy and hold. We don’t work on vacation rentals. We work on long-term rentals and say, bring your rental to us. We’ll help you find and place a tenant in less than 21 days. We’ll reduce your delinquency rate, reduce the chances of going to court, eviction, and provide a much more passive experience. How you want that is basically your own personal choice.

Some of our users will say, great, I don’t want you guys to do my repair coordination. Every time there’s a plumbing request, I want it to come to me. Others will say, actually, I want that coming to myself. And so from that perspective, we’ve really tried to make it a plug and play where we’re your partner in property management. We’re a technology company again. So from that perspective, using technology to help you not only manage your first rental, but also grow and scale. It’s been really cool. We’ve had users grow from

you know, 10 rentals to 100 rentals within a year. It’s been really cool to watch that happen and watch them achieve financial freedom. And then when they get to a certain point and they say, Hey, I need someone local there to drive around and stuff, connect them to our partners on the ground.

Quentin Edmonds (06:39)
Ooh, I love it. Thank you for walking us through what you do, walking us into how you’re doing it. I absolutely love it, Ms. Dana. And I want to peek a little bit into you. And so I have this question that I always ask. First, I’ll make a statement, Ms. Dana. When I say destiny has no wasted moments, I mean, what we go through in life, these moments build up to the moments where we are now. And we borrow from these moments. We borrow mindset. We borrow.

Dana Dunford (06:56)
Okay.

Quentin Edmonds (07:05)
strategies, disciplines, but all of the kind of snowballs into the moments where we are now. And so I would love to know, you didn’t help users grow from 10 rentals to 100 rentals. I absolutely love the idea of being on Mars and managing your properties, right? So you’ve had growth, you have time to think about what’s going on. What has these moments taught you about yourself?

Has it taught you resilience? Has it taught you discipline? Has it changed your outlook on innovation? Like what is these moments in the journey taught you about treatments, Dana?

Dana Dunford (07:37)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting because kind of my backstory was I’ve always worked at startups or what we considered startups, maybe some people wouldn’t say they were startups. But like, you know, back in 2010, I was at Apple and then I left ⁓ Apple, I went to actually a company called Nest, which Tony Fidel, who created the first iPod created the Nest ⁓ thermostat. So a lot of people from Apple were moving over to Nest.

Quentin Edmonds (07:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dana Dunford (08:03)
because that was like the next wave of like home innovation was the next wave of digital disruption. And in all those cases, I would say ⁓ the job was very easy. It was very, very easy. And so I had a moment where I was graduating from business school. I was moving back from Boston to San Francisco. And I had this inflection point where I had an offer letter from Google because Nest got acquired by Google.

I had an offer letter from Apple and I can’t say enough good things about those companies. I absolutely loved them. And ⁓ there was this point where I had to say, am I gonna go back into working at large tech companies or am I gonna go kind of dive into the deep end and start this idea that my co-founder and I had? And ⁓ I chose the path to start something and that…

People always say, because so many companies have, so many people have started property management softwares and it’s a really hard industry to be in. I have to say it really is. And so a lot of people ask me, well, why are you still around? And most others are not, right? And I think it just has to do with that persistence and resilience that both my co-founder and I have that say, you know what? We’re going to solve the most challenging, hardest problems. And we know this is going to be the hardest on us.

but we’re gonna stop at nothing to do it. And even if people don’t believe in us, we’re still gonna do it. And I think that and having that over the past 10 years since we had an idea that we took to ⁓ a market, having that and stopping at nothing has been how we’ve been able to achieve success time and time again. But along the way, we’ve also had so many failures, right? Like now in hindsight,

We have all the puzzle pieces together for the most part. So it’s much easier to know where we’re going. But back then when we were saying, should we centralize repair coordination or decentralize it, there was not really one answer from that respect. And so ⁓ there’s been these different formations and different transformations that we have had on our own that has really just made me a better person, I think.

It’s made me a better leader. It’s made me better at understanding people. It has made me now every time I go into something, I can dissect to the business so much faster. We’re a relationship of working with someone. I can understand who they are because I think having so much of that struggle and every entrepreneur has it. And if there’s entrepreneurs who say they, it was so easy to build my business. I actually very likely want to look at your business further. But I think

Quentin Edmonds (10:32)
Yeah.

Dana Dunford (11:23)
when you’re truly trying to do something innovative, and we definitely were like pre-COVID 12 steps ahead of saying you’re on Mars and managing your properties, and back then people didn’t even know how to use Zoom, but they didn’t know how to pay rent online. You go through it and you constantly are a self-learner in tweaking. I myself personally, and if there’s anything people should take from this is I try to learn one thing every day.

and try to better myself every single day. And if you have that, I think you could achieve great success. And it doesn’t have to be like just one big moment, but just all these small micro changes will create big transformations. And some of the product launches that we’ve had, like self-guided tours, where someone was like, you’re going to have squatters in the properties. It’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of self-guided tour companies that do, but we’ve done 52,000 showings. And the tenants who have shown,

Quentin Edmonds (12:18)
Mmm.

Dana Dunford (12:20)
viewed the property have never been squatters in the property. And, you know, we’ve just continued to say what are the problems and how do we solve them and mitigate risk. And I think that’s a lot of what property management is, but that’s a lot of what business is as well.

Quentin Edmonds (12:34)
Thank you, Ms. Dana. You said so much. And I thank you for just being so thoughtful when answering that question. Because I tell people, no matter what happens within your business, the constant thing in your business is you, right? You’re the constant in your business. And so I love how you talk about just like the little moments, just these compound little moments build up to great success. And even you talked about just being 1 % better. So two books that I keep very close to me is one, Atomic Habits.

Dana Dunford (12:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (13:03)
by James Clayton. Yes, love that book. I’ve read about three times. The book I’m finishing up is a book by Mark Battison called Gradually Then Suddenly. yes, exactly. What you just summed up is this actual book, how you talk about the little moments. Mark Battison says, success happened two ways, gradually then suddenly. And so when you talk about the persistency, that’s the gradual movement towards success.

Dana Dunford (13:03)
I love that book. Yeah.

⁓ I might have to get that one.

Quentin Edmonds (13:27)
It’s gradual, it’s putting the seed in the ground, it’s tilling the ground, it’s watering the ground. But once the seed starts to spur, once the fruit from your seed, your gradual starts to happen. Sometimes to other people it seems like suddenly, but it’s that gradual that’s been building up to the moments when things just start to make sense. And like now you said, you can kind of triage situations very, very quickly.

all because of the gradual times that you’ve been taking time and letting this, the moment churn and letting the idea churn and putting in the intensity and being persistent. Now it seems like you can move at a faster pace, but it came from gradual then sudden. And so everything you said just totally makes sense. And I appreciate again, you being so thoughtful with the question. I appreciate it. Absolutely.

Dana Dunford (14:13)
Great. And one

other thing I would say that I would not underestimate is your team. I’ve always found that if you just have a couple of A++ players, they will run circles around B players. And I noticed that even at Apple, when I was there, there were four of us working on worldwide financial planning analysis of big product. I’m talking about, you know, billion dollar launches and ⁓

Quentin Edmonds (14:38)
Yeah. Yes, ma’am.

Dana Dunford (14:41)
I’ve always found that like, it’s not the size of the team, it’s how smart the team is and how they work together. And so I’d also just not underestimate team. For me, I feel so fortunate to have those who I work with and they are just as passionate as me. And that is really, really cool.

Quentin Edmonds (15:01)
Yeah. We’re going come back to that, Ms. Dana, for sure. So you kind of like foreshadowing, like you’re planting seeds. So we’re going come back to the team. As you can tell, you know, I love to read and I’ll be honest, one of the things I like to read is the Bible. And there is this saying in the Bible. It says, write the vision and make it plain so those that hear it will run with it. And so when you talk about the team around you.

Dana Dunford (15:15)
Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (15:26)
Sometimes you being the, you know, the founder or the visionary, when you write the vision, but those that see what you’re writing and know that, my skillset matches up and I believe in what you’re doing. When they hear it and you got them A plus people around you, they will take your vision and they will catapult it to the next level. And that’s what it’s all about, you know? And so, but we’re going to come back to that. I want to ask you about Himley. That’s the name of the business. I got it correct, right? All right.

Dana Dunford (15:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Quentin Edmonds (15:55)
What is the next real goal for you guys? Like, what are you looking to solve a scale next?

Dana Dunford (16:40)
Yeah, it’s been really interesting. know AI is such a buzzword. ⁓ It really is. ⁓ the biggest thing is I don’t think we’ve seen something so disruptive to humans since, honestly, the Industrial Revolution. Maybe you could say it’s ⁓ mobile phones and the internet, but it is crazy. mean,

My AI agent writes all my emails, responds to all of my emails instantly, sends any reports out, automates things, tells me what to do next. And we have an internal AI agent at Hemlane. His name is Darves. And ⁓ he’s very powerful. He can do anything. You can tell him, go in and delete all my rental properties and cancel my rent payments or go in and respond to all the tenant.

inquiries in this way or that way. the AI agent will do it and he does it very, very well, right?

And so I think for us, we’ve had this internally and we are trying to figure out how much to give to our users with Jarvis, knowing just how powerful he is, because he’s actually much more of like a coworker than just a AI agent.

like a chat where you put something in, he’ll actually do the work for you. And so we’re just, I’m very excited about that to see how we give that to users in the most delightful way, but also as a company.

I think, know, monitoring or being able to provide a much better experience, but not have so many ⁓ restrictions is something that we’ll need to do. for example,

Jarvis knows fair housing and some of our users don’t know fair housing as well and fair housing can get very complicated. so making sure that Jarvis is there to help you with that. ⁓ I think it’s really cool. And so that’s one of the things I’m most excited about. I’m also excited about our local partners. think when you look at Anthropic came out with a really cool graph the other day of what jobs will AI completely replace. you know.

Quentin Edmonds (18:38)
Mmm.

Dana Dunford (18:52)
folks who are tradesmen, people on the ground who are driving by properties and stuff like that, they’re not going to replace that. And so I think to win in this day and age is to also have really strong partners there as part of your A plus team. And so that’s something else I’m super excited about.

Quentin Edmonds (19:09)
Absolutely. As one kid, kind of brought me four circle because this is I was going next. Because you’ve mentioned partners, you’ve mentioned A plus people, and it sounds like you have worked with some fantastic people throughout your journey. So I want to throw a word out to you and I want to hear your perspective when I say it. The word relationship. What does that word mean to you in your mind? What comes to mind? What rings bell? What bells kind of ring when you hear that word, Ms. Dana?

Dana Dunford (19:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, when I hear relationship, I ⁓ immediately think of trust ⁓ and building trust over time and positive relationships. You know, there are people who, you know, may not be as intense as you in business or may not be as passionate as you in business. And those are relationships you want to keep positive, but you probably don’t want to double down on those relationships. The relationships I double down on are those who I see have the same passion as me.

have the same excitement and then also are always there, like very loyal. ⁓ Those are the relationships I like. ⁓ I would also say, and this has been something that has been a huge revelation for me in the past two years, people tend to have relationships with people who are like them. So like I am a very organized person. I have to like write it all down, see it all, think of the pros and cons. I’m very strategic about things to like make sure we’re going the right direction.

⁓ But at the same time, there’s certain things I’m not. Like I’m not a visionary. I know, like for example, my co-founder’s a visionary. He never checks his email. My email inbox is cleared by the end of the day. He never checks his email inbox, but he’s a visionary. He’s thinking up here. you know, ⁓ knowing that that’s a really important relationship for me and doubling down on that relationship and knowing what his strengths are, which are my weaknesses.

and my strengths are his weaknesses and being able to bring that together, I think those are honestly also some of the best relationships. There’s a great book called Unicorn Team that I read, I think it was about a year ago, it’s called Unicorn Team, it talks about visionary strategists and executors, those who execute. ⁓ And that was really, really helpful for me to understand people and saying, hey, I shouldn’t be always hanging out with those who are strategists and ⁓ execute.

that’s my personality. I need to hang out with the visionaries like my co-founder who really bring me out of my comfort zone and into something totally new and then I can strategically get us there. And so that I would say on the relationship side and the team side is pretty important.

Quentin Edmonds (21:42)
I mean, you just said it. One of the things, words that I use is the word community when I talk about relationships. And community is common unity. It’s people moving in the same direction with the same goal. It’s not necessarily unity and uniformity are two different things. Unity is when we’re moving the vision forward, but we’re doing different things. Uniformity is when everybody’s doing the same thing all at once. But no, the common unity of relationships and community is that

Dana Dunford (22:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin Edmonds (22:10)
We can have different perspectives, but we all afford the same goal. And so I love everything you said. I absolutely love. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, Ms. Dana?

Dana Dunford (22:26)
Yeah, so my name is Dana. ⁓ Hemlane.com, H-E-M-L-A-N-E.com. You can go there, even if you go to our chat, say you want to talk to Dana. ⁓ I love talking to customers. I love talking to real estate investors. I love talking to landlords. I love talking to property managers. ⁓ So if you’re any of the above, would love to connect with you. I always learn something new from folks, and hopefully they learn a thing or two from me.

Quentin Edmonds (22:50)
Absolutely. Well, listen, let me say three things to you. First, thank you for your time, because you are literally where you want to be in the world, but you still spend time with us. So thank you for your time. Thank you for your story. Thank you for your narrative. I believe you have planted many seeds today. And Ms. Dana, thank you for your mindset, the way you think. I a sneaky ⁓ suspicion you paid a pretty penny for the way you think and your experience. And so thank you for bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you.