Unlocking Success: Journey in Senior Cooperative Management

Dylan Silver (00:02.277)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, we have the owner of AAPG out of Kansas City, Alexis Anderson. Alexis, welcome to the show.

Alexis Anderson (00:16.088)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:20.781)
It’s great to have you on here. I always like to start off at the top by talking and asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Alexis Anderson (00:30.478)
Yeah. So I started my journey in property management 12 years ago as a part-time leasing agent. And I kind of worked my way up through some different roles. Until 23, I was a regional manager for a company that developed senior cooperatives. And then they also managed them after they developed them.

So in June of 23, they actually called me into the office and said, hey, we’re divesting our property management side. Um, you know, good luck. And so after that, I thought about it and decided to start my own property management company.

Dylan Silver (01:20.719)
Now, I think it’s a difficult situation for that to happen. I’ve actually experienced something, maybe not quite exactly that, but a similar situation. And you kind of have to think, okay, well, what do I do now? You took really a devastating situation and made something pretty incredible happen. And before we were, before we hopped on the podcast here, you mentioned that you took so many of these contracts and then you immediately turned it into business.

Alexis Anderson (01:45.676)
Yeah, so it was a lot. It was a lot all at once and it was very quick because we had to go and propose to the board of directors at each of these sites. And so that meant we had to put an entire plan together.

plus a proposal, go meet with each of them. We had three days to go meet with them and it was, you know, they’re not close locations. So I was traveling night and day all through Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, flew to Colorado and Washington State. So to propose to them and hope that they liked our plan. So most of them did. We…

signed 23 contracts within a couple of weeks and then we took over from the end of July. We then had to do all of the work and took over managing them September 29th.

Dylan Silver (02:43.823)
Wow. So end of July to September 29, that’s not a it’s not months and months. It’s what like three months basically that you launched your own property management company and had 20 properties.

Alexis Anderson (02:57.806)
Yeah, 23. We retained all of the staff, so about 80 employees. So we had to onboard all of the employees. We had to get all of our vendors in order, insurance, all of our property management software, everything in about three months.

Dylan Silver (03:17.691)
So have you had experience with starting companies beforehand or was this all new?

Alexis Anderson (03:22.83)
I have, so I have a real estate investment company that I’ve had since 2017. Small, do, you know, we invest in some smaller deals. We do some flips, different things like that. When I was 17, I started a social media company, ended up selling it to a big company, a big marketing firm when I was 18. But nothing like this. Nothing with this many employees, nothing this fast.

And honestly without a full-time job promise of a salary. So it was a big chance, but my kind of weighing back and forth was, hey, it either works or I’m looking for a job, but either way, you know, if I don’t try, I’m looking for a job. So I might as well do it.

Dylan Silver (04:11.429)
might as well give it a run. want to talk about the co-op space. Now, I’m familiar with this, but I think a lot of people might not be familiar with the concept. What is co-op and what are co-ops?

Alexis Anderson (04:24.78)
Yeah, so it’s really interesting. We do senior cooperatives, so 55 plus. Some of our properties are HUD-insured loans, so they’re 62 plus. But essentially, instead of like a condo or instead of renting an apartment, when you’re purchasing into a cooperative, you’re purchasing a share of like the corporation and then you are assigned a unit. So you own a part of the building.

when you’re purchasing that share, and then you pay a monthly due that covers all of the operating expenses for the cooperative.

Dylan Silver (05:06.897)
And so this is really kind of, I would say, a niche space to be in. I mean, I don’t know how many property managers there are that do only cooperatives. In this space, do you feel like because you have that reputation that you’re also potentially seeing other people with cooperatives reaching out to you? Or is it kind of disjointed in a sense where people don’t really know who is the co-op property manager?

Alexis Anderson (05:30.966)
Yeah, so last year our properties that we onboarded were purely by word of mouth. We have not done any marketing of ourselves until this year. So it’s we’re still new, so we’re still getting our name out there, but it has been nice because word has traveled fairly fast between the cooperative space.

Dylan Silver (05:56.369)
I want to get granular here, Alexis, and talk about property management and strategy. And for people who are looking at this as maybe a vehicle for them to grow and scale a business, you mentioned that you have real estate investment experience, which I tend to think as someone who works a lot with investors is kind of critical if you’re going to be managing investment properties or properties in general, honestly. But I also know that there’s other people who

don’t feel that way. And so I’m curious to get your perspective on if you want to be scaling a property management business, what are the kind of the prerequisite skills or experience that you should have in order to be successful with?

Alexis Anderson (06:39.022)
So knowing the laws, so the state laws, that’s gonna be very important. Knowing the fair housing laws is also going to be very important. And then property accounting is one of the biggest things that we do. So we oversee the audits for the buildings. We do the monthly financial packages for our owners.

and kind of work through those. So I would say those two things, knowing the laws and knowing truly how to read a 12 month trailing, a balance sheet, a budget comparison, putting a budget together and then working with their lenders is gonna be key for any property management company.

Dylan Silver (07:27.567)
Now, talking about lenders, think a lot of people, myself included, think, well, OK, you got to deal with the lenders when you’re taking out a loan. You got to deal with the lenders maybe when you’re potentially issues, right, paying. But how do the lenders come into play when you’re dealing with these larger deals? And what are some of the trickier things that might come up?

Alexis Anderson (07:52.078)
Yeah, so we have just over 2,000 doors managed. Each one has a different lender. Some of them are conventional loans, so they’re gonna be a balloon loan. Their rules and guidelines are a little bit different than like our HUD-insured loans. So our HUD-insured loans, those are gonna be a little more…

detailed because we’re subject to things like REAC inspections, MOR inspections. Our Collier’s lender, they do a PCNA study to where they come in and we oversee that process for them. So there’s a lot of different requirements. There’s a lot of different reserve requirements that’s typical for any lender.

Dylan Silver (08:42.896)
Yeah.

Alexis Anderson (08:42.932)
of hey, you have to have a replacement reserve, you have to have this, you have to have that, and you have to fund it at a certain percentage. So just making sure that the properties are in compliance with their lender requirements is really important. We’ve been very fortunate with our maintenance. So our React scores are incredible. Our lowest score to date is a 90A, our highest is a 100A.

which is almost unheard of in the property management space.

Dylan Silver (09:18.735)
So I guess because I’m so new to this, forgive me for my ignorance here Alexis, we’re talking about the buy side, meaning before the property, you’re on title, you have to get the lending for it and if it’s lots and lots of doors and it’s like a residential commercial deal, there’s more that goes into it. But then once you’re able to secure the funding, I’m imagining you’re still talking with the lender all the time.

Alexis Anderson (09:44.014)
As far as the it really depends on the owner and what how the owner how involved the owner wants to be Most of the time we handle the lenders requirements. So we will send them their financial package We will have a rep at their lender that we communicate directly with which is most of the time sometimes we have some owners that want to be a little more involved and

They want to be the point of contact, so we will send them anything that they need to send over to the lender.

Dylan Silver (10:20.321)
I want to pivot a bit here, Alexis, and ask you about real estate plays and some of the things that I’m seeing. And I’m curious to get your perspective because you’re managing so many doors. We’re in different areas. I actually don’t know so much about Kansas City, although I imagine it’s probably great for real estate investing right now. I’m in DFW in Dallas, right? So I think this is maybe one of the best, if not the best areas in Texas for single family home investing. And what I’m seeing a lot right now is land.

Land is huge. And the reason why I’m seeing this is because fix and flip is harder. So fix and flippers are maybe fine in smaller margins and land. There’s so many things you can do. You can do ground up new constructions. You can turn into RV parks. You can get it to where you can sell it off to a builder. So you can basically, you know, rehab the land, if you will, improve upon the land. But then you also have, you know, large commercial residential plays. And I tell people this. I just got into pickleball recently.

and I realized pickleball is this massive real estate play because everywhere where you’re seeing like a commercial residential high rise going up, there’s a pickleball court somewhere around there where you can, you know, buy drinks, eat food and play pickleball. It’s nuts. So I’m curious to get your perspective on, you know, what are, what are some of the, the, the plays that you’re seeing people be interested in and are you seeing kind of that trend more towards, you know, ground up new construction?

Alexis Anderson (11:43.374)
Yeah, so I Because the last company I worked for was a development company. That’s what they did They went through and they evaluated the different markets the different and honestly land land is huge And they were very smart. They always bought additional land around the area They were going to build in because they know that they were going to exit owning that

property in that land. so they had essentially they bought and held the other acreage, a part of that. I always say they don’t make more land. So being able to leverage that is is huge.

Dylan Silver (12:22.513)
That’s right.

Dylan Silver (12:30.917)
I think, you the land is an interesting. I wasn’t, I get how would you say this? I wasn’t really enthused about land because it’s it’s not like HGTV. You’re flipping homes. I loved that aspect of being a wholesaler because it was cool. You got to walk into distressed properties. Frankly, I loved that. I loved walking into homes where it was like kind of chaos or like you might think it’s a tear down, but you’re able to salvage it and turn it into something beautiful. But then with land, it’s not that

You don’t get that same type of thing. People don’t even have that much attachment to it. But that actually makes it great for investing. It really, really does. And then now, of course, I’m in Texas, so we’ve got so much land. The land plays are practically like endless. mean, storage facilities, RV parks, you’ve got mobile homes. learned about manufactured homes, like offsite construction type of thing. You can do tiny homes. You can do, you know, maybe a smaller apartment complex. And then you have these enormous

beautiful residential commercial deals that I think, you know, for folks who are involved in those, I mean, those are a gold mine. I don’t know how people scale to that level. I got to figure it out, Alexis, but every, it seems like every apartment complex that I’ve heard of that is that kind of upscale nicer end is raising their rents practically every year.

Alexis Anderson (13:52.598)
Yes, yeah, we’ve seen that trend also. No, I agree. I think that land is a great investment. You might not get that immediate gratification of seeing it become pretty like you would in a fix or flip, but the margins are great with buying land.

Dylan Silver (14:08.923)
Yeah, I know.

Dylan Silver (14:16.335)
Now I want to pivot a bit here Alexis and ask you about managing so many doors. How many doors are you at right now?

Alexis Anderson (14:23.899)
2,136.

Dylan Silver (14:30.321)
Wow, so you know your numbers, I can tell that, because you got it down to the last one, right? So 2,136, I think, you know, managing, I know this from personal experience, managing 20 doors is challenging, right? Before we hopped on here, we talked about technology and how that’s critical. I can only imagine that if you’re going to 100 doors, you need tech. If you’re going to 1,000 doors, you’re at 2,136. How does tech come into play?

and where do you see maybe, no one’s got a crystal ball, but where do you see maybe it going to in the next, you know, six months, year, 18 months with tech?

Alexis Anderson (15:08.108)
Yeah, so this has been huge for us. We’ve really tried a bunch of different things to see kind of what works and what doesn’t work. You really, you know, the first thing you should always do is property management software. You need somewhere to manage your, your tenants and do the accounting. So that is, you know, the biggest one for us. And then we recently brought on a project management software.

that really helps us scale because we use it like a massive SOP on everything that we do. And then it also helps our team stay accountable because we can pull reports daily to say, okay, hey,

You know, has this been completed? Where are we at in the budget process for this property? Where are we at in the audit process for this property? Where are we at in, you know, X, Y, and Z? so that’s been huge for us. I have, I did some consulting for property management a while, a while ago, but I have never seen project management software be leveraged in the property management space. So that has been.

Dylan Silver (16:19.995)
Thanks.

Alexis Anderson (16:20.834)
credible for us. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:25.039)
changing the game out here. mean, I know from the single family residential side, I am blown away at the use is and use cases for tech, for AI, for cloud. It’s mind blowing. And it’s wild because I’m also a software engineering student. And I feel like real estate is using more of this than almost anything else because we’re seeing so many different use cases for it. And I think it’s a lot of

A lot of the ways is because I think real estate people by their nature are generally social people, but they also have to solve complex problems, right? And so how do you do this in a way where it is both facilitates our lives to be easier, but also, you know, your clients and the people that you’re working with, like people want something that feels credible. People want something that feels like cutting edge. Otherwise, why am I going to go with you when I could go with someone else?

And so on all sides of it, I just think it’s like incredible to see. mean, I can give you one example. I had a guest here on the show who had like a speed to lead type situation, but also he was able to have his calendar booked out while he was on the show. So someone could be like texting him in, hey, I want to sell my house. And it would be responding. The bot would be responding to them.

and then it would book out his calendar, he’d get a notification. So he doesn’t even really have to take inbound calls any longer and it just books out his Google calendar. I said, that’s incredible. We’re seeing so much stuff like that going on.

Alexis Anderson (18:06.028)
Yeah, no, that’s great. We’ve been using some different AI functions. Honestly, our project management software has been incredible because it will even convert our forms into different languages. Yeah, the things that AI can do have just blown my mind. So it’s great.

Dylan Silver (18:27.121)
Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s a little scary. For sure. Alexis, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they want to maybe learn a little bit more about your business or reach out to you?

Alexis Anderson (18:37.782)
Yeah, so you can visit us at theaapg.com. You can also learn more about our senior cooperatives at theaapgcooperatives.com. And we are really working towards moving into additional spaces like apartment complexes.

Yeah, we created the tools to do it and we see it working well in one space and we really think that we can improve the other. So we’re excited for this year.

Dylan Silver (19:11.823)
Alexis, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Congrats on your success and to your continued success on the journey.

Alexis Anderson (19:19.522)
Thank you, I appreciate it. We have big things planned.