doing a background in credit check doesn’t solve the problem of a real estate investor what actually does solve their problems is a tenant who doesn’t

want things tracked online because when a tenant is trying to hide it really is a red flag the best piece of advice was

one of my professors in business school said “There’s only one thing you have to remember in life don’t run out of cash.”

[Music] Welcome to the Hybrid Real Estate

Professional Podcast i’m your host Aaron Amin today I’m joined by a special guest Dana Dunford CEO and co-founder of

Hemlane a venture-backed property management platform with over 28,000 rentals under management dana built

Hemline to help investors manage properties from a distance while staying connected to the trusted local pros in

this episode we’re going to unpack what the smartest real estate investors are doing differently how to build a risk mitigated system for your rentals and

why your best deals probably aren’t in your backyard so let’s get into it welcome to the show Dana great thanks so

much Aaron for having me of course well I’m eager to talk about the platform but

before we do that I I think you have a really interesting background i’d love to just kind of hear a little more about your origin story and how you got into

the rental property world yeah it’s interesting i ask other folks who are in as a kind of unsexy of industries as

property management and I don’t think anyone wakes up and dreams to go into it it has to be a personal problem whether

it’s your family a significant other a friend close to you or you have experienced in order to say hey

something’s not right and I need to fix that i also think as an entrepreneur you like I was always when I was at work I

was always like but why are things done that way why do I have to send this email every Friday who’s going to open up my email and I was kind of that

smartass that you probably didn’t want working with you although actually I had good good relationships i think my uh

VPs and exa the exacts really enjoyed it but um still always questioning like why

why are things done this way why can’t we improve and and so while I saw a lot of opportunities to always improve in

the work world I saw something even bigger in real estate but back then and

now I’m really dating myself that was you know 2000 2009 2010 you know it took

one a long time to actually jump into the deep end and start a company and two I think there was a lot that I just needed to learn in five to six years

before starting Hemlane and really understanding like what is property management why is it done this way and

answered those questions before actually saying okay there’s a better way to solve it and so um kind of fast forward

from there in uh 2015 I I jumped into the deep end with my now co-founder Frank we started a company that was

getting our feet a little bit wet with like just background and credit checks for tenants which back then you didn’t

have Zillow rental manager that had background and credit checks in there you didn’t have softwares that did it so

we were really at the forefront of that and then from there just said hey there’s something bigger here doing a

background in credit check doesn’t solve the problem of a real estate investor what actually does solve their problems

is picking up the repair calls reducing liability like all the other things that go into the value props and that kind of

led to saying “Hey we should do a platform based approach and and actually do something so much bigger in property

management and completely change how properties have been managed.” I love that no thank you for for retracing that

a bit and you heard in my intro right one of the things that we teach in our program is how to invest in just 20

minutes per day and it’s it’s it’s built around this idea of busy professionals or people with families that don’t have

a lot of time and to your point like one of the biggest pain points for people that especially new landlords that are

still learning a lot of the motions is it’s not that there’s a ton of work to do it’s not that there’s a full 8 hour

day worth of work to do as a as a property manager or as a landlord but there are these little things that add

up you know you got to coordinate a repair you got to talk to a tenant about leasing you got to um you know go update

a listing like there’s all these kind of little micro motions that you have to go through as a landlord and I think you

guys correctly saw that you know people want to buy those little chunks of time back and minuteby minute you know it’s

um that’s how I’ve kind of grown to think of it especially I know you have you have kids I have kids and it really

puts things in perspective like how little time we actually have to dedicate towards this so I think you by seeing

where those pain points are with the landlords that you were talking to and working with you were able to design a

solution to kind of help solve those bigger problems and to your point also in 2015 there weren’t as many tools so

you guys kind of had an early advantage of being able to create some of those those automations and systems so when

you were first scoping out the product and trying to validate what what the need is what was the process did you go

and talk to a ton of different investors did you and and Frank have you know a portfolio and you learned some of these

problems from from your guys investments or like how did this all kind of come to be in the in the beta and the minim in

the early version of the product yeah great question so I’ll start with one i knew a lot of landlords who had a lot of

problems to your point there’s like small little things that add up but then there’s some big catastrophe and you

really when I read into that it’s not like how do I solve this now for them it’s like how did this happen and how

did they get to this state of an eviction to begin with and like how do I actually solve root problems so I think

that was really like the impetus of hemling is like management should never be challenging or difficult if you can

really solve these things and streamline it as far as the process I interviewed or not interviewed I interned at a

property management company where what I literally did I was a free intern and no one would have hired me for for a paid

intern um ship because it was just for the summer so I just went around and I saw how they did inspections i saw what

they did every day and then I also just constantly asked like “Well why do you do things this way how are you charging

the owners?” And really getting that experience and exposure helped me understand one a lot of property

managers know a heck of a lot about how to mitigate risk and we should promote that like we should be promoting risk

with your rental properties but also on the flip side a lot of these property managers are overworked underpaid and

then they start putting charges in there that don’t make sense like vendor up charges or trying to not do renewals so

that they can just get a a lease up fee versus for an owner you want to keep the tenant in the property long term and I

started seeing these things and would just kind of silently observe them and get back to the root of like hey this

industry is so inefficiently run and the only way to solve it is not layering technology onto the existing industry

it’s actually to reinvent it because the industry if you think about it with property managers they have Appfolio

they have Yardi they have Real Page and Buildium and Door Loop and all these tools built for them but it’s still the

second lowest rate rated industry on Angie’s and so how do you make it actually better for those who are

licensed who are assisting and then those who own and operate rentals yeah no it’s a good point so in addition to

the technology that you know that helps solve and create efficiencies but it’s actually the business model and the

underlying incentives that were maybe worth disrupting i have a really strong

opinion about this because I’ve I’ve had trouble finding third party property managers that I love i’ve found some

that are kind of uh I guess acceptable or meet the mark and I’ve had a few like pretty bad apples where they were either

the structure of their fees like you mentioned is built to incentivize them to either do more work or let tenants go

instead of renew i mean that stuff’s crazy right that they get basically paid more if they run your property in a

certain way that is less favorable to you as a landlord and so just that the fact that that’s even kind of a widely

accepted structure for incentives doesn’t make sense to me but I love that you know you are trying to basically put

the control back in the landlord’s hands and and your platform basically provides visibility transparency throughout the

whole process but also like it’s just that kind of combination of making their life easier taking the more mundane and

annoying tasks away so that they don’t have to do it but then still like giving the control to them but I find you know

so I’ve been a a customer of of Hemlain and I thought that it was a really seamless experience to set up like very

easy and then when when I actually like went through the repair coordination for the first time and got some of the like

notifications and I didn’t have to be involved in the in that part with the tenant I realized how much it was like

kind of eating into my life with all those little context switches uhhuh because I was self-managing six out of

our eight rentals across three different states and there’s just all these little intrusions into your life and um and I

noticed that like I didn’t have to worry as much as long as I had kind of built and pre-populated my my portfolio in

your guys platform but maybe you can explain a little bit of the functionality of like how how one

onboards and like uh puts a property in and and then what that experience is like for for the owner yeah that’s a

great question and and first of all I’m glad to hear that because I think context switching is something that’s super real that if you can do the same

thing really efficiently you can get through so much more but if you’re like “Oh my gosh I need to like go out and do

a showing oh wait I need to like go back and do this maintenance um and uh repair

you start not doing things really effectively.” And so that was something that we leaned into of hey we can have

subject matter experts that just do these things to perfection for you as far as the experience for an owner

there’s no one-sizefits-all and the reason that I bring that up is that you kind of choose your own experience and

every person is different based on how much they want to pay how much they

value their time and what their situation is so if you have a property down the street you can use our basic

package which is software it’s got tasks it onboards everything you need to advertise this rental you need to invite

a tenant to this one you need to set up rent collection and what it will do is just really quickly get you through it

to get your property on autopilot but then if there’s a repair request it goes to you if there’s a lease renewal it

goes to you etc uh then we have an essential package which actually a lot of property managers themselves use it

uh and um I find that to be actually delightful um to know that they’re using

us as a backend and that’s where you have your own service professionals but you use our 247 repair coordination we

do the troubleshooting the dispatching pay out the service professionals all of that on your behalf and then the the

third one that we have is basically the um property management on basically like

a much more complete holistic view and so that’s where you get a rental assistant they respond to all the tenant

inquiries that’s a new feature that we have and then you also have a dedicated repair coordinator for your properties

there’s eviction shield so if your tenants are late on rent we get a mediator involved so really from the

dashboard you should be able to see everything going on without it being too overwhelming for you and also

everything’s transparent you can see every message sent you can make decisions you can hide from tenants and jump into conversation so it makes it

much more delightful see that’s actually another thing I was going to say right is that even if you don’t mind doing that work yourself I don’t know about

you but like when I’m texting a tenant one thing and then I email them something else and then there’s a

picture that comes from a vendor and then there’s an invoice and it’s in four different places I’m not very good at

like you have to actually stop and like create the document trail for a repair or or a sequence and I think that’s one

of the like especially when you’re looking two or three years back or maybe at tax time you’re trying to retrace something that happened or you’re just

trying to do a retrospective on how your your properties performed those paper trails can get really loose and sloppy

if you’re the one doing it yourself and you’re busy with other stuff that’s another big value ad that I remember getting you know from from using the

platform and I think it’s it’s it can’t be overstated right because I’m actually going through this right now where

there’s two properties that we’re considering selling and I’m having to retrace like four years worth of repairs

and maintenance logs and I did my best but it’s it’s definitely um there’s times where I’m having to search through

the memory and anytime you have to search through your brain for stuff from four years ago in today’s world not

usually a pretty Yeah yeah totally you forget yeah we upload all those invoices

and stuff and our team can download those at any time for you if you need them um if you’re doing repairs through

us so absolutely yeah and I think it’s an interesting point you mentioned too that some property managers I’m guessing it’s probably more of the smaller like

one or two person companies not the big ones they use your your service as a backend right for the the support and

coordination because I’ve actually worked with a couple my two favorite property managers that I’ve worked with had like 50 or less units they managed

small but but they had small operations they had no full-time employees they had a list of vendors like they did most of

the work themselves but then they had a a short list of vendors across each of the different types of repairs that they

would work with but they can’t answer things 247 uh 365 so having something like that on the back end for them where

they’re still your point person and they can still respond to just about everything but then they have this kind

of back-end support where they know they’re going to have a coordinator they’re going to have 247 response i could see that being I I had never

actually really thought of that until you said it that that could be a good value ad for a smaller property manager

is that the typical profile of who you see leveraging it yeah we just see they can coordinate to your point so many

more rentals because they’re not like the the larger players you’re right they try to hire their own repair

coordinators they don’t train them correctly they upcharge on things like there’s just so much that goes into it

that becomes it’s sort of like the DMV it’s like so inefficiently run that it’s

mindboggling right with the property managers who use Hemline you’re right it’s usually the owner operator you’re

talking to and then all of the repair coordination and eviction shield and everything is is basically built into

the system for them to use and we tell them certain things we don’t have for you you want to up charge on uh repair

invoices we’re not going to do it like we’re not building that in there so you can go to App Folio and you can sell the

same old thing or you can modernize and align with your customers and I think that part is like very much what we call

the Hemlain way and unless you are very bought into the Hemlain way we don’t want to work with you and that we’ve

really stayed true to and that’s why I think when you have a property manager who uses Hemlain where it’s transparent

to the owners they can see everything it does become a such a much more delightful experience makes sense and I

think the other archetype I can picture is someone who does want hands-on experience i picture myself maybe four

or five years ago before we had kids like I actually enjoyed self-managing i enjoyed building the skills of working

with tenants i’m not much of a hands-on person for repair stuff but like I enjoyed the art of being a landlord and

you know I made plenty of mistakes but I can see a tool like this kind of helping insulate and give you that backs stop so

that you can focus on like the I guess you know tenant facing or customerf facing interactions without having to

worry as as much about the backend administration and then as you build out your own portfolio you know you can

scale more effectively because I think what happened for us is especially because we were invested across three states and that’s three different teams

that’s three different roles of venues that’s a lot of stuff to store and keep again anything that ends up in your head

it’s a dangerous um you know if you don’t have a good organizational system easy to forget stuff easy to to let

things slide so I I think of it also as a tool that could backs stop you as you’re building out your own systems and

I think too the pricing model that was another thing that I really liked about it where basically you and correct me if

this has changed but there’s like a a platform fee like a one that you only pay once and then additional units are

at a lower price is that right exactly because when you have one unit we give you the same support as someone with 10

and so at least that base fee if you have 10 units gets distributed across 10 and we actually find the support tech

support to be the same if you have one unit versus 10 because someone with 10 may be like much more bought into

learning everything knowing how things work and so it’s been a great way also to help if you’re a larger client to get

a really low you know uh cost per unit um should you say i had a funny experience I want to ask get your

perspective on so I tried to use Hemlain on a property in Washington state and

the tenants were the problem not the platform older tenants who were very averse to it was a smaller town and

they’re averse to anything technology based right they would prefer to drop off a paper rent check in my mailbox

rather than or go to the local bank and make a deposit rather than do some type of automated a and so I just had a heck

of a time trying to get them to use this platform they could not for the life of them learn to submit a ticket or a

maintenance request through the platform and so I honestly just gave up but I’m I’m curious what your kind of response

is or like if you’ve had if you’ve been able to work on a solution for people that are very techverse or if you have

any advice for landlords who might be encountering similar issues yeah I have some pretty strong opinions on that

because I think people who are totally tech averse like we have a 96-year-old guy who pays his rent every year uh

every um month through Hemlain and he actually calls the support team just to talk to him he’s a delight his name’s

Peter everyone loves when Peter calls and he’s 96 years old and we had told him when he was on boarding I think the

account executive that was working on it kind of flagged of like the tenants really old for this one are they going to be able to do it so they said to

Peter “Hey get your um children to help you set your up on Hemlane.” And he goes “Oh no I use Facebook and if I can use

Facebook I can use Hemlane.” He’s down in Texas and sure enough he set up his rent he put it on autopay and so now

we’ve said because of Peter if you can use Facebook you can use Hemline and if a 96-year-old can do it you can do it i

think those who are averse to using technology one I I think that that definitely is becoming much more of the

um minority right now of of folks but if you can’t use it you can’t use anything

you can’t even use Uber to get around you know what I mean you’re paying more for everything cuz now you’re paying for like an assisted living person want to

book your Uber for you like I think it’s a bit and hopefully hopefully they have family who can help them out with it but

I think it’s one of those things that the landlord can decide the landlord can decide hey do I want to still collect

the checks manually or do I want to try to get this person on Hemlane we’ve seen

it really successful where it’s like great come into the office we’ll help get you set up we’ll show you how the platform works everything’s bank level

encrypted PC level one secure and have them go through it but you might get the

occasional stubborn tenant who’s like “No this is the way I always used to do it.” You’re not going to change their

mindset and so you’re going to have to keep that however when you get your next tenant in because the application’s

online the credit and background check is on there you never get any push back they just go through the process and

really that is the future of it and so you hope that someone who is older who’s not techsavvy you hope that they have a

kid or a family member or someone who’s supporting them who is techsavvy because when you look at the future that’s where

everything is going is online and so it almost seems to me like a disservice not

to do it i’m also not a fan of rent collected via cash i learned the hard way it’s a terrible way to do business

and you can get in some pretty bad situations as we have and so I that’s

why I’m very much promoting like the future way of doing things and I think a

good example was at Apple i remember they took out um the floppy disc and

everyone was in uproar why would you take that out and they had remember the CD player instead and everyone was like

“But we still need a floppy.” And every other computer had the floppy and then the plugin for DVD cuz not enough or CD

because not enough had moved towards CD and it was one of those things well we’re not building for yesterday we’re

building for the future and I think if you have that mindset you are going to have some manual offline processes but

you’re also going to find your operations are so much more efficient if you move towards the future versus the

past yeah I totally agree and there’s a few kind of landlord lessons that I learned along the way so that experience

I described with the tenant who was resistant to it that was a tenant that we already had in place and we were

trying to get her to transition away from something that was convenient and comfortable and at the end of the day we

kind of just gave up mostly out of our own circumstance we were tired of fighting against it and the process wasn’t um you know she was still paying

so we didn’t push too hard but where where I’m going with that is that to your point like when you onboard a new

tenant and now in our leases it’s written that it has to be automated a

payment at the time we were using Hemline it was written in our lease mhm that it had to be through the specific

platform unless otherwise agreed upon in writing and I actually do a little bit view it as a flag if somebody isn’t

willing to do an automated a for their monthly rent because that means that somehow they’re not managing their cash

well enough to know that there’s money in their account for that automated AC that’s what that indicates to me whether

that’s true or not and so my stance has changed to that on that quite a bit over time but I think that’s maybe just a

little landlord tip too is that put it in your lease in writing that rent collection method is through the

platform and then even you can always offer to help them set it up that’s another thing I did so I had trouble

with you know some tenants but others that adopted it just fine and I totally agree that it actually makes everyone’s

life easier on both sides if it’s automated for them and then you know that it’s through a trusted platform and

you can kind of depend on and get those estimated delivery dates and just know when it’s going to hit your account instead of waiting for some cash deposit

to pop up you know from your from your local bank sometime between the 1st and the 5th and you’re just left wondering

if it’s going to happen every month over month so I’m all for tech solutions on that front and then you have the context

switching Aaron like you have to go into your bank you have to confirm is it there like there’s just so much versus

like we always say no news is good news like will send you hey all this rent has been deposited on you know the first of

the month or whenever rent is paid but you don’t have to worry about that um the other thing I would say is I’ve seen

it in renewals you can’t charge fees i think in most states for saying “Hey if you don’t pay online I’m going to charge

you $20 more.” But you can give rent rebates so you can say “Hey the new

rental rate is this.” If you move towards the online system it’s that you get a rebate on your rent of $20 a month

and you better believe suddenly when it’s written like that to suddenly change their mindset and say “Yeah I’ll

go ahead and pay online now.” Yeah 20 bucks is like a Subway sandwich you know these days yeah and Yeah and it’s also

one of those things that’s just good for tenants i think a tenant who doesn’t want things tracked online I always

question why because it’s like well then it physically shows what day you paid it physically tracks every conversation

with the landlord and so when a tenant is trying to hide it’s really is a red flag to me yeah today’s episode is

brought to you by the Remote Real Estate Academy the community I launched last year where I personally coach investors

and empower them to buy rental properties anywhere in the United States my business partner Nathan and I have a

collective 15 years experience with over 20 cash flowing out of rental properties

we provide a step-by-step playbook on how you can build your own portfolio and start accessing the life-changing

benefits of real estate investing starting today go to remoterrealestateacademy.com for more

info or better yet shoot me an email at aaron.com with subject line RA and I’ll

throw in a special bonus for podcast listeners who join the academy now let’s get to the show so this is actually a

great segue into you know one of the other I think features that you guys offer but also something that does

require some collaboration between the landlord and Hemlane which is tenant screening and then also just the lease up process so in my mind in

self-management the hardest parts the hardest things that you might encounter from a difficulty standpoint especially

if you’re remote are eviction if that is ever needs to occur and then lease up

which will occur at some point so maybe we can start with the lease up process and just talk about like what are the

options i I believe you have a couple right you have the self-guided tours and the um potentially partnering with local

leasing agents but can you just run through kind of what those scenarios are and how that might work for someone who’s not physically in the location of

their rentals yeah that’s a great question so essentially you can either self-manage and do the advertising

through us but show the property yourself you can use self-guided tours or you can use a local licensed agent it

kind of goes in order of cost from that perspective um one of the things we realized with local agents is we have

some really good local agents who are on their phone 24/7 a tenant message comes in right away they call they set up the

showing boom boom boom boom boom however we also found there was a lot of micromanagement of people who were not

our employees in other words a broker agent and we’d be like “Hey tenant

inquiries came in last night this property has been on market for 20 days why didn’t you respond and reach out

like we did our automated but why didn’t you call them why didn’t you text them like what is going on that this is

taking so long or hey you don’t have any showings in the system or the showings aren’t for another week if you want to

get this leased you got to have a showing every single day and so what we found was there was a lot of micromanagement and something that was

outside of our control and something outside of our control to improve obviously gives me anxiety and so if

something ever went wrong within local agent our h our hands were kind of tied cuz it’s like they’re not a Hemling

employee you have a contract with them so we launched self-guided tours and we did it over 3 years ago and now there’s

been a huge investment in it so we’ve just made the process like just incredible like the phone call goes out

within the first 5 minutes of a tenant inquiring like just so much more that goes with it and what we have found um

with it is we’re able to reduce days on market by over 10 days with self-guided tours but you have to do everything very

safely and secure securely and so we have someone there texting you or on a call as you’re doing the showing you

show up we’ve already done identity verification so your ID up to your face we’re scanning it we’re following up

after the showing seeing what you liked what you didn’t is there anything to report confirming you locked up showing

a photo of you locked up like we have that process down and so what we found is that’s really helpful i think where a

lot of people get self-guided tours are like just the automation process wrong is they overautomate i never think over

automation is good you still need if someone says “Yeah I really liked the place.” You need someone to call them

great you really liked it let me walk you through exactly next steps on the property and all of that and so I still

think you need a human touch with all of this to really make it um make tenants

trust you as well and so I think there’s that that balance between the automation and the humans and then obviously that

third one is local agents we have some phenomenal agent partners i don’t mean to say that all are bad we have some

phenomenal partners and so now our criteria really is like they have to

have a four-star plus review in our system that brokerage if we’re going to refer it out to them got it yeah yeah so

self-guided tours is something that I was very uncomfortable with for a long time but the more I hear about it and

the more like particularly the security and like how it’s a one-time code there’s biometrics there’s a lot of

stuff involved to keep it safe and secure u I’m warming up to that idea but

so just just to kind of better understand though where are the live touch points if somebody uses that service and who is it is it the landlord

that has to do those calls or is it someone on your team no it’s all our team it’s their their leasing

coordinator so you’ll have a showing coordinator and a leasing coordinator the leasing coordinator is going to

coordinate everything with the tenants um just from like setup through the showing coordinator is just managing

those tenant inquiries and you can see it all in the system so you can log in see what calls we’ve sent see what

emails we’ve sent text messages etc got it and is that service so I know that there’s different like size markets and

the level of service that you guys offer sometimes is based on population or maybe I don’t know the density so is

that service available only in the markets where you have that kind of higher tier service or is it um Okay go

ahead it’s available everywhere we can’t um if you want us to install the lock box for you you do need to be in one of

those complete areas but if you have a friend or someone else to install the lock box it’s a digital lock box so the

code is changing you can it’s really easy to install you can be in any market so that is available nationwide anywhere

the one caveat I would make is we’ve seen in towns with populations of 3,000

or 4,000 people the days on market is longer so our average days on market is 21 days on market if you’re in a really

small place not to say all of them but we’ve seen the days on market go up and so when we were looking at our days on

market in our data and system we saw if you are in a much more higher populated

place it’s just like clockwork but if not it will take slightly longer yeah no that’s interesting so I’ve heard you use

a couple different data points but I’m curious like how do you measure success for your company like what are the

different metrics that you pay attention to so you talked about days on market for listings are there other like ways that you kind of measure satis

satisfaction or the quality of your your service to landlords yeah um so every

single service is different i think with eviction shield it’s how many course cases did we not get to court and how

much rent what percentage could we collect on rent from the tenants through negotiations if it’s maintenance and

repair it’s time to dispatch as well as um uh total days that it the request is

open and um that one the time to dispatch and like time to response the

reason those are more important is that we just need to know hey when a request comes in you’ve done the troubleshooting

you’ve confirmed that the tenant can’t do it and go you have this scheduled because if you find that hey you’re

waiting on um actually one of our repair coordinators said a good thing about it you said it’s like a a car with four

wheels hemlane’s one but you have the service professional the owner and the tenant and you need all of them to be

moving in the same direction and so then the question is like hey if we’re not getting the scheduled if it’s a service

professional that’s on us we can push that forward but are we getting the tenant to push it forward as well to get

it scheduled with us and so there’s certain things like that that they’re doing to get the time to dispatch down

um so it’s another one um and then the biggest ones are NPS and um uh just

seesat per product we want to make sure that we are always getting five star reviews in other words if you are a

coordinator in any of our departments and you have under 4.3 star reviews you are automatically on a PIP and you are

going to have to find another job because we want to make sure that you are clearly communicating and

articulating things to everyone in that car moving one direction yeah that makes

sense it’s I think there’s also a lot of onus on the landlord to

understand what you can and can’t do there’s a ton of capabilities you’ve already described but the landlord has

to play their part too right i correct me if I’m wrong but I feel like Hamlin is not for someone who wants to be 100%

handsoff all the time right they have to have some degree of involvement and there has to be kind of a established

relationship or almost like an agreement like okay here’s the type of stuff I’m going to pay attention to here’s the

type of stuff I can outsource and I’m not going to just like leave it to Hemline to figure everything out with no with no involvement what do you kind of

expect from your landlords I guess is the question behind that it’s a decision-making the only way to get five

star reviews is to have no surprises and so if we get a landlord involved it’s because they typically haven’t filled

out their move in guide haven’t filled out their instructions of how they want us to handle certain things haven’t filled out their thresholds like we want

to know we have some landlords who are like “Hey if it’s a if it’s under $1,000 I don’t want to hear about it.” Do the

price negotiation push back close out the repair pay the bill we have other ones who say “No I want to be very

involved.” And so we just need to know what your level of involvement is in that commitment to ensure that we can

get five star reviews and say “Hey this is exactly how you wanted us to handle it.” And so when we get landlords

involved it’s things like rent increases you know here’s what the market’s saying how much do you want to increase it by

those types of things are where the landlords would still need to be involved and we also make everything transparent so if you’re saying “Hey I

don’t want to hear anything.” He’s not the tool for you because if it’s not transparent I actually don’t know how you scale yeah it doesn’t seem like

there can be a scenario in which the tenant doesn’t at some point have to interact with the landlord right or I

mean there lease renewal things like that but they do it through the platform they do it through the platform yeah

yeah yeah yeah yeah and I can tell you as someone who um texted often with my

tenants I as especially as I scaled sometimes that got a little much even though I was I I enjoyed having a

relationship with my tennis the fact that they’re in your personal cell phone your personal inbox it can get a little

intrusive and having that kind of separate platform that you can go and check check on and communicate is

definitely valuable if you’re trying to really you know I used I think I used to blend my landlord and my regular life a

lot more than I do now now it’s a bit more compartmentalized and separated yeah and it creates that kind of peace

of mind and extra space so you could be more present especially you know now that I’m a father that that means a lot more to me yeah so I think but being

able to leverage that part of the tool and the way you communicate with your tenants again that’s kind of it’s on the

landlord to learn how to do that not just assume that it’s going to be done without any input from them default but

they feel helpless because they’re 2,000 miles away and maybe they only know one or two people in the town so how have

you built this service and I’m sure it’s evolved over time but how have you built this service to give people peace of mind when they encounter those type of

situations yeah it’s actually our fastest growing product everyone seems to love it and love it for a good reason

so it starts with um first if a tenant’s late on rent obviously the system

whether or not you have eviction shield will go ahead and send a notice that the

tenant is late rent is usually due on the first late on the second and typically late fees kick in on the fifth

of the month although sometimes it’s the sixth or the third what we do is between the third and the fifth of the month if

the tenant is still late or you know that many days from when the rent was due we go ahead and outreach the tenant

and we and it’s a mediator and the mediator’s primary reason to do the outreach is to just understand why are

you late on rent and how can I help you when they come from a scenario of help suddenly tenants open up a heck of a lot

more about what’s going on and that’s what you need you need data you need to know did they lose their job are they

going through a divorce is it that they just forgot and that they need help with from tech support is it something else

and from there then you can basically put it into these little branches that basically say “Hey do we think that this

is going to have to go to court and the tenants being difficult and go ahead and serve a notice right away?” And we have

a local process server pound on the door and serve the notice do we think that this is something where we can work with

the tenant on a payment plan or an early termination because that is going to cost the landlord way less if we can do

that and the one I love the most is how do we get them services until then which is going through local um like there’s

local government as well as a lot of church groups will be able to pay at least float and do one month’s rent to

keep that tenant in the place and what I love about that is they pay that one month usually the tenant has enough

money by the next month to pay and then you can work on a termination and the landlord’s not out any money yeah I love

that approach is you know empathy right instead of just assuming mal intent you’re actually trying to understand

what the problem is it’s a really hard line to walk where you do want to enforce your policy which is a late fee

because I think what I’ve learned at least again you know from my own naivity is that every time you flex on your late

policy it becomes an expectation so I think you know that can al that can become a slippery slope very quickly and

then it can lead to that behavior that then might end in in one of those eviction scenarios so I really like that

your approach is based on you know service and empathy and the fact that there’s a third party a mediator that’s

a really interesting idea that I can imagine when sometimes they might be have some feelings about approaching

their landlord with a problem but maybe a third party that’s impartial they can feel like they’re not being judged and

they’re just trying to be understood so I I really like that and then so the this service I assume is only available

in those full service larger markets right no this is um anywhere eviction

Shield works anywhere there’s process servers even in towns of population of 3,000 so we’ll work with a partner

process server i love it i I have a property in a town of 3,000 so good to know so there you go awesome well I do

think you know that uh long-distance investing which is you know my niche and obviously the probably the most common

scenario that you serve those are the common like big pain points are you’re usually busy you don’t want to manage

all those little micro motions like tenant coordination repairs all that type of stuff you don’t necessarily the

lease up is one of the more nerve-wracking parts where you you have a vacant unit you need it to get turned

over you need somebody to be able to coordinate that and then advertise and then do the showings and then of course the scenario where something has gone

wrong and you might need to do an eviction or put together some sort of plan like you said maybe it doesn’t end

in an eviction but you have to navigate a complex scenario and so just having like even a thought partner like someone

where because I think as a landlord when you enter those situations it really is a you know a type of stress that’s very

unique where you feel somewhat helpless especially if you’re far away and so just knowing that there’s a um someone

else in your corner and you you are aligned of course a third a traditional property property manager can provide

that type of support but it’s usually pretty expensive and isn’t always done in the way that you might do it

yourselves i think that there’s so many different areas that that you guys add value and I’m curious too like if you

were to describe like what your average client or customer is like is it that long-distance investor that you know is

um investing in one or multiple out of state markets it’s a combination so I think it’s about 15% PMS but they tend

to have larger portfolios um and then the rest is split between those who are

local or can drive an hour or two away and then those who are remote so we found that to be uh pretty much the same

what we’ve found that’s consistent across all of ours is they believe in transparency they want to know everything going on and they want

something that’s more than just cheap software that’s going to get them in trouble with you know fair housing violations because it says we do AI

descriptions and the AI description says great family neighborhood and it’s kind of the wild wild west with those

softwares we try to make sure everything’s really elevated and that we’re really your partner there with

your property management makes sense so without revealing any industry secrets

or proprietary information what is the future what is on the road map or any

features or that you’re exploring or new pain points that you’ve discovered that you’re trying to help work on with

landlords what does the future look like yeah good question so one is revamping a

lot of our things like lease renewals to make it a very quickstep process for you

and help with the negotiation where it’s all automated online so you’re not having to go back and forth with the tenant but you can get a renewal in

there so that’s that’s one of the ones we’re working on we’re also working on um better inspections so more annual

inspections tenant le inspections all the things that you would want to really feel like you have eyes and ears on the

property driveby inspections we do those um for certain properties as well and so that will be across all properties we

can go ahead and do um and then um the other big thing is AI how do you just have AI do more for you but in a very

very streamlined way where you’re not putting yourself at any risk while it’s answering and responding to questions

and stuff like that and so those are like a couple of examples there’s obviously a list of like 5,000 things i

think the biggest thing for us is how do we support our users with a more localized approach coupled with how do

we just mitigate risk especially as new tenant landlord law is coming out every single day those are the two things that

uh we talk about a lot with really the vision to say Aaron you can go to Mars and we will manage your property for you

and you do not have to worry you can manage it directly from Hemlain and check in from Mars and not feel like you

ever have to visit it i’ll add to that you guys put out a lot of great educational material and you have a podcast and just you I think you go

above and beyond trying to help educate and contribute to the dialogue of what it means to be a landlord in modern

times and um just even being out there and and being at different events i know you and I met at an event recently and

just shaking hands and and talking to landlords obviously you know informs how you can stay you know up toate with your

product and make sure that you’re serving people you know based on today’s problems and not just banking on stuff

that you learned right away i I’ve been impressed with how you guys have iterated and evolved over time and how you’re you’re constantly kind of looking

around the next corner to see what um what the problems of tomorrow are going to be consider me a grateful happy happy

customer and um and uh grateful to know you as well i want to wrap on I guess

two questions that uh are a little bit lighter one is you are the only other

parent of a person named Atlas that I’ve ever met so I have a son named Atlas and uh he’s

one of our twins how did you pick that name and it’s really funny because mine’s a twin obviously too and I think

we spoke about this so we both had sons named Atlas um so that actually is really funny we were coming up with baby

names we had Dea for the daughter we didn’t have a name for Atlas i wanted an

alliteration cuz our last name’s Dunford david Dunford dana Dunford dea Dunford i

wanted Dune Dunford but then um we had a friend who we we just been sent their

holiday card and the kid’s name was Atlas and this is kind of a distant friend kind of like um was like a

business partner of my husband’s and he had his son’s name is Atlas and we were like we love that name so he called this

guy and said hey are you okay if I also name my son Atlas like we’re not that close we sort of do business together

but pretty distantly the guy said sure yeah just name your son Atlas and then 2

or 3 years later my husband comes to me and he’s like “That guy copied my business idea and does the exact same thing my company does.” And I was like

“Well that’s because we stole his son’s name so now he’s stolen your business name.” So or your business idea so I

think we’re we’re an eye for an eye yeah exactly exactly so it’s pretty funny yeah that’s that is funny yeah our whole

family is a names first and last name so I love it yeah and my wife picked Atlas

and it resonated and our the other twin is Anakin so we went we went with non-conventional names i love that i

love it and then my last question is going to be the one that I think you used on me last week which is “What is

one quote that you live by?” I was interested to hear your response oh my gosh I have so many quotes that I live by um okay so there’s a couple i think

the one though I I could give a lot of inspirational ones but I think one of the ones as an entrepreneur and as a

business person that was like the best piece of advice was one of my professors in business school said there’s only one

thing you have to remember in life and it’s don’t run out of cash and the reason that I bring that up is I’ve seen

everyone in our property management platform software space run out of cash burn through cash not think prudently of

how they’re going to grow their businesses and I’ve seen it a lot on the real estate side as well where you see

folks a little bit foolish with fix and flips and stuff like that and you see a lot of bankruptcies you see a lot of

people take out personal loans on things and those I think who are the savviest with real estate tend to be a little bit

more conservative always have the reserves always have the capital always think strategically and so even though

that’s not like one of my most inspirational quotes I actually think it’s a one that it’s like it’s a good

lesson for everyone out there yeah that is very good advice uh unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at

it the world does run on currencies of all types and cash happens to be the one that usually keeps the lights on at home

so great great advice and I really appreciate you coming on the show i learned a lot i’m sure my audience did

too where can people find you if they want to learn about Hemlain or connect with you or just stay in touch in

general yeah you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter you can type in Dana Dunford um and then also Hemlain

Hml.com um and anyone there you can just mention my name and and they can put you

in touch awesome i’ll include everything in the show notes and please drop Dana a follow and a thank you and thanks again

for coming on the show great thanks for having me thank you for making it to the end of today’s episode as you may know

podcasts are very difficult to grow organically if you’re getting value from today’s episode I’d deeply appreciate if

you can take 30 seconds to leave my show a fivestar rating and review this will go a long way to me reach more listeners

just like you thank you so much in advance