We had the pleasure of sitting down with Luke Street live at the NARPM National Convention in Atlanta, GA and chatting about the journey he has taken in streamlining and scaling his company with LeadSimple Operations.

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Luke's depth of experience and strong commitment to raising the bar in the property management industry makes this an interview property managers with any amount of experience won't want to miss!

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Property management is a logistics, communication, and task-heavy business. Prior to LeadSimple Operations, Luke was using spreadsheets, paper checklists, and weekly meetings to try to keep his team on track.

"We were operating on paper checklists...but there was never any collaboration with the team. It was very reactive in nature and we were missing deadlines. ... The only way I know where a team member is at is to go to their desk and pick up their file. We would meet weekly...it was a very manual processes and we'd spend two hours a week in this meeting, not actually working, but just making sure that we were working the way we were supposed to. "

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Luke quickly realized that this was not an effective way of managing things because issues would only be caught after they became an issue and not before.

"It wasn't a happy meeting because we were looking to find where people were behind. It wasn't effective, because if I'm catching it at the meeting, it's already past due or it's already late. ...we'd miss stuff because someone wasn't doing something and we wouldn't find out about it until we met at that meeting or things would fall behind and then our PMs would stay late to get everything done and make sure their reports looked better, which again is not the world-class service we strive for."

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That's when Luke started with LeadSimple Operations and began building out, documenting, streamlining, and automating his processes.

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When asked how processes have impacted his bottomline, Luke highlighted multiple things:

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✅ Cutting out the $900 weekly meeting to try to stay on track

"You should be aiming to get to the point where, if you want to pay yourself $200 an hour, you are doing work that brings in $200 an hour. The same thing goes for your staff. ... I did the calculations, our two hour meeting with our entire staff was costing me like $900 a week."

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✅ Prioritizing processes with revenue opportunity (such as lease renewal fees)

"We had a lot of instances where we weren't charging fees when we were supposed to be charging them, or the wrong fee. 30% of our renewal fee - I can look at that dollar amount and say that's what it's costing us to not have something in place."

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✅ Efficiency equals better service, shortened vacancy times, and a stronger company reputation

"For every process, the more effective it is, the better your service is. That's helps your reputation, and from a property management standpoint, if you're doing things faster and better, you're making more money. Vacancy is the big killer of profit for both investors and management companies.... Everything that we do that's faster on a vacancy time, that goes to the bottomline."

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✅ Managing more properties with the same number of employees

"We've effectively been able to manage more properties with the same number of people that we've had, and we've grown from 400 when we started with LeadSimple, we jumped way up to 700 and now we're down to 550 because we phased out a lot of lower rent properties, but our people count hasn't changed."

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✅ Leveraging global talent and remote team members

"[We couldn't use remote team members prior to LeadSimple.] We were portfolio style and we were at that point just focused on staying afloat. ...We weren't making more money, just doing more work and adding more stress. So the LeadSimple and remote conversations happened at the same time, to say that this is a more scalable model. An in-office property manager shouldn't be doing the lease renewal calls - they should be focusing on things that bring value and money to the company."

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Ready to join Luke Street and all the other property managers who are transforming their companies with processes? Start saving time and make more money - schedule a discovery call for LeadSimple Operations today!