Climbing the Ranks in Multifamily

[Peter Christenson] (0:00 - 0:30) There's going to be some difficulties with technology in general. Sometimes it's to the point where it adds an extreme amount of additional stress on the team. That's not the goal.

The goal is property preservation and saving money in the long run. It's very interesting to me to see how big of an impact they make because they are one of the biggest companies, if not the biggest, and have the most resources and the most technology and the most availability to all of these things. It's going to be a challenge for other companies.

[Adrian Danila] (0:30 - 0:54) Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Multifamily X Podcast, Masters of Maintenance. I want to thank our sponsors Skyros and Upwork for making this podcast possible. Our special guest today is Peter Christensen.

Welcome to the show, Peter. Thanks for having me, Adrian. I appreciate the invite.

Peter, let's start by introducing you to the audience. Tell us a little bit about your journey in multifamily.

[Peter Christenson] (0:54 - 2:43) Started in multifamily seven years ago. I was moving locations to a different city from Milwaukee to Rochester. I needed to find a job, so I just so happened to see that the place that we were renting from was hiring for a maintenance position.

I thought that I'd be capable of making the career switch into that and just seeing how it worked out for me. Maybe temporary as I found other things that were more permanent. Once I got hired, I found out that I really liked entry-level maintenance.

I thought it was great. I was able to learn, had freedom to work on stuff, kind of endless knowledge capability as far as what I was learning and gaining, and had more free time with my other job, which was also a pretty big benefit. After about six months, I moved to another property that had some different challenges and different things I could learn with.

Then after a year with that, I had the opportunity to get advancement and a supervisor position. I stayed. I got that position, took over three properties at first, about 250 units.

Then as that continued, I put on a couple more properties and then continued to grow and develop and learn. Just as of January of this year, 2024, I was able to get a director of maintenance and purchasing position with CenterSpace. That's been a great learning experience.

I definitely would have not been able to do anything I do now effectively without having started where I did.

[Adrian Danila] (2:43 - 3:06) Let's go back to the time when you got promoted to service manager. Tell me about some things that you learned and you learned maybe the hard way from transitioning from a technician to a service manager. What were some things that kind of hit you that you thought they were different, and actually when you got the job and you actually had to do the job, you realized, well, this was not like I thought it was going to be?

[Peter Christenson] (3:07 - 4:10) That's a good question. One of the things I think was I initially thought that was scheduling and ordering might be something that's a really big challenge. What I realized with is proper planning and just diligence in what you're doing, that it can be fairly simple and effective.

It doesn't need to be a big process or very hairy, as long as you go with your prescribed process from your company, us making sure that we did use the proper punch out and then you put the proper GL codes in. Everything went very simple and there was very little kickback, very little pushback. Budget adherence was another thing.

Budgets were something I had to learn a little bit more and kind of to see how it affected us. A lot of the maintenance work that's done is a necessity and not necessarily want. So if you're going over budget, you have to figure out how that affects the entire company as you're doing it.

So that was a little bit of adjustment as well.

[Adrian Danila] (4:12 - 4:22) Tell me about the people part. How was it? What kind of experience you had with having to manage people and different than you thought when you were a service technician?

[Peter Christenson] (4:23 - 6:33) Leadership, people leadership kind of brings me back from maybe when I was 19 years old, I started to learn and kind of see different styles of leadership. One of the ones that I thought was most important is someone who taught me that in a large decision making process, it's good to gain insight from many different areas. On the maintenance field, that would be your team.

And then if you're in the leadership position, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do exactly what they say, but take their insights and kind of collaborate as a team, and then make the best decision for the team. And you're going to get more buy in when you use part of what they've, they probably have more experience in different areas. So you can use part of what they said, part of what your experiences are, you're just going to make a better collaborative decision than if you're just doing it yourself and tell everybody to follow because that's what you want to do.

Oftentimes, that's not the best decision. So that's sort of a collaborative approach. I found that one of the most difficult things as a manager is to do corrections.

And I found the easiest way to do corrections is first by building a relationship with that person. So in the situation where I was, I was entry level, and then I ended up supervising the people that taught me in that entry level position. And so that was, that's a unique situation.

I already had built that relationship with them. But I knew at the same time that I couldn't necessarily tell them what to do. So I just needed to get them to see things from my perspective, if we were going to do a change, and to see how it would benefit them.

Everybody's on board if you're going to make their life better. And that's what my goal was to make everybody's life more efficient, easier, a better run property, making us all happy. And when you're at work, it doesn't have to be so burdensome if everything's planned out in a team effort.

[Adrian Danila] (6:34 - 6:41) Peter, tell me a little bit about your current position as a director. What are your duties? What are your main responsibilities as a director?

[Peter Christenson] (6:43 - 8:16) Director of maintenance and purchasing for center space, my main duties is to find and or create efficiency and consistency across our organization, so that we have the best ability to grow and develop our company with if you have many different sites doing many different things, it's very, you can't have consistency. And then it's very difficult to train on that as well. But the more consistent you are, the more repeatable results are.

And then the better that impacts financially, and work life as well. So the overall arching is efficiency and consistency in maintenance and purchasing. That does get more specific into turn time work orders, preventative maintenance, specific property, mechanical issues, and or systems that we need to learn, and then how to create a plan to do that.

And then the purchasing side is signing major contract, not necessarily signing, but working with major vendors, being HD supply, Lowe's, Office Depot, Amazon, and Ferguson are our main ones, as far as maintenance, repair and operation suppliers. So keeping a relationship with them, working on pricing, working on consistency is what they can provide us and then where they can, I guess where we can benefit each other, where we can help them, they can help us.

[Adrian Danila] (8:17 - 9:01) I want to go back a little bit later to the purchasing part, procurement part, because I have some topics that I really want to get your take on, something that I think the industry is not too much aware currently. I know you are, so I would like for you to share with us. You've emphasized the importance of viewing maintenance as a professional career.

We had conversations on a leadership group and you're one of the members that believes in this, just like you believed in yourself and you made an amazing career for yourself so far. You're just getting started. Now, what steps do you believe are crucial for someone that's just starting in maintenance to advance to a leadership position like yours, someone that's looking up to you and wants to become like Peter one day?

[Peter Christenson] (9:01 - 11:45) I think everybody's career path could be different, but I think some things that could be similar from mine to other people's is I started with very little knowledge, but what I did have was the eagerness to learn, self-driven. If I didn't know it, I was going to find it out, figure out how to do absolutely everything. You have to be able to retain that information.

That just makes you more effective. Not to say that the resources go away, because if you don't remember something, you can always look it up. After, I would say in addition to that, I rarely ever, if ever, turned down opportunities for more challenges.

If somebody was going to ask me, you know, do you think you can do this or take on this bigger task? I found a way to do it. I figured it was a way to improve myself, make myself more valuable to the company.

It's kind of always putting it out there that I'm willing to do more. In my reviews every year, I asked for more challenges, which paid off and they seemed to find everyone every time it was a different challenge every year, but they were able to help me with that. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that also values professional development, so they were able to send me to different certification classes, EPA, Boiler's License, CPO, and then a CRMT course, which is Certified Maintenance Technician.

Those were all very beneficial and good additions to my career for knowledge. In addition to that, I think all that really helps you get to be a really successful supervisor. I think in the next level of trying to get from a supervisor to a director, there's a lot of analytics that go into it, kind of like more soft skills.

From being an on-site supervisor to a director, I don't have anybody that I'm directly leading, more or less guiding our company that nobody reports to me. So to be able to understand how to use, it sounds simple, but like the Microsoft products or whatever platform you are using, you need to be able to understand how to write a document, write an SOP. That's not something you normally get practice in.

I think Excel has been is extremely beneficial. You need to know how to run reports for your company. That's different softwares for every company, but the more you can learn on that level is very much going to benefit you going forward and being able to help your organization skills and then show your efficiency through those different software programs.

[Adrian Danila] (11:46 - 12:15) You pointed out very well the fact that you don't have any direct reports. Most directors don't. In this situation, when you're a director and you don't have direct reports, you got to use the power of persuasion.

You got to persuade people. You got to get the buy-in. What are some tools that you have in your toolbox to get the site teams or the maintenance teams in general to execute on your plans, to get the buy-in from them on company programs that you're leading?

[Peter Christenson] (12:16 - 13:47) Yeah, I think they have to know the why. That's a very simple answer to that. Kind of similar to what I was saying before, if you can get the input from the people it's going to affect and make decisions, the best decision based off of that.

We have a, I think it's a mid-sized company. It's big, but in rental terms, I think we're a mid-sized company. I'm not able to pull everyone's opinion at the same time and then get feedback from that, but at the same time, I know any question that our company has, there's probably someone in our company that already knows the answer to it or has a really good idea on a way to solve it.

So, it's being able to listen to everybody, know what's actually going on in the field, and then make best decisions based off of that. And then when you present it, you have to be able to explain the why for the people that either don't agree with it or it wasn't their idea. If you can explain it effectively, show the benefits, show how it's going to improve their life, their work life.

And then the second part of that, being able to track it or report on the new procedure, say, or implementation. That way people know that it's not just something you roll out and are like half-hearted interested in doing. It shows importance if you're reporting on it consistently.

[Adrian Danila] (13:48 - 14:25) Peter, you mentioned your company and let's just say, I don't know if we mentioned the name, it's Center Space, right? Yep. How many apartment homes totally you have under management your company has?

Yeah, we have 70 different communities and just under 13,000 units. That's a very good size company. Now, if I was to be a candidate looking at a maintenance position within your organization and you were in a position to interview me and showcase what are some great things for me to look at when I look into Center Space, right?

I have multiple offers and you're in a position to make a case, why Center Space? What would you say?

[Peter Christenson] (14:26 - 16:25) There's many, many reasons. Our benefits program is, I think, comparable to anyone that I've ever heard in the industry as far as 401k match, how much we invest in you. Our healthcare is very competitive.

You can have the HSA, FSA. We have very generous vacation time, I believe, starting out. And then we also have 11 company holidays and usually some additional holidays that get thrown in there that are unplanned or unscheduled.

For example, in October, we're going to have a half day on a Friday for mental health awareness. Everybody's office is closed and we get an additional half day that's on schedule. So those are some additional perks.

Our culture is something that we really put a lot of belief in. We also have our core values, our six core values, that it's not just on paper. It's something that we actually live and make decisions by.

So everybody's on the same page. Everybody wants success for somebody else. I mean, one of our core values is one team.

And that is shown very much as where everybody also wants to help each other. And specifically from maintenance, we have on-call bonuses. We pay extra money for that.

It is either time that you can do cut at the end of the week, or you can work with your manager. And assuming that's a fit, you can have that in addition to your 40 hours. So there's kind of that flexibility that we have with on-call.

And probably everybody knows is on-call is the least enjoyable part of maintenance. But the list goes on and on. Our HR would know, I would have even a better description of it.

But those are some highlights for me personally. And there's more along with that too.

[Adrian Danila] (16:26 - 16:44) Peter, I want to talk about perception next. How is our profession seen from outside looking in? I want to ask you what challenges and opportunities do you see in shifting this perception of maintenance work being purely a technical role to one that includes strategic thinking and leadership components?

[Peter Christenson] (16:45 - 18:32) I think that's definitely a long-term goal for this industry. It's something that for a really long time has had that perception where it's maybe we're not as refined as we could be when we're in there. Part of it is the way that you carry yourself, the way that you speak, the way that you interact with people on a day-to-day basis.

Everything should be professional. Language should be professional. Your look should be professional.

When you do that, people treat you differently. Whether they should or not, I mean, whether you look or say something doesn't necessarily mean people should judge you for that. That is kind of the nature of humanity where that is the case.

So I think it comes from an individual aspect of it, a company's effort to make that, having a uniform policy, the more professional classes that you can take on how to carry yourself, how to treat people, how to work together as a team. Those would benefit people. To make it so that people are more strategic and leadership components, I think those are really difficult.

You can take a leadership class and that will not make you a leader. From what I've seen and experienced, I think it's something that somebody has to develop for themselves because it has to be authentic. It has to work for the people that you're working with and it has to be something that you personally believe in.

A leader is not going to vary in the way that their reactions or perceptions are on a day-to-day basis. They need to be consistent. So gaining experience, working for different people, taking what you like, discarding what you don't like, that's what makes people good leaders.

Strategic is probably something that also comes with experience, coming up and being faced with situations that aren't ideal. And then that teaches you how to be strategic.

[Adrian Danila] (18:33 - 18:57) Peter, part of your current position is to be in charge of purchasing procurement. I want to take my next question into what are some trends that you know you're seeing that they weren't around, maybe a year or two years ago in purchasing and in procurement in general and multifamily. How do you see those trends evolving if you were to look into 2025, 2026 and beyond from a procurement standpoint?

[Peter Christenson] (18:58 - 20:24) When I first started doing ordering, it was pretty much you order from one company. We had multiple punch-out vendors still, but you ordered everything from one company. It was just kind of what you did.

They have your whole catalog. They're the rep that you talk to, all that. As the years have gone by, I feel like other companies have become bigger players in the industry.

And they are also looking for the business, which has really made things beneficial for us to some degree where they are price checking each other. I don't think that was done as much before. I noticed that at times I could find things, even with our discount, that were cheaper in a physical retail store than it was on our punch-out with that discount.

I don't see that that much anymore. I think maybe one of the downsides of that is that you might actually have to shop a little bit. You might have to price compare between different things.

It's not a one-stop shop anymore. But on the plus side, people do that every day. They're on their phones every day.

And before you buy something, typically look at which store has the best price. So it's not something that our maintenance teams are not used to doing. Our community managers are not used to doing.

It's something they do, and they just get to do it on a different platform than on their phone. The competition and increasing companies in that field is going to be the biggest change.

[Dean Fung A Wing] (20:29 - 21:49) Next is this fire protection solution around kitchen fires. Again, we are not, by any means, saying that this is replacing your fire suppression system. This is replacing your building's fire protection systems, which are all regulated by fire departments and local codes and all that.

You still have to have all that. But I'm telling you, there's actually a step before any of those systems go off. And that is just knowing what the temperature in that kitchen above that stove is in real time.

You knowing that is the difference between you stopping a fire in an apartment and not. If you knew that that apartment was 100 degrees, Adrian, you could get to it with a fire extinguisher. You could wake up the resident, open that door, get in there, solve that problem before it spreads to the whole building.

Again, you can also notify the fire department. The moment that kitchen's over 100 degrees, notify the fire department via text message, email, phone call. You can notify your local building engineer, your maintenance staff, your property managers.

Everybody needs to know the moment that apartment's over 100 degrees. Simple solution to a problem nobody ever wants to think about. But this is a life safety issue and it's no one else's responsibility except for a building owner to make sure that we take care of that building and make sure we protect residents.

So we're here to help if that's something that folks are interested in.

[Adrian Danila] (21:50 - 22:11) Do you see a need, Peter, for creating an app that actually eliminates all that manual work so people don't have to actually go to two or three different places to where there's a place that aggregates all the competitors in one place and actually that particular piece of technology gives you the best price for a particular product that you're looking for?

[Peter Christenson] (22:12 - 22:23) I think that'd be a really large time saver. With that, it could integrate your stock in a shop. I think that would be a widely successful app.

[Adrian Danila] (22:23 - 23:01) Peter, this is something that I actually heard from you almost two weeks ago on our last leadership meeting. We're talking about purchasing procurement and you mentioned that Amazon has entered the market, like seriously entered the multifamily markets. How do you see this playing against the existing players, which we know for the most part their HD supply lows and probably Chadwell and Ferguson, kind of like right there, those top four in my mind.

How do you see Amazon playing into this field and how do you see the situation two, three, five years from now with Amazon being in play, like being a player?

[Peter Christenson] (23:01 - 24:05) Yes. So I've heard from Amazon that they are increasing their presence. They're making a very good effort for that, getting onto different purchasing platforms potentially as early as this year.

I think similar to that app, what you were saying that would compare prices for you, I think that would be something that essentially Amazon already has nailed down on the non-commercial sector. So just personal day-to-day life, they have the ability to do that. I think they will very much increase their role in the purchasing throughout the years.

I think it could be, it's very interesting to me to see how big of an impact they make because they are one of the biggest companies, if not the biggest, and have the most resources and the most technology and the most availability to all of these things. It's going to be a challenge for other companies. They might have to find their own spot.

Everybody might have to have their own spot that they're best at and not try to be best in all categories.

[Adrian Danila] (24:06 - 25:09) I've been seeing Amazon taking over different aspects of our lives. They're not entering a certain industry to establish a presence. They're entering to dominate it.

I don't think the multifamily is going to be any different. You're right. They have the technology.

They have amazing technology for purchasing, making it very easy to purchase, very easy to get your hands on materials, on stuff, to inventory. Their workhouses have the bins that the parts are in, they're based on a weight. So if you go into a bin and you remove a door stopper, their system will know based on the weight of door stopper that how many door stoppers are in that particular box.

That's, to me, an amazing piece of technology that if implemented in our main and shops will eliminate a lot of the manual labor of counting and keeping up with inventory. This could be a tool of automatically updating inventory real time and actually placing orders for you when you set certain minimum limits for products. Don't you think?

What are your thoughts on this?

[Peter Christenson] (25:10 - 25:40) Yeah, that would be amazing. I mean, especially during busier seasons, high turn seasons, that's something that's probably a pain point for a lot of people on site. When you're going through, all of a sudden you had fully stocked, whatever it is, and now you used all but one of them, but you forgot to order and you have a couple more turns coming up.

If you're able to have that automatic stock inventory and automatic ordering, not only would it save time, but it would create efficiency within the property.

[Adrian Danila] (25:42 - 26:03) We talked about companies as very high tech like Amazon. I want to stay with technology in general. With increasing availability of automated service call responses, leak detectors, and virtual maintenance tools, how do you assess whether these technologies generally reduce workload or just simply shift the burden elsewhere?

[Peter Christenson] (26:04 - 27:17) Yeah, I think some of this is yet to be seen. I know when we install initial technology, oftentimes it is an increased workload for the sites at first, and then after a certain amount of time, it levels off or tapers off. The balance is sometimes further out than what we would hope it would be.

I know we have essentially a AI leasing agent that is beneficial for our teams. There's certain things with AI that is really good, and then certain things that can be improved upon. It's always improving.

I think it's definitely the way of the future for a lot of almost everything. The more it learns, the better it's going to get. There's going to be some difficulties with technology in general for leak detectors.

For example, you get more notifications. Sometimes it's to the point where it adds an extreme amount of additional stress on the team. That's not the goal.

The goal is property preservation and saving money in the long run. There has to be a balance between that to make it effective and to have buy-in from the team to see the benefit of it.

[Adrian Danila] (27:18 - 27:35) Looking back, Peter, for a minute, and looking at great lessons learned when it comes to implementing technology, what are the most significant challenges that you've encountered when implementing new technology in your maintenance operations, and how have you overcome those challenges?

[Peter Christenson] (27:36 - 28:53) The most difficult part is, I'll go back to maybe when we implemented digital turnboards, and everybody had it on paper or a spreadsheet or something like that. If they were doing it efficiently, well, this would perceive to be an additional headache or another step, an additional step. Anytime you do something new, there's a learning process to it, which takes an additional time.

You don't want to feel when you're implementing something, you don't want to make it feel that it is going to take up more time and make you less efficient. And the adhesion to that is just not as good. What we've done to curb that is additional trainings as much as needed.

We continually provide resource videos, written in-person training as necessary. People that are subject experts at it, we let them present and or talk people in person and try to help them through it. The more the people are aware of it and get used to the product, then they can find the benefit from it.

And oftentimes they find benefits that we didn't even know exist, which is what we've seen in some situations as well.

[Adrian Danila] (28:54 - 29:04) What are some technologies that your company have implemented that really made a difference, like the made the most impact on your business and also help your team the most?

[Peter Christenson] (29:04 - 31:03) We use ERD as our main platform. Maintenance IQ is our main maintenance go-to. For that, for work orders, for preventive work orders, we're working on inspections as well now.

I think having one source of truth, as people say, is very beneficial where you're not having to go to different platforms that maybe don't interact with each other very well. So that's been one source of communication. Visibility from the top down and the bottom up is really important.

I think you need to be able to understand what every property is doing from any location and not having to manually upload or that's the downside of having paper or a spreadsheet, is that not everybody has access to it. So you can't see what is actually going on. One of the more recent implementations that we have is virtual reality training with meta headsets and Interplay.

Interplay is a training resource and we've invested in headsets for every property so they can do virtual or desktop training. People that know Interplay, they have a very extensive catalog that can train you on whatever you want. We're working on continuing education and having that be as uniform as possible.

I think that's going to be huge to provide consistency in our company and then it also frees up a little bit of manual training or off-site training that may be inconsistent or maybe not as vetted so that we don't know where we're getting when we're paying for it or if somebody's going off-site. This way we know what the quality of the training is. I think Maintenance IQ and Interplay have been two of the more major technological advancements that we have.

[Adrian Danila] (31:03 - 31:25) Peter, if you were to be asked how should maintenance training look like in the future, in 2025 and beyond, how would you build it? What are some characteristics of the training that are a must-have for it to be the best experience for the trainees and also to make the most difference for business?

[Peter Christenson] (31:26 - 32:52) One thing that I think can still use improvement in this area is to have an individualized training plan for somebody and that would come with assessments. There's different assessments that are out there to say where you might be able to find what your weakness is but that varies all the way across the board. When I was brand new, I could have used training in anything and it would be very beneficial for me.

Then as I got further in my career, there are certain spots where I knew certain aspects very well and there's certain things I didn't know very well. So if I can create that or have it created for me, that would be very beneficial. I think Interplay has some of the capability to do that right now.

Some of it is still not perfectly assessed which is understandable but they also do have professional development which kind of goes back to what we were saying before early. How do we develop that? Some of it is the classes.

As I mentioned before, Excel is a huge part of what I do every day as far as being able to navigate it and have proper function of it. They have classes on that on 101 or Excel 101 or how to run templates or make a chart. That's kind of the professional development and technological development that I think through individualized plans would be ideal.

[Adrian Danila] (32:53 - 33:22) Pure centralization. It's one of the hottest topics. Whenever I talk to someone in the maintenance industry, a maintenance professional, what are your thoughts on maintenance centralization?

Is this just a buzzword? Is it something that is real, could be very effective? I'm talking about for a company like yours or is somewhere kind of a mixed bag of feelings?

Neither one of the extremes, it's a combination of like on a case-by-case scenario. What are your thoughts on centralization?

[Peter Christenson] (33:22 - 35:42) Part of me thinks that some people use it as a buzzword and then it means something different. Part of my thought process of that is I've heard many different people say it and it means different things for every company, which is perfectly fine. For center space, we have on the office side of things, we have definitely fast forward our centralization of our assistant community directors.

They're leading towards mainly being offsite and taking over multiple communities instead of one per community or one per two communities. This has been a pretty big benefit. I heard feedback even just today that the assistant community directors or regional directors would be, or assistant regional, they do the job of assistant manager offsite.

It would be remote ACM. There we go. That's what I'm looking for.

They like what they do. Then I've heard from onsite that they find it very beneficial that they're actually able to do more for the team onsite as far as handling all deposit accounting, incoming, outgoing, leases, signing that type of stuff, turn photos, move out deposits. Centralization from that aspect, we've already seen to be very beneficial.

I do see in the long run centralization being a pretty beneficial thing for maintenance as well in the fact that a maintenance professional has a better perspective on what needs to be done for the maintenance team and might have a better way to divide things up. You're creating more tiers in your company, which is a benefit because I know that's one weakness that oftentimes there is for us, we have maintenance tech or service tech, service specialist, service lead, and then supervisor, and then manager. When you talk about centralization, you might be able to add another layer.

You have to justify that layer with creating more efficiency with the onsite staff. That seems to be the trade-off. It's difficult because the onsite, it's specific per situation.

Not everyone is ready to be in a leadership or organizational role and oversee that many people effectively to justify that position.

[Voice Over] (35:42 - 35:46) And now a word from Shawn Landsberg, co-founder, Appwork.

[Adrian Danila] (35:47 - 35:58) What you can measure, you can improve. You did mention an average completion time or tracking completion time for maintenance technicians. What other very important KPIs is Appwork capable of tracking?

[Sean Landsberg] (35:58 - 36:36) All the data can also be broken down. All those KPIs can be broken down, like we said, on a property level, technician level, or back up to a portfolio level. But even within a technician, you can break that down based off of the categories.

You can see, how is this technician doing with HVAC work orders, with plumbing work orders? We also took the concept of KPIs. A lot of companies use a KPI to say, how is somebody doing?

Let's look at his KPIs. But another thing that we actually did is we took that a step further, where we actually translated those KPIs into sentence-based comment. The system would actually automatically spit out an actual actionable sentence, whether it's positive or negative, based on the technician's performance.

[Adrian Danila] (36:36 - 37:21) Peter, I know of a couple of initiatives that your company has, and I'm not sure how much of it, percentage-wise, has been implemented so far. But I know that it's been an ongoing thing, like six months ago. One of them is leak detection, installing samples to prevent leaks and floods.

The second one is access control, which is specifically related to electronic locks that need a physical key to access. You could open them using your phone, or make it very easy for people to access. So keys are eliminated from the process.

Could you tell me some thoughts on these two programs, how advanced they are within your portfolio, and what's your experience with them? What's the feedback so far?

[Peter Christenson] (37:22 - 39:12) I think I heard 55% of our properties are implemented with that. I do know that the leak detectors have saved money for the company, in general. I do also know that the leak detectors have caused a fairly big disruption to after-hours calls.

A leak can happen at any time during the day or night, and a lot of properties share calls, or they're grouped in one call group. So there's potential that they have a high volume of calls during non-working hours, but either disrupts personal life or sleep, and that can be a high stress. And not all of these calls would have been classified as emergencies prior to leak detectors.

As far as the smart locks go, I know that there is a, I don't have it measured, but a good time savings in not having to switch locks in between people moving in and out. There's slightly less time interaction with the vendor, as you can send them a vendor code to enter the building, and then the specific unit. Recorded access is a really big benefit, knowing when people are entering and when they're exiting.

Maybe not as much exiting, but you can typically tell if it's locked and never comes unlocked, then you know. Those are all really big benefits. There is some technical issues, as you would expect when you have that big of an implementation, and those are also a little bit of sore spots for the team currently being worked through and trying to improve as we're continuing the program.

[Adrian Danila] (39:13 - 39:16) Overall, thumbs up or thumbs down on the two programs?

[Peter Christenson] (39:16 - 39:46) It depends on how you ask. If you ask the guy that gets off call that week, probably a thumbs down. As far as the higher end level of theoretical money saving, hard to realize it exactly because you never know if every leak was going to be a $1,000 loss or $10,000 loss, or maybe it would have got caught.

So hard to realize savings on that end. From the people that do see the budget, they would overall say that it has been a positive interaction.

[Adrian Danila] (39:47 - 40:01) Peter, who is or who are the people that were the most influential in the most positive way in your personal life and professional life? Specific names? You could name them, absolutely.

[Peter Christenson] (40:02 - 41:44) I'll start out with Eric Stenzel, was for my maintenance career, has been like my main mentor and teacher all the way throughout. I just saw him today at one of our town hall meetings. He has taught me most of what I've learned in person that I haven't learned from YouTube or other sources.

He's been my main on-site teacher throughout my career, definitely a very good sounding board. And Jenna Schneider, for sure. She was a regional director when I was starting.

I think she got her regional director role probably six months after I started or so as a technician entry level. And both of them have been very big proponents of me taking on new challenges and giving me opportunities. There's been countless other people that have been involved.

I've worked for many different managers that have all learned from a lot. Center Space is a great company and provided me great opportunities. But as leading up, I mean, I'm thankful currently that I've been able to have the opportunity for this position, which is most of the people.

Jim Mitchell will be the main one that has given me this opportunity to be a director of maintenance and purchase and work me through the things that I need to know and become better at, encourage me along the way. So that's great. All my interactions have been positive.

It's a lot of people to name all the way throughout, but that's the short list.

[Adrian Danila] (41:45 - 41:53) Let's try to imagine yourself like 34 years from now, you're looking back. Legacy, how would you like to be remembered?

[Peter Christenson] (41:54 - 42:14) I would like to be remembered as somebody that has always been willing to help in a situation of need, whether that be great or small, very responsive, kind and understanding, a problem solver, resolution-minded person. Hopefully they don't have to remember me in three years.

[Adrian Danila] (42:14 - 42:36) Hopefully I can still just be carrying it on. Peter, amazing conversation. Thank you for taking the time to be with me and the audience today.

I want to give you the opportunity in closing to share some thoughts, some things that you wish you had opportunity to during our conversation and you didn't. So I want you to take advantage of this opportunity and share some final thoughts with us.

[Peter Christenson] (42:37 - 43:36) I think we touched on most of the things that are all really good discussion topics. I do see one of the biggest opportunities for this industry is increasing the perception of what maintenance is or what they can do. The more and more that happens, the more it's going to become a more well-known career path for people, which is going to benefit the amount of money that people can make in there.

It's going to benefit possibly a personnel shortage that we will be coming up on. Definitely know that we have, as every industry is, but the skilled labor, specifically, a lot of people are moving out, not as many people moving in. And I think that's partially due to perception.

So I would just encourage people to put your efforts in your maintenance teams and encourage them to improve, provide opportunity for them to improve, and you're probably going to be amazed at what they can do for your company.

[Adrian Danila] (43:36 - 43:58) Peter Kristensen, thank you so much once again for being with us today. I hope to get you back maybe a few months down the road to have another conversation. It's been great having you here today.

Also, I want to thank our sponsors from Kairos and Upwork for making this broadcast possible. Everybody, thank you for watching. I hope to get you back here soon.

Have an amazing day.

[Peter Christenson] (43:59 - 43:59) Thank you, Adrian.