Scott Peters Journey of Growth in Multifamily

[Scott Peters] (0:00 - 0:47) Knowledge is free, right? And those of us who have some knowledge should share that knowledge. You should never wanna just keep that locked up within yourself.

When I was assistant maintenance supervisor, you know, you had different things you're doing every day. You can turn apartments, you can do service requests, you can do exterior work, you can be outside, you can be inside. You know, there's many different facets to what we do that although you might start at a groundskeeper or a maintenance tech type position, through a few years in training and learning, you'll get to be a maintenance supervisor at some point if you're committed to what you're doing.

Not everybody has to be the biggest leader in the group. There's still guys out there who just want to work, just wanna be there, just wanna do their job.

[Adrian Danila] (0:47 - 1:23) Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Multifamily X Podcast, Masters of Maintenance. I wanna start by thanking our sponsors for making this broadcast possible. They are Kairos and AppWork.

Please check them out if you are in need of leak prevention solutions, very cost efficient and very efficient in stopping leaks. And also if you need an amazing Uber-like experience for managing your workflows when it comes to maintenance. With this being said, I wanna introduce our next guest, a special guest today, Scott Peters.

Welcome to the show, Scott.

[Scott Peters] (1:23 - 1:34) Thank you, Adrian, appreciate you having me here. And I found you guys online and just think it's awesome what you're doing and gathering so many different individuals in our industry together.

[Adrian Danila] (1:35 - 1:52) Scott is the Vice President of Property Services with Conam Management based out in California. Scott, I wanna ask you to start this conversation by walking us through your multifamily journey. Where did you start, how did it evolve, and where you are today?

[Scott Peters] (1:53 - 6:11) Started probably over 30 years ago now, but I was in the Navy and when I was getting out of the Navy I needed to find work. Worked a little construction afterwards after I got out of the Navy, and then fell into painting for a small company. And then from there I was painting units at a property and that property decided they needed a painter on site, so they hired me on as a painter, which I felt was better.

I was working for kind of a piecework company and you'd have to get up in the morning and see what they had for you that day. And sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. So a little more stable, looked a little more stable for me to work at a specific property for a management company.

So I took that role on and I was painting. Was just looking to paint. And went from there, was working at their property.

Some things had happened at the property with shifts in staff. The maintenance supervisor there kind of, I guess saw something in me and promoted me to the assistant maintenance supervisor from the painter position. And I kind of grew from there and learned under him and went on to a few other properties as an assistant maintenance supervisor and maintenance supervisor.

And then I ended up back at that original property as a maintenance supervisor. It was about 400 units was that property. It was a little beast of a property.

Had a lot of different plumbing issues on the property. It was an older property, had chillers, boilers. So I cut my teeth on some big equipment out there that sometimes you get experience with in this industry, sometimes you don't.

And then grew from there. I was promoted to a regional maintenance supervisor. I was managing the one property and then I would take on other properties as needed or fill in at other places whenever needed.

And then I was promoted to a regional maintenance supervisor in which I got to then take over a certain amount of properties in the region and oversee those properties and all the capital work on those properties. And then I had a, my boss at the time, his name was John Caddick. And there's actually in within our company, the highest award you can win on a yearly basis in our company is the John Caddick Award.

He was with the company from the inception of Con Am and he worked 35 plus years here at Con Am. And I was actually able to work underneath him and be mentored by him throughout the years. So when he retired, I was put in the position of regional maintenance director in the Las Vegas area.

And worked that position for a while, was promoted to a senior regional maintenance director. And at that time I started to do some travel for the company I was covering our, what we call our Central Southeast area which was Texas and Florida. And we were kind of at that time had a bunch of stuff in Kansas as well.

And we're trying to move into the Kentucky area. So I was traveling around doing that while still overseeing my region. And then from there I was promoted to a position that was a senior director of property services which is more corporate level as to where I'm now overseeing all the capital work across the country and helping to oversee each one of our regions and our regional maintenance directors.

And then this year, in the beginning of this year I was promoted to vice president of property services which I worked directly underneath our senior vice president of property services. So we kind of tag team the nation as far as that goes. So it's been, I celebrated 28 years with Con Am in August.

So it's been a minute, it's been like a blink of an eye. You know, it goes quick when you look back on it it goes very, very quick. So in a nutshell, that's kind of my journey.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it that we could talk about for quite some time but that's pretty much it.

[Adrian Danila] (6:12 - 6:40) Scott, I have a few questions regarding this amazing journey. I'm of the opinion that a career is really not something that has been designed for you or pre-designed. It's what you make it.

You're the best example, one of the best and the brightest examples that you could start at a very entry level as being a painter, becoming the vice president for a significant size management company. How many direct reports do you currently have?

[Scott Peters] (6:40 - 7:09) I think I've got 11 or so regional maintenance directors and then they have regional maintenance supervisors under that work with them. So we have in our department, we have about between my boss, our senior VP and myself, there's about 30, right around 28 to 30 of us in our department. We have admins, we have our own AP and we have regional maintenance directors and regional maintenance supervisors in each region.

[Adrian Danila] (7:10 - 7:18) Remarkable journey, Scott. What were the top lessons that you've learned along the way throughout your 28 year journey with Conem?

[Scott Peters] (7:20 - 8:35) Boy, lessons every day. I am one who will tell you when I walk into a room, I'm not the smartest guy in that room. Okay, I learn every day.

I just never stopped trying to learn and it doesn't mean that I need to learn something about maintenance or that I need to learn something about the multifamily industry. It's just learning anything almost every day, whether it's in your personal life or in your professional life and then applying those to both, right? What you learn, it's one thing to learn something but then it's another thing to apply it.

And I think that's sometimes what we miss. Sometimes you miss that a little bit, but it's learning. I think one of the biggest thing I can ever say is just open yourself up to always learn.

I mean, there is just never an opportunity not to learn something. You know, in our industry, most of the times, we are, you know, good at a lot of things but experts in none. We have enough knowledge to be just dangerous on certain things, you know?

So it's always learning. I can tell you, it's just, it's been a journey of learning.

[Adrian Danila] (8:37 - 9:31) Learning. What else kept you on for 28 years with the same company? When we look at the labor market right now, I personally, as a hiring manager, when I used to be in operations, will say, if I could hire someone and they commit to our company, for six months, this would be a good run for me.

Like, I'll take a person for six months. If throughout those six months, they are committed to the job that they do, like, that would be good enough for me. What made you keep going for 28 years?

And what's your take on the very short tenure that we generally see in the industry? I'm not sure about Conem, if this is like kind of like an exception or it's actually the rule with so many tenured employees, but that would be for you to share. But I'm definitely interested in your take at like the general state of our industry where people move around quite a bit.

[Scott Peters] (9:31 - 15:25) Yeah. So, you know, to the first part of your question, I get that, I get to ask that quite a bit. And, you know, oftentimes even, you know, I'm based in Las Vegas.

So sometimes I'll be, I'll stop by the office or I'll be asked to speak at things or something people say, why, you know, 28 years, you know, how'd you manage that? How are you, how do you keep it? And I said, one of the things I say is, well, every morning when I showed up to the office, my key word.

So I just kept coming back and they never told me to leave. So here we are 28 years later, right? So that, you know, little funny side of that, right?

You know, but realistically Conem has just been a great company to work for over the years. Just, I've had great leadership to be mentored by, that's huge. And, you know, being promoted, Conem's a huge company with, you know, value to promote from within, right?

We're huge on promoting from within. As long as that individual is, you know, willing to take on the responsibilities and willing to learn and understand the responsibilities that they're taking on, promotion from within is huge. To grow somebody that has very little knowledge in the industry, very little experience with what they're doing, and to mold them and watch them grow, it's to me, one of the best things ever to see.

And I've gotten to be a part of that, right? I've been mentored by wonderful people in this industry that worked for Conem for many, many years. So I too want to return that, right?

Knowledge is free, right? And those of us who have some knowledge should share that knowledge. You should never wanna just keep that locked up within yourself.

You wanna share that to everybody that you can who's willing to take it, willing to absorb it and utilize it, you know, to their advantage. You know, we should always be sharing our knowledge, whatever it might be. That's a huge thing.

And just, you know, the experience, right? I mean, my job has never been boring. I get to do something different almost every single day.

No matter when I was a painter, no matter, you know, yeah, I had to paint units, but then I'd go paint curves, but then I'd go do stucco, then I'd go do other paint. And then I'd get sent to another property to go do painting over there. Or when I was assistant maintenance supervisor, you know, you had different things you're doing every day.

You can turn apartments, you can do service requests, you can do exterior work, you can be outside, you can be inside. You know, there's many different facets to what we do that can keep your interest, right? You're not just sitting in one spot doing the same thing over and over and over again.

You get to do many, many different things and you get to learn many, many different things. Think about our industry as a maintenance, in maintenance, right? And this is one thing I always look at with maintenance and office and maintenance, office maintenance, right?

There's a big thing, office and maintenance, right? In the maintenance field, we are expecting to find somebody who has not just knowledge for, you know, to show up to work every day and do their job, but they have to have additional knowledge, right? Like, and it's not easy knowledge all the time.

You have to know how to work on things. You have to have that mechanical aspect to you that you understand how to grab the tool, grab the right tool, utilize that tool properly, and then make repairs or do preventive maintenance, which I'm absolutely huge on, which I know we're going away from preventive maintenance and it's supposed to be scheduled maintenance. But like I had said before on the other day, the bottom line is maintenance, right?

And that's the thing, right? It's just, it's been different every day. Like I'm showing up today and I'm doing this today.

I've never done this before. This is something new, right? Recently, you know, we bought a drone so that we don't have to climb up on roofs anymore when we're doing due diligence, right?

I can now fly a drone over, you know, buildings and over the property to get good visuals and see what's going on, see if we have to do further inspection on a roof, right? But what did I know about a drone before we bought it? Not a whole lot, right?

But I learned how to fly it. But then we learned, you know what? You can't just fly a drone.

You have to be licensed to fly a drone. You can't just go out and start flying a drone around. Why would, you know, you gotta get a license for that.

Well, I went out and now I've got my drone license. It wasn't easy, I can tell you that. I don't know if you've ever done it before, but.

I haven't, not yet. I joked, you know, when we talked about it, I said, yeah, I'll go get my drone license, just thinking it was this little thing to do. Fill out some paperwork and get my drone license.

No, it's a huge ordeal. And you have to take classes and you have to learn how to read supplement charts for airports and know the flight zones and where you're at. And there's quite the tests that you have to take.

You have to schedule it at a local airport where they have flight instruction schools. And it's a closed book test that you have to go in and take. It was quite the event.

And at my age, it's an old dog learning a new trick. And, you know, it wasn't that easy. Now there might be some younger guys out there that go, oh yeah, it's no problem, no big deal.

And that's fine. But, you know, but it's learning, it's doing something. I think one of the big things is something different every day.

And in maintenance, I think you get to experience that, something different every day.

[Adrian Danila] (15:26 - 16:07) Scott, I've interviewed on my podcast close to 200 guests. And the thing that comes back over and over again is that the guest tells me, I fell into the industry. Basically, they ended up in multifamily by accident.

So I wanna ask you, how do we change the narrative from I fell into the industry to making this a conscientious decision for those that wanna join our industry? Because it's a great career to have, not just because it's happenstance, it was an accident. They just ended up here and they happen to like it.

[Scott Peters] (16:08 - 20:56) Yeah, and again, right? It's how I ended up here, right? I didn't pursue to be in the industry.

It wasn't even something on my radar. It was just something that kinda naturally happened, right? I got hired on as a painter and it progressed from there.

It wasn't something that I sought out. So yeah, I mean, I've looked at many different things and how do we attract people into our industry? And I think it's hard.

It's a little difficult because we're like this shadow industry, right? That people fall into and then they go, wow, this is pretty neat. There's not, I mean, there's some CAMT schooling and things that you can do, but realistically, if you're not already involved in the multifamily industry, are you gonna know about CAMT?

Are you gonna go and pay for those certifications and things like that? I think one thing I saw a few years back, we had a company in Las Vegas that was doing HVAC training, right? They did, they were doing HVAC certifications and training their school for HVAC.

And at the time I was talking to the director of that school and he was trying to put together a schooling for multifamily specifically, right? So just maintenance type training to offer a course within his school for maintenance training, a little more fast forward HVAC training, but then have training for repairing of appliances and terms and things like that. It just never took off, right?

He just couldn't get the attendance volume for it. And then of course what he was charging for HVAC, right? Who wanted to pay for this a little bit, quote unquote, lower level, but still had to pay for that certification and then what does that get them?

And that's always the trade off I think is what is your pay coming into this industry as somebody with no knowledge, with no experience compared to something else? I don't know. And right now it's so difficult.

It's so difficult when you can walk down the street to a fast food place and make 17, 18, $20 an hour walking in the door and we're competing with that right now, right? Will that stay the same? I don't know.

I don't know how sustainable that is or not, but I don't know. I don't have numbers to back any of that up. So I don't even wanna speak to that, right?

But that is what we're competing with. So how do we find the folks from high school to come into this, right? And it's kind of an area to where it's targeted.

I think it's targeted to those who may not have the opportunity to leave high school and go on to college, right? Not everybody has that opportunity. I didn't have that opportunity, right?

So again, I fell into this and have been very fortunate throughout my career to be advanced through, right? So is everybody gonna follow that same path? Probably not.

But I can guarantee you if you come into this industry with an open mind and a willingness to work that although you might start at a groundskeeper or a maintenance tech type position, through a few years in training and learning, you'll get to be a maintenance supervisor at some point if you're committed to what you're doing. And at that point, you can make a very good career out of what we're doing in the maintenance industry. And then there's also nothing wrong.

I've seen guys just be maintenance tech for their entire career. And that's what they enjoy doing. They don't want the responsibility.

They just wanna do maintenance. And that's okay too. Not everybody has to be the biggest leader in the group.

There's still guys out there who just want to work, just wanna be there, just wanna do their jobs. How do we attract that to our industry? It's difficult.

It's difficult in today's market. You get a lot of people walking right out of high school wanting to make $30 an hour. Well, that's not always out there.

I think if there were some type of almost trade school that you could put together and then advertise that through the high schools as people are coming out and getting ready to graduate, you could start grabbing people from that element to start coming into our industry as somebody who wants to progress in our industry.

[Voice Over] (20:56 - 21:00) And now a word from Sean Landsberg, co-founder Appwork.

[Adrian Danila] (21:00 - 21:18) Tell me a little bit about data integrity. How does Appwork rank in data integrity? We all know that what you put in comes out, right?

So if the information that you put in is not accurate, is not representing the reality, whatever comes out as data is really not accurate. So how do you fare in data integrity?

[Sean Landsberg] (21:19 - 22:06) It's not just about the information that you put in. The information that comes out is only as good as the information that you put in, but it's also the fact that someone actually has to manually input a lot of that data. So for us, there's two things.

Number one is just about all the data that we're collecting, it happens through the normal course of using our product. Right, so no one's actually going in and manually adding information that we're then using in reporting analytics or anything like that. So all the data that we're presenting is actually not done manually.

So it takes out just one less thing that people have to do and makes using the product a lot easier. But it also removes that whole component where people can influence the data. So everything, even take something as simple as, you know, a technician's callback.

That's a metric that comes directly from the residents where there's no way anybody, especially the technician can influence that. Same thing with the ratings.

[Adrian Danila] (22:06 - 22:38) Scott, for a young person right out of school, whether it's high school or college that considers joining multifamily maintenance, what are some pieces of advice that you have for them? If they're kind of like considering this and they're debating, should we get into maintenance and to steer them towards like getting into maintenance and then once they're in the field within the industry, what are some pieces of advice that you have for them for midterm, long-term type of deal, career progression?

[Scott Peters] (22:40 - 24:15) You know, I think the one thing I can always say to anybody coming into this industry or any other industry or anything that you're doing, right, is keep an open mind about what you're doing. Understand that you have a path to learn, okay? You have to learn certain things to make the next step, right?

You're not just gonna walk in the door and be a maintenance supervisor, right? So keep an open mind and not just keep an open mind but learn as you go, right? Ask, ask questions.

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Take on tasks. Don't shy away from them.

Throughout my time, one of the things I did, I just never really said no. If I was asked to do something, I did it. You know, sometimes today you'll get individuals out there who will say, well, I'm not doing that.

It's not my job description. You know, and when I hear that, I don't have much value for you anymore because you're not willing to take a next step. You're not going to be a leader for me.

If everything that has to come out has to be specifically in your job description for you to do, look, I can sum up a job description very easily, right? You can write as many job descriptions as you want and you can put as much as you want into any job description, but it's very simple in my view. Okay, and strictly my view, okay?

A job description is simple. Do what your supervisor asks you to do unless it is not safe.

[Adrian Danila] (24:16 - 24:51) You mentioned being a lifelong learner and learning things kind of kept you on this trajectory to where you build a career 28 years impressive with a company and accomplishing unique things, amazing things. So I want to stay on a training topic right now. And I want to ask you, what would ideal training for maintenance look like for you?

Describe it in as much detail as you can. What would ideal training for maintenance would look like in 2024 in multifamily and beyond?

[Scott Peters] (24:51 - 29:02) Training's been a huge thing, right? Like first coming into this industry, we didn't have the training that we have today and that I've seen kind of throughout my years, okay? Today, right?

Like when I was coming into this industry, we, I don't even know if we had internet. We certainly didn't have cell phones, okay? So today I can walk in, not have any knowledge of a refrigerator, look it up and within 30 minutes, diagnose and be able to fix that refrigerator, right?

So there's opportunity for everybody out there right now that was not available back when we, we had to actually learn, like, you know, we had to really tear into things and learn how to learn how to fix them. Training wise, and I can only speak to what we've done and what I've saw as successful, okay? When I was in the regional maintenance position at one time when this was years ago, we had a, we had one individual who was doing maintenance training and that individual not just did maintenance training, but he would also kind of be a rover and would also help out at properties and things so we could utilize him in different roles and do maintenance training.

And what we did was we set up a training center at one of our properties. And this is for a, like, this is in Las Vegas, right? So we kind of have the ability to get people together.

So if you're spread out, sometimes it's a little bit different, but we had the ability to have a maintenance trainer and we set up a maintenance training room, okay? And we built everything. I mean, we cut water heaters in half.

We cut compressors in half. We had electrical walls. We had fake walls set up that you could pop holes in and do drywall repairs.

And you can bring everybody in individually. I mean, we had AC units set up and we had a board, just like if you went to an AC school that had all the components and you could, on the back of the board, unplug something and then you had to troubleshoot through the board. This is, to me, and a lot of what I see in maintenance, and this is just my opinion of what I've seen, is us in maintenance learn by doing.

It's sometimes hard for us to learn from reading a book or reading a manual, or even sometimes just watching something on a video. If you're hands-on doing it, that's a lot how maintenance learns. I don't know if that will ever change.

I know we're doing things now, a little differently, but that hands-on experience, putting somebody in a room where they can actually physically touch it, see it, feel it, right? That was monumental. And at that time when we were able to do that, I like doing what we call building our bench.

We were building our bench, right? We were building our bench because we were building maintenance associates, right? They were learning how to do things.

Do it the right way, right? And the safe way. And we were able to build maintenance supervisors.

We had a great bench of maintenance supervisors. We had the next man up mentality. You know, I mean, you go to any sport and what do they say?

You know, if this guy gets injured, you gotta have that next guy up mentality, right? Football season just started. I'm very happy about that.

But yeah, you gotta have that next man up mentality. And we had that. If we had an assistant maintenance supervisor and a maintenance supervisor, the next property that came on, we had the next guy ready to go for that property.

And then the next guy to come up and fill up that spot. And then the next groundskeeper to come up and promote into maintenance. And that's very important.

We've had to get away from that a little bit because there is a cost to that, right? There's always a cost to that. And what I've found recently and what we're working with right now is we've instituted, and I'm sure you've heard of Interplay training.

[Adrian Danila] (29:03 - 29:03) Yes.

[Scott Peters] (29:04 - 32:00) Maintenance training. I've looked at a lot of different maintenance training throughout my years. There's a lot of different platforms out there.

There's a lot of different things out there for maintenance training. And Interplay is definitely just one of the top ones I've seen come to our industry in a very long time. I don't know if you've taken a class on Interplay or not.

I have not. And yet I encourage you, get a hold of Interplay and ask them to do a demo class. I encourage any maintenance out there to do it because it's not just sitting at your computer and watching a video and listen to somebody drone on about how to do something.

It's very interactive. There's a virtual aspect to it that we're not utilizing right now, but you, I mean, they have the whole system where you can virtually put on the goggles and you are working on a system as you're going through the class. But even without that portion of it, just sitting at your computer, you are still utilizing your mouse to do what they're asking you to do as far as let's say you're taking electrical class and you have to set your meter to the right setting and you have to take the probes and you have to put them in the right spots and you have to get the right reading.

So that is huge to me because again, maintenance learns from hands-on and it's really more hands-on learning virtually. And we've been getting very good feedback from our teams out there through Interplay. So that's kind of going from that in-person training to that tech, everybody's big on tech these days, right?

So that's one of those things implemented to help our learning path for our maintenance teams. Now, Interplay has a huge catalog of classes, like unimaginable amount of classes. So you have to be very careful with that because they cover many different industries, not just multifamily.

So what we had to do initially is we set up a seven courses that all of our maintenance techs are assigned. And once they take those seven classes, then they're open to take anything within the catalog that we've gone through all the classes and just have a certain amount of classes that pertain more to what we do. And specifically to training for maintenance, one of the biggest things in our industry in maintenance is electrical.

If you don't know about electricity, you don't know how to use a multimeter, you're not gonna be successful in this business. Almost everything we touch, appliances, AC, light fixtures, switches, outlets, all electrical. So one of the big things I'm big on is one of the first things I want our guys to take is an electrical class and how to use a multimeter.

If you don't know those two things, you're not gonna find much success in what you're doing.

[Adrian Danila] (32:02 - 32:07) Scott, you mentioned the football season. Who's your favorite team? Whom are you rooting for?

[Scott Peters] (32:07 - 32:11) Oh, come on, I'm a diehard Chicago Bears fan.

[Adrian Danila] (32:11 - 33:34) All right, I got a really good friend that's a Chicago Bears fan. Actually, coincidence or not, I just did a podcast with her yesterday. So back to Chicago Bears fans out there, I'm an Eagles fan.

Okay, all right. Yeah, so go Eagles. You also mentioned about the professional sports team mentality and how that could apply to hiring and developing your talent and developing your bench.

I always make this parallel, and actually I learned this from an amazing sales coach that's very successful worldwide, Jack Daly. He says, sports teams are ran better than most businesses because they have those bench, right? So that's the reason why if you see a quarterback being injured in NFL, you're not gonna see on a job opening the next day recruiting for a quarterback because they have it, it's right there, it's on a bench.

And they don't have just one, they have like team two, team three, team four, and so on and so forth. It's kind of like an ever ending thing and they always recruit, right? They understand that recruiting is not an event when you have open positions.

Recruiting, it's ongoing, it never stops, right? You should always be recruiting for every single position in your company, whether they have an opening or not. Do you disagree?

[Scott Peters] (33:36 - 35:27) Oh, no, no, you know, it's hard to, right? I mean, you're talking about professional sports companies or teams and sometimes there's pretty unlimited funds that they have to deal with to have that next guy up mentality and have that next person sitting on the bench. So you gotta get a little creative, right?

As far as that goes, it's not my lane because we don't directly oversee or hire the maintenance folks on site. We'll do interviews, they report directly to the community manager and to the regional property manager. And what I've seen success in the past is, you know, even though you might be full, which is in this day and age, I don't know.

I don't know if there's any property that's fully staffed right now, but let's say you are, you're always hiring the next maintenance guy and you're roving them around to some properties to get them into the company to understand what they're doing, get them ready to go. And it's inevitable in our industry, somebody is going to leave, somebody is going to find the grass greener on the other side of the fence and pack up and go. And then you have somebody to slot into that position.

When you can do that, I think it's, I think it's the best way you can do it. In this market today, man, I would say everybody's scrambling just to fill roles that are open, let alone over. You know, over hiring at this point.

But if you have the opportunity and you have the ability and you have the financial means to do so, yeah, it would definitely be the way to go. And now a word from Dean Fungawing, founder and CEO Kairos.

[Dean Fung A Wing] (35:27 - 36:35) Another solution, which is our HVAC sort of monitoring solution that we have. We've been testing this for years. The problem with HVAC monitoring is that, again, these HVAC systems were like $1,500 HVAC systems to replace the whole stinking thing, right?

So what we found out is that, you know, a lot of folks don't wanna spend money. They wanna spend $1,000 on some complex solution that can tell you if it's the capacitor or the compressor or the fan coil, or you've got a short somewhere or some sensors off. We don't need all kinds of telematics on the HVAC system.

You need to know what is the condition of the air returning to the HVAC system? What is the humidity in the environment? What is my temperature split?

What is my cycle runtime? Is it too short? Is it short cycling because you oversize an HVAC system?

Or is it running optimally? Did the resident turn it off for 48 hours or more and the humidity is over 65%? These are data points that matter.

And there's a simple solution, the same one that we use for the freeze protection package, the same one we use for the fire detection in the kitchen. All of that can be utilized also with the HVAC solution. Very simple.

You can bolt it on. There's no additional op-ex expenses.

[Adrian Danila] (36:36 - 37:00) I wanna go next to a topic that's like a very hot topic in our industry, and that is centralization. There's a lot of talk about centralization and specifically centralization in multifamily maintenance. So I wanna ask you point blank, is centralization a real thing?

Is it a buzzword? Or is maybe a situation like in between the two of them? What's your take on that?

[Scott Peters] (37:02 - 39:28) Centralization. It's a very tough question at this time. Again, you're talking about having basically a crew of guys ready to go to different properties to perform maintenance.

It's hard to say. There's different HR laws in different states and things like that, and how people are reimbursed and reimbursed for their travel throughout the day. So specifically, like I said, we're based in California, so we have to abide by a lot of California law.

Quote unquote, you're really making those people rovers, and you gotta be careful with how much travel that they're doing and how you're compensating them and how it's, do you buy vehicles? And who pays for those vehicles? Do you make them use their own vehicles and then reimburse them for that?

So there's a HR element to centralization that I can't answer. I know it's a sticky web when it comes to that. Do I think there's pros and cons to it?

Yeah, but I think it really needs to be drilled down into, before you could commit to just saying, okay, we have 15 properties in this area and we're gonna hire this team, and then they're going to take care of, let's say, I don't think you're ever gonna get away from having some type of staff on site, right? Because you have to open your property every day. You have to pick up trash every day.

You have to make sure that your property's looking good when those doors open. So somebody's gonna have to be on site at some point. And do you have enough, do you have enough people to do that with centralized maintenance?

Maybe there's a component to that. Maybe you have partial onsite staff, partial centralization, maybe four turns, something to that effect. I don't know.

I would love to have the answer for you on that. And I hate to be wishy-washy. And I'll give you my, you know, just, I'm giving you my best political answer.

How about that? We're in a time when we're seeing a lot of political stuff and I'm giving you my best political answer where I can go either way, split right down the middle. How about that?

[Adrian Danila] (39:28 - 40:21) I'll take it. Let's just say that the jury is still out. We'll leave this for a future episode, for a future conversation.

Scott, I wanna go to technology next. Technology is definitely a thing of the present, a thing of the future. We are becoming, the world becomes a technology-driven world.

So the technology drives innovation and everything. Maynard's field in multifamily is no exception, right? Whether we want it or not, technology affects them, technology enters.

What's your take on like current situations in an industry with pain that technology can solve, technology does solve, and what, where are the opportunities? What can technology solve in a future that you don't see being solved with the current technology that we have?

[Scott Peters] (40:23 - 43:52) A tough question, because there's so much out there, right? I mean, it's a very, very tough question. What works?

What doesn't work? What's beneficial? What's not beneficial?

What do we wanna pay for? What do we not wanna pay for? How do we, you know, we do a lot of fee management.

We own and manage and we fee manage. So if you go to a platform and there's a fee for that platform, how do you convince an owner we've been doing business with for almost 50 years or 20 years that we have never done this before and now you have to pay for this? You know, there's that element of it that's always gonna go back to, right?

What's your return on this investment? That's the first question with anything we ever institute in our industry. What, how are we returning this investment to somebody, right?

What is the benefit of this for this individual? And I think that's the first hump to get over, right? With any technology.

Then you have to say, okay, I love this technology. There's many maintenance platforms that we've looked at out there to move to. We are not on a maintenance platform at this time, right?

We're not with any individual company. We don't have, you know, we don't have that platform rolled out at all. This technology is great, but does it talk to the system, right?

There's the IT portion of it too that things have to talk. You can't just implement 15 different systems which might look great, okay? And you might give you good data, but at some point there's an individual who has to deal with all that data and or collect that data and or log in to get that data, right?

And you might say, well, it's only, you know, a couple seconds to log in. But if you have all these different platforms that don't talk to each other, that's not beneficial either. So there's caution out there, right?

Because there's so many different types of technology that you can look at to do different things in our industry. But what are the ones that can talk to each other and make it easy for those who have to utilize it? I think about when I was on site, okay?

And, you know, computers were really just hitting. When I started, we had, you know, pink, yellow and white copy for our service requests with a carbon paper in between, okay? If you're a younger generation out there watching this, you're gonna have to look up what carbon paper is, okay?

So, you know, we've seen many strides of technology come through our industry from the time I started to where we stand today. So what do you institute? What do you not institute?

What do you bring in? What do you don't? What we like to do is see what's out there, okay?

And then see what we can utilize that we have already, right? A lot of people don't understand what you already have. For instance, we have Microsoft, right?

We probably a majority of companies use Microsoft. There's apps within Microsoft that you're already paying for that does some of this stuff without having to pay additional for it. And you can utilize it.

For example, we use an app in Microsoft called Forms. I don't know if you've ever utilized Forms or seen Forms, but- I have not.

[Adrian Danila] (43:52 - 43:54) I heard of it. I heard of it.

[Scott Peters] (43:54 - 43:54) Yeah?

[Adrian Danila] (43:55 - 43:55) Here, yeah.

[Scott Peters] (43:56 - 47:48) So we utilize Forms all the time. I mean, you can put together your own form to collect whatever data you want. And you just put together your questions.

You send it out to whoever you want to respond. They click on the link. They answer the questions and it all populates right into one spreadsheet for you.

And you have your instant data. Okay? There's many other platforms out there that do that, that people are paying for.

We use Forms for our due diligence. There's many companies that charge you for the same service that you have available to you already if you already have Microsoft because Forms is part of Microsoft. We use it on due diligence all the time.

And the benefit, we've used other platforms for due diligence before. And the problem I see usually with that is we have to have data to them a few weeks before. They have to input that data into their system.

They have to create your questions for you. If you have changes, you gotta let them know at least 48 hours before so that they can change the form. When due diligence comes up, we usually don't have that two week window, right?

So in Forms, we're able to create our form that we want and utilize it however we need to. And if the day of due diligence comes up and we get out there and we realize that we missed something on our form, or there's a circumstance on the site that we go, uh-oh, we wanna collect this data. All we do is we fire up our computer, make the change in the form, rescan the code, and it's done.

The only drawback to that, which I like on some of the other platforms, is we can't apply pictures to our data in that form. We have to take our pictures separately and then manipulate them later if you want it. But there's no cost to what we're doing either.

So what do you do? So there's technologies out there that's available to utilize within some of the things you have already. Like we were just looking at a data collection base for a lot of our contracts.

And there's many of those platforms out there. But we got with our IT department and said, hey, what do we have? What can we do?

And we just had a meeting with them yesterday and they took us, we utilize Yardi, and there's a whole system within Yardi that he's setting up for us right now that will, all we need to do is put our contracts into the expiration dates and who to notify when those expiration dates are coming up and Yardi is gonna notify us. But there's platforms we could go out to and pay separately for, but we have that technology already at our fingertips within some of the things that we're utilizing. So I think sometimes we fall in love with the technology before we understand what we actually need and then where are those costs coming from and who's paying for those costs for that technology if we're going out and grabbing one of these platforms.

Sometimes there's a little more work to it on the backside and I get that. So there's a trade-off, right? There is a trade-off there.

If you just go to one of these platforms, it's gonna be a little probably more easy data collection and set up in the beginning, a little easier. But there are a lot of things out there already that most probably have at their fingertips that they just haven't explored. And I think that's important.

And I don't wanna down any of these platforms out there because I've looked at a lot and they're great. They're absolutely wonderful. But I'm in the business of making sure my owners and my company is taken care of to the best of our ability.

And if we have something already that we can utilize at our fingertips, why wouldn't we utilize that first? And then if that doesn't work, then we can explore further.

[Adrian Danila] (47:49 - 48:04) There's a question I wanted to ask you about your third-party clients. What are the things that you're hearing from your third-party clients that keep them awake at night? What are their main concerns in today's environment, economical, political environment?

[Scott Peters] (48:05 - 49:21) I think it's like anything else, right? I mean, our third-party clients, they're out there, they're wanting their properties managed right and properly. I think it's the same.

And it just depends on the client. Every client has a little bit different view of how they do things or how they want things. And it's our job to kind of group that, right?

And say, well, this is how we do it. We've been doing it for about 50 years and we're very successful at what we do. Lean on us, let us drive the ship and we'll make your property successful.

And those who lean into us and say, okay, it's yours, we usually find good success. Sometimes they wanna be a little more involved and that's okay too. That's okay.

We are very flexible as far as our clients goes, as far as how much involvement they want, how much involvement that they don't want. We have some clients that I've known and I've met for many, many, many years. We have some clients, I've never even met them, don't know.

So it depends on the client, depends on what it is, depends on who it is and what their focuses are for their properties as well. We just guarantee them that we're gonna keep your property clean and safe and give people a very nice place to live.

[Adrian Danila] (49:22 - 49:43) Scott, thank you so much for making time to be with me and with the audience today. Amazing conversation. I love to get you back here in the future for a second episode.

But right now, I wanna wrap up this conversation by giving you the opportunity to say something you wish you would have said during the conversation you didn't have the opportunity to. So any final thoughts?

[Scott Peters] (49:44 - 53:23) One of the things that we were talking about and some of the things that we kinda maybe skipped over from some of the questions we were talking about initially is leadership. I think leadership and how you are as a leader. How do you get individuals to follow?

How do you get individuals to buy in to what you're doing? And I think as far as leadership goes, one of the big thing, I have a couple cores, right? There's a lot to leadership.

I mean, you can talk for hours about it, right? There's a couple cores, right? Number one to me is always lead by example.

It's a very, very simple concept that sometimes people don't get it, right? I mean, just lead by example. Be available for your team.

Be available out there as a leader in your community, in your, whatever you're doing, be available for people and lead by example. Don't be afraid to jump back in there and get dirty. I mean, we have a property that's kinda on the outskirts and it wasn't getting the attention that it needed.

So last year, my supervisor, our senior VP and myself, we jumped on a plane, we got out there and they were having some AC issues out there. And we went through the entire property and M&I and our regional maintenance director there cleaned all the coils, cleaned all the condensate pans, changed all the filters, did their unit inspections. Took another day and knocked out all their service requests.

Don't be afraid to do that. No matter what position you're in, lead by example, show your people that you have no qualms doing exactly what you grew up doing, right? Be a leader that way.

Know what you're talking about or don't talk about it. Right, that's the big thing. I see a lot of mistakes being made by leaders.

Don't shoot from the hip on subjects you don't have confidence in speaking about. If I don't know, I don't know. And I'm gonna tell you, I don't know.

I'd much rather tell you, I don't know than have a conversation with you about something that you know very well. And then I'm sitting there shooting from the hip and you're going, oh, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. That's not good leadership.

So that's a big thing. Again, then it leads to my next one is if you don't know, then ask, right? Even if you have to ask those that you're supervising, right?

It just shows a common ground of respect and that you value their knowledge and experience and opinion. That's how I've always found to be a good leader is be vulnerable. Let them know you don't know.

Let them know they might know it and you don't. Maybe they can teach you about it. Communication.

Communication is clear and often as possible. People like being communicated to and knowing what they need to get done. And then my last one is don't be afraid to implement change.

One of the worst answers I can get from somebody when I go out to a site or if I'm going around is, well, that's the way it's always been. And don't be afraid to implement change to that. Just because it's been that way doesn't mean it can't be done differently.

But if you're implementing that change, be very clear about what change you want and how you want it. And that's just some of my nuggets of leadership that I've learned through the years. It's nothing that I was born with and thought, oh, this is great.

But those are things that learning from and being mentored by very great individuals I've learned and seen to be effective. And I try to be effective that way as a leader myself.

[Adrian Danila] (53:24 - 53:51) Scott Peters, it's been a pleasure, sir, to have you on today. Thank you again for making time for me, for the audience today. I hope we continue this conversation later down the road, do another episode.

Everybody, thank you so much for watching us. This was another episode of Multifamily X Podcasts, Masters of Madness. I want to thank our sponsors, Kairos and Upwork for making this podcast possible.

We'll see you guys soon. Take care, have an amazing day.