Why Multifamily Maintenance is Broken, and What Must be Done

[Mark Sharp] (0:00 - 1:03) Retain maintenance talent that can help increase your resident renewal rates by just investing in education on your maintenance team. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. We're going to make it easier for you to sell.

We're going to give you all the tools you need to sell. Sell, sell, sell. Keep people coming in the door.

Well, I'm the one that likes to raise my hand and say, well, how about not letting them leave? The perfect training program is the one that sets aside time for your individuals, for your maintenance professionals, service professionals, setting aside time for their growth. Think about them as individuals.

Don't think about it from a company perspective. Their KPIs are set in a way that should like that. That's not what you should be tracking.

But I understand like why they're doing it, why they do that. But that does nothing for the individual. It's all for the company.

And I think that's why individuals leave.

[Adrian Danila] (1:10 - 1:14) Hey, Mark, great to have you. Welcome back to the Masters of Manz.

[Mark Sharp] (1:14 - 1:17) Thank you, Adrian. It's good to be back. Appreciate it.

[Adrian Danila] (1:17 - 1:28) For those that haven't watched the first conversation we had here, I want you to take us through your personal and professional journey a little bit. I want them to get to know you a little bit.

[Mark Sharp] (1:29 - 2:46) Oh, man, I don't know how long the podcast is, but to get into my... Let's make it as long as you like. I have time.

We can condense it a little bit. But I mean, I'm just going on. This will be my 25th year in the multifamily industry.

I've worn a lot of hats in the industry, started in leasing, and rolled over to the maintenance side, got on the supplier side, was an assistant manager, property manager, regional manager. And now I spend my time developing training programs and teaching maintenance individuals for management companies. I have my own podcast.

It's a lot. I've done so much, but it still feels like I have so much left to do in an industry that seems to change every year, every two years. Something new comes out and you get accustomed to using it and then boom, there are replacements there and you've got to adapt.

It's been an interesting journey, that's for sure.

[Adrian Danila] (2:47 - 2:57) I want to stay with a part where you mentioned you're doing education-related content. What are some details that you could share about the work that you currently do there?

[Mark Sharp] (2:57 - 5:10) Yeah. So a lot of, through the podcast, Multifamily Mixtape, I have several management companies who've reached out and say, hey, we have a need for a very specific training. What can you do?

So I'll go and consult with them, for them, spend some time with their company to learn some procedures and policies that may need tweaking and then putting together some education programs and plans that would help benefit the company as a whole. I think maintenance is my passion. It's what drives me.

Maintenance education, I guess, more specifically. But really getting into the bits and pieces of how companies operate, the things that they are doing correctly need to be pointed out as like, hey, this is great, continue to do this. But there are a few small tweaks that could be done that could help retain maintenance talent, that can help increase your resident renewal rates by just investing in education on your maintenance team.

I think there's all sorts of great technologies that are coming out that are amazing, wonderful things for leasing and AI and all of this stuff. But it seems like it's all driven towards sales. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell.

We're going to make it easier for you to sell. We're going to give you all the tools you need to sell. Sell, sell, sell.

Keep people coming in the door. Well, I'm the one that likes to raise my hand and say, well, how about not letting them leave? Let's invest in that.

And really pointing out that there is a difference. It is something that I think a lot of people, a lot of companies might overlook. I'm just one person providing an opinion.

But I do enjoy creating training programs and helping management companies grow and change their perception on maintenance.

[Adrian Danila] (5:10 - 5:53) I wonder what inspired you to just kind of stick with maintenance. You've done management, you've done supplier partners. A lot of people enjoy doing those.

You seem like you had your mind made up on staying with maintenance and now serving a higher purpose because educating others, you have to have the calling for it, the talent for it. And you also have to have the heart for it. It's not an easy thing, especially when we have to look at industry turnover rates, people going through this recycling to this revolving door that you put your heart and soul in it.

And then when you start seeing progress, a person leaves and you start over again. So what made you decide that this is the thing for you and this is what you want to do?

[Mark Sharp] (5:53 - 7:32) In my years on site, it's always the maintenance teams that struggle. It's always the maintenance teams that don't get the tools that they need. And I don't mean tools as in figurative hand tools, although that is true.

It's also the training and the development and the growth needed in maintenance. And so I took, I'm going to be very blunt here, but maintenance is not sexy. Maintenance does not sell.

You can't print marketing material for maintenance. You can't drive people to your properties with maintenance, right? It's nothing people get excited over.

You did that. If you made marketing material that says we have the best maintenance in town, I think all people are going to see or hear is, okay, so I'm going to need to call maintenance a lot. Maybe that's a bad thing.

Maybe I wouldn't choose your property over the one that has all of these amenities and all of these things that I like. So I stick with maintenance because I just don't feel like they get the tools and the gratitude and the attention that they need and they deserve. So I'm just one person, but there are a ton of people like you, Adrian, and like other individuals, friends of ours who are out there trying to get maintenance to the same level maybe as some of the other opportunities that there are in the multifamily industry.

[Adrian Danila] (7:33 - 8:05) I think in a larger context, if we package maintenance as service, I think that people resonate with that. We're a very service-driven society in an era where Amazon and Uber are dominating. And I think when you think about these two companies, you're thinking service and convenience, right?

Associating maintenance with service, which actually is a service, right? It's not lying. Just packaging the message that way could actually make it sexy again.

[Mark Sharp] (8:05 - 9:31) Right. You're absolutely correct. I love how the industry titles are changing from maintenance supervisor, maintenance tech, maintenance whatever.

It's service supervisor, service tech, service professional. So I think the industry has made some wording changes on personal titles for their company to make it seem a little bit like that, but maintenance does provide a service. We are in the service industry, but maintenance is one of the least sought after, but there aren't, I'll start using the word service for the rest of the podcast, but there aren't great service training platforms out there.

I mean, even our own NAA, love NAA, they serve a purpose. I go to the conferences. I'm a huge fan on several committees.

So trust me, I'm not bad-mouthing NAA, but even some of the services that they provide, the designations that they provide, the educational opportunities that they provide are geared toward office, leasing, owner, regional, investor, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there aren't many opportunities for service.

[Adrian Danila] (9:31 - 10:23) This brings me to a thought and a question at the same time. What would an ideal learning platform for maintenance look like to you? I had to agree that focus, like service doesn't tend to be same level of focus, same level of intensity as the CAPS, the CAM, the other designations.

I think that that's actually an entire subject for an entire podcast episode to dig very deep into why isn't opportunities to overcome. I know that lately I heard that efforts being made into making the KMT program more than what it is. And I'm excited to hear about the changes and to see them happening.

But back to the question, what would an ideal learning platform for service personnel, for service professionals look like to you?

[Mark Sharp] (10:23 - 13:21) The ideal service learning platform, first off, there needs to be one. It just needs to be there. I think to me, that's the ideal one, the one that is just there right now.

And I know there are several of industry companies out there trying to create and do things for service. And I think that's wonderful. But for an industry that is severely understaffed, and that's not me saying something, that's a known fact that we have a hard time finding people to come to the multifamily industry.

And we have an even harder time getting those individuals to come to the maintenance service side of the multifamily industry. So there needs to be a training platform that's out there that's relevant, first off. It's hard for us to find, I don't say qualified people, because the word qualified is relative, but we need people who are hungry to want to learn.

So they need to have the ability to want to learn. And so we're bringing in people with little to no experience. And so the days are gone of having a supervisor or somebody on site train those new people, because we're so understaffed, we're so busy, we have so much going on that you can't devote the time necessary to invest in that individual.

You have to have a robust, clear, precise training program out there in order to get your greenies, your new maintenance personnel, service personnel caught up with just the basic of tasks. So the ideal training platform is the one that is there, that people can access, that's free, that's short, precise, nothing that it's going to take me, don't put me in a room for eight hours and expect me to retain all of this information. Give it to me short, in short increments, precise, let me mull it over, give me in-person, on-hand, hands-on training.

That's what the maintenance industry, the service industry needs. We need hands-on, purposeful, precise, short, good, good training. And I think by doing that, your renewal numbers will increase.

By keeping the back door shut, I think is a better way to think about resident retention.

[Adrian Danila] (13:22 - 13:57) One of the things that Mark Cooker says all the time is teams that don't train don't win. That's right. I think he comes to something as simple as that, you know, simple truth, simple but very, very powerful truth.

I'm going to circle back, I'll continue like this train of thought here with training, but you mentioned your podcast. I want to give you the opportunity to just kind of share some details about your podcast, pretty much where we could find you, where we could find the content, and then what are topics you're approaching on a podcast?

[Mark Sharp] (13:58 - 16:53) Yeah, thank you. So the Multifamily Mixtape, it's really a podcast for everyone. I gear it to maintenance in that I'm discussing maintenance and service operations and some of the things that maintenance personnel come in contact with on a daily basis, but it's for everyone because I want office personnel, I want owners, I want people to hear what service personnel are struggling with on a daily basis.

I'm not that smart. I don't come up with these ideas on my own. I have maintenance personnel from throughout the country that are emailing me, texting me, sending me ideas, hey, talk about this because I can't, you know, I'm bound with this company and if I get online and start saying what I want to say, what needs to be said, I'm going to get in trouble.

And I am, I am that voice. I'm that person who says, well, I can't get fired because it's my company. So I'll say whatever I need to.

As long as it's, now I'm not going to get on and start bad mouthing or bashing things because that's counterproductive. But, you know, to bring awareness to mental health issues in the multiside or the multifamily maintenance side is crucial. It is a big issue.

And I don't know that there are a lot of resources out there, but purchasing agreements, are they, are they good? Are they bad? I talk and I discuss about a lot of things, but the podcast is really for anyone and everyone who is wanting to listen to maybe get a different perspective on some of the things that they know throughout the industry.

But I've also launched recently a new initiative on mixtape, the Tuesday take. And this is where I actually do hands-on very specific training. And so the podcast is great, but then we also have these little two to three minute shorts that are on everyday maintenance items where we take them, we diagnose them, I walk you through it.

And this, you know, could be for people who've been in the industry for 20 years or people who've been in it for two or three days who are being handed keys to an apartment and say, Hey, go fix that. So I'm hoping again, part of the training side, like I'm hoping to use the podcast to be a voice for maintenance, but to also educate. It's what I enjoy doing.

It's what I wake up in the morning to do. And I've had a really, really good time with it. And I've had, you know, for the short period of time, my podcast has been out.

I've had some pretty good response and pretty good feedback. So I'm going to keep going.

[Dean Fung A Wing] (16:54 - 18:02) And now a word from Dean Fungawing, founder and CEO Kairos. Just know that the days of being able to push things onto renters insurance is going away very, very quickly. And the solution that sits in between the real estate owner and the insurance company is the solutions that we provide real time risk data, what we call building telematics to let you know what is happening in real time.

That's the water leak detection solution. We can combine that solution with shutoff valves, which is a more capital intensive project. And it's not for everybody.

You can do it on the beginning of a building's life cycle. So if you're constructing a building, I highly recommend that you start with automated shutoff valves and leak detection solutions, because now you're providing sort of this blanket gold standard of like risk management protection for the entire life cycle of the asset. It's like, imagine just never having catastrophic issues in that building and being able to hand that off at this position and saying, look, we haven't had historical losses.

We haven't had historical insurance claims. You can acquire this asset at a much better value, right? Comparative to someone else, because our maintenance record is stellar.

[Adrian Danila] (18:03 - 18:07) How do you pick your guests? And how do you pick topics besides listeners feedback?

[Mark Sharp] (18:08 - 19:28) So I pick, I wish there was something scientific I could tell you that I do, but I get a thought in my head, like, hey, I think this is a good one. Or somebody will send me an idea. Hey, I need you to talk about this.

And so I go and I seek out industry experts in that field and bring them on for for guest conversations. Or if somebody doesn't want to get on a podcast, I take them to lunch, we sit down, we have a conversation, I document just to make sure that their message is clear. I kind of go about it that way.

But, you know, I don't have, you know, I don't have people busting down my door to want to be on the podcast, which is fine. But it's really been really cool to see that when I contact individuals and say, hey, I'd love to have you on to discuss this. It's it's the reception is pretty, pretty good.

So I'm excited about the direction mixtape is going to go and maybe I can get on to where, you know, we have some some submission forms and we can have more, more guests on a routine basis. But But for now, I just sort of sort of wing it, I throw everything at the wall and whatever stick sticks. Let's go from there.

[Adrian Danila] (19:29 - 19:35) What's what's the easy way for someone that, you know, is interested in being a guest on a podcast for them to get all of you?

[Mark Sharp] (19:35 - 20:23) Oh, man. So I have a I have a website. Yeah, I do actually have a website multifamily mixtape.com.

And there is a submission form. There's a question on there want to be a guest and just fill out the form and I'll get an email and I'll touch base with you schedule a meeting similar to what we're doing and just kind of talk and see what you want to discuss and then we'll we'll build it from there. But really, go to the website, multifamily mixtape.com or you can email me mark at multifamily mixtape.com.

But those are the best ways to get in touch with me. And if you're listening and you want to be on multifamily mixtape, if you have something to add on education or the maintenance industry, I'd love to have you.

[Adrian Danila] (20:24 - 20:46) How often do you drop episodes? Every two weeks. So every other Tuesday.

So everyone, you heard the information, you want to be a guest on a show, just get in touch with with Mark out there. So he'll How has the approach to maintenance training evolved since you started in the industry 25 years ago?

[Mark Sharp] (20:48 - 23:39) Well, 25 years ago, it was, hey, this is Tommy was my first supervisor. This is Tommy. He's the main supervisor and he's going to be training you.

It was being his shadow. It was following him around asking him questions, watching stuff blow up in his face because, you know, even he, you know, we didn't have YouTube back then. We didn't have the ability to record things on our telephones.

You know, we had telephones, but they weren't that sophisticated. And so, you know, we were breaking things just so we could figure out what went wrong, so we would know how to fix it. So, you know, my my training started off with with Tommy and then I moved to a different market and got in with a guy named Bob Mills.

This was in Concord, North Carolina. And Bob Mills was at the time, I didn't appreciate it because I was young. I was arrogant.

Bob was that unicorn. Bob was that guy in the industry that has forgotten more than I'll ever know. He took me under his wing and he would let stuff blow up in my face and he'd say, OK, what'd you do wrong?

And, you know, instead of just telling me what I needed or telling me how to fix it, he made me create the process. He made me walk him through step by step what I did, what I did wrong, what I did right, what I should have done, you know, just just invested what I consider the proper way to do things. And he instilled that in me.

And it was it was it was him or someone around that time. And I've had the same saying in my head that I've carried with me for years and years and years. And I mentioned it every time I teach and I train.

But it's the saying, if you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again? That saying has stuck with me for 20 plus years, because if you get into a rush and you do something wrong just to get by, just to get through the next one because you didn't have the amount of time, well, you're going to have to go back to that. So if you're going to do a repair, if you're going to do something, spend the time necessary to do it right, be complete, be precise, because your residents don't want you in and out of their homes every other day.

They don't want you in their home at all, which is why a lot of us get those residents that move out after three years and never called in a single service request and their apartment's destroyed. You know, it's an inconvenience when you're in there. Do right by your property, do right by your company, do right by the resident and complete the service request the first time and go on about your day.

[Adrian Danila] (23:40 - 23:49) Mark, what's one major lesson you learned early in your career that you wish was part of a training program? Patience.

[Mark Sharp] (23:50 - 25:06) Rarely in our day do you hear the terms, hey, I know you have nothing to do, so can you go and take care of this work order? It's always an emergency. Everything's always an emergency.

And back on that saying, if you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again? Patience. Diagnose the problem, diagnose the issue correctly.

Kind of a lot like medical stuff. You go into the doctor or whatnot and they treat the symptoms, but what's the root cause? So going in and seeing something and it's oh, well, it's this.

Make sure it's that. Do your due diligence. Walk yourself through everything that it could be.

And instead of just replacing the aerator on a faucet thinking that's what's causing the leak, look at the stem, look at the supply, look at the connection. Look at all of it. Don't just assume because you switch this out.

Take the time to make sure that it's done properly. So I would say, I would say patience. Everything's an emergency, but that doesn't mean you need to do an emergency fix.

[Adrian Danila] (25:07 - 25:12) What would you say are the biggest gaps in multifamily maintenance training programs today?

[Mark Sharp] (25:12 - 27:51) The biggest gaps I think would be relevancy. I think we're trying to teach new people to our industry the big things. Let's rush them through EPA.

Let's rush them through HVAC. Let's rush them through CPO. Let's rush them through all of these things.

But everyone who's EPA certified knows you learn nothing about HVAC in an EPA certification. It is just a federal designation that allows you to handle refrigerant. You don't teach.

You don't learn anything about fan relays and proper pressures and heat versus cool. You don't learn that. You learn some very, very basic stuff, but let's force people who've had two days on the job through an EPA test or through an EPA class just so they can carry the on-call pager.

That's a huge gap. You can't, you got to start with the small stuff. You've got to start with the soft skills.

You've got to start with how to talk to a resident, fair housing, what not to say to a resident. Start with all of those things before you start sending individuals through very technical classes. CPO, thankfully, is open book.

It didn't used to be. In fact, in the state of South Carolina, you used to have to have or used to have to go to Columbia and sit in a windowless room and take your shoes off and leave your phone in a box and take your CPO test. Now, it's all open book.

The gap is we're rushing people. We're rushing people through because we need them certified. We need them to be able to take the on-call.

We need them to, no, you don't. I think we're focusing maybe on the wrong things first in that some of the individuals that we're bringing in, some of the younger folk that we're bringing into the industry, they went through COVID. They went through lockdown.

They went through no personal face-to-face interaction. We've got a whole generation of people who don't know how to talk to people because they've never had to. Everything was online, Zoom.

When you send them into someone's apartment and they have to have a conversation with an individual, they have to shake someone's hand, that sends individuals into some type of anxiety because they're not comfortable with that. I think we need to start with soft skills rather than jumping into the big ticket items.

[Voice over] (27:52 - 27:56) Now, a word from Sean Landsberg, co-founder, Appwork.

[Adrian Danila] (27:56 - 28:13) The ideal experience from an end-user perspective is the Uber experience. What I mean by that is you put the app in the hands of anyone who would know how to video. They should be able to figure it out and order an Uber.

How is that Appwork providing that type of Uber experience for maintenance?

[Adrina Danila] (28:14 - 29:09) We've done a lot of research behind each and every end-user of the product, whether it's your property manager, your leasing agent, your regional manager, your maintenance supervisor, and your maintenance technician. We did a lot of research behind them. For example, the app is used by maintenance supervisors and maintenance technicians.

We have to build a profile around who they are, how they think, how they're going to interact with the app, and we have to design it in a way that requires little to no training. Like you said, we used Uber as our model. Aside from incorporating features, such as reviews and other really cool components to the Uber style, it was designed behind the same concept of Uber, whereas when somebody goes to call an Uber to take them from point A to point B, there's no how-to videos or even instructions.

Hey, let's teach you how to use Uber. You download the app, you know how to use it. That was the same thing for us.

We use that from a design perspective. We need this to be as simple as it is to call an Uber.

[Adrian Danila] (29:10 - 29:15) What's the most common skill deficiencies you see in today's maintenance teams?

[Mark Sharp] (29:16 - 30:16) I would say proper use of a multimeter. I think a lot of people, a lot of maintenance guys, I have taught a class recently. It was suggested that they bring their meters in, and half the class didn't have a meter.

Then when we said, okay, we're going to switch to ohms now because we're going to check this stove element, the amount of hands that went up in the room and said, what setting is that? What is ohms? These are people who are running the properties.

You can't fault them because they were taught by someone. I think the biggest skills gap right now for me, at least what I've seen recently, is the ability to properly use a multimeter and to know all of its amazing, wonderful uses to help us every day.

[Adrian Danila] (30:17 - 31:22) I think we're shooting too much for elevated stuff. We forget that we haven't built a foundation. We're missing the basics.

We expect to build grandiose companies and organizations and maintenance teams. You can't really build anything on sand. Nothing gets built without a foundation.

Start with the very basic things. I totally agree with you. I haven't been in a field in a minute really, but I do see people in a field.

I do have constant contact with people in a field. I could resonate with the fact that we're trying to resolve a problem by going two, three levels up when we're not really paying attention to level one, the first entry level. What are the top basic things that a technician should know so they could be fairly successful at the basic functions of the job?

How would you see the ideal maintenance training program looking like? What would it look like ideally if you were to build it from scratch for one of your clients, for a company? What would it look like?

[Mark Sharp] (31:22 - 34:28) To get specific, that'd be difficult because certain companies have certain deficiencies in certain things. The perfect plan is going to be what works for them. For industry, just to get a little bit broader about the industry, the perfect training program is the one that sets aside time for your individuals, for your maintenance professionals, service professionals, setting aside time for their growth.

Think about them as individuals. Don't think about it from a company perspective. Like, oh, this is going to be great optics for our company.

We're putting a training program together. Great. That benefits the company very well to certain individuals.

But if the training program isn't relevant or if it's a bunch of information, if I've got to sit down in front of a computer and watch 14 videos every year, that does nothing for me. That does nothing for the maintenance individual. Sure.

The company meets its standards for insurance purposes and whatnot, but that doesn't do anything for personal growth. Your training program has to be very specific, very tailored to what it is your company is trying to accomplish. That's where I find that a lot of companies miss the mark.

Their KPIs are set in a way that's not what you should be tracking. But I understand why they're doing it, why they do that, but that does nothing for the individual. It's all for the company.

I think that's why individuals leave, because they're not investing in the personal growth. Again, it's more about company optics than it is about my personal growth. Then you get the scenario, well, what if we train all these people?

What if we do it the right way? What if we do all the things you're recommending for us to do, Mark, and they turn around and leave and go somewhere else? That's when it brings up that quote from Henry Ford.

Well, what if we invest in our people and they leave? It's like, what if you don't invest and they stay? It's like, just do it.

Do it, but do it right. What's really great is, and funny for me, a lot of times when I meet with these CEOs and I talk to these individuals, it's like, okay, how did you come up with this training program? It's like, oh, well, our regional manager sat in a room and they thought about it.

I'm like, okay, did any of you ask your onsite personnel, your onsite maintenance, the people who are currently working for you, doing this job, what they think? The answer is always no. You've got subject matter experts out there every day on your properties.

Ask them. Ask them what they want.

[Adrian Danila] (34:31 - 34:42) In-house versus outsourcing, are there any certain maintenance tasks that should always be outsourced versus trained internally that you can think of?

[Mark Sharp] (34:42 - 36:26) Always no, because I do know of several companies that send various positions to receive certain certifications in order to do their own backflow testing. When it comes to life safety, you need to be very precautious about what you're doing. Call reputable companies for life safety type things.

Major plumbing, supplies to buildings, sewer pipe crush. Certain parts of our country that deal with asphalt more frequently or deal with certain things more frequently, they may be trained. They may have the tools necessary.

I went to a property in Long Island, New York, and the maintenance team had their own skid steer. I said, wait, what? You don't rent that?

That's yours? You own that? The property owns that?

Yeah. We clear parking lots. We dig ditches.

That's phenomenal. It depends on what part of the country you're in. Texas, with their placidic sand, their buildings move throughout a year.

A lot of their plumbing leaks and plumbing issues out in Texas are due to buildings that are built on. Their supplies have to be installed a certain way. I think there's always something you can learn.

You can always be certified in. I'm a huge fan of education, but if I don't know and I can't fix it, I'm calling somebody. That's always a recommendation.

If it's too big for your staff, if your staff's too overworked, if it's life safety, call a pro. Call somebody who's got the time to do it and do it right. Because again, we don't want to half fix anything.

[Adrian Danila] (36:26 - 36:32) Mark, what do you see as the biggest shift coming in multi-family maintenance trading over the next five years?

[Mark Sharp] (36:32 - 38:40) The biggest shift? I know there are lots of amazing AI platforms. I know that AI is not coming.

It's definitely here. It's definitely taking over a lot of things that could remove human error. But what I see is as much as there's a push for AI, I see companies using that for, oh, I need to create a training program.

Let me go on ChatGPT and say, hey, create me a maintenance training program. Well, that's great. All you did was source internet or the information that's available on the internet.

You didn't do anything that's specific to your company, your property. Maintenance programs can be different by company. They definitely need to be different by property.

But what I see is I see people using AI to help them create programs, but again, I think AI is great. I use it quite frequently, but it needs to be specific. What I don't want to see happen is people using AI to create these programs, but not getting down to the purposeful nuts and bolts of what's needed.

You're just getting a general program. It's not specialized to what I need it to be. It's those fundamentals that we talked about earlier.

I don't want to see AI take over the training platform because I don't think that it will get as specific as you necessarily may need it to be. And it needs to be regional. There's various, like I talked about Texas and Long Island and all these different environmental challenges and opportunities that we're faced with.

Training programs, 80% of it could be universal, but that other 20% needs to be very specific. And I don't think AI can quite get there yet. I see the shift going towards AI, but I don't want it to.

I want it to be very personal. And I just, I don't know that you can get there with AI yet.

[Adrian Danila] (38:40 - 39:13) I think we'll see a collaboration between intelligence, artificial intelligence and humans. You're still going to need some human touches, at least for the time being. I'm not seeing the large learning models becoming as perfect to mimic a human touch perfectly.

So maybe that's just around the corner, or maybe it's just technology that's been produced as we speak. It's kind of hard to tell. Things are moving at a very high pace.

[Mark Sharp] (39:13 - 40:00) Yeah. And from what I've seen and what I've read on, again, they're amazing. Oh man, AI is so cool.

It's scary. Some of the stuff that it can do, but I think it needs to be used as a tool, not a replacement. And I think a lot of the programs that are out there are being sold as replacements.

And so we're replacing jobs with AI. We're replacing positions. We're replacing certain things with AI.

And I think it's just meant to be a tool to help with the fact that our industry is understaffed. Again, there's a purpose out there and I use it. I do, but I just don't think we're there yet on the training side of things.

[Adrian Danila] (40:01 - 40:07) What's one thing that every operator should start doing today to improve their maintenance training programs?

[Mark Sharp] (40:07 - 40:42) If you don't have one, create one. If you do have one, check it for relevancy, make sure that it's right and you're not just wasting your team's time. Because we are understaffed.

We are overworked. Every company has a mission statement. And if that training program is not progressing that mission statement, empowering your workers, your staff, your team members to work that mission statement, then it should be looked at.

[Adrian Danila] (40:43 - 40:47) Mark, thanks so much for coming back on the show. Any final thoughts?

[Mark Sharp] (40:48 - 42:00) No, I just, I appreciate you having me on Adrian. I appreciate everything you do for the multifamily maintenance side of our industry. You are a very powerful voice for what we're trying to do.

I appreciate you having me on and let me ramble on for the last 30 minutes. So no, I just really, really appreciate everything you're doing. And hopefully as an industry, we can start to shed some light on some of the missing opportunities that are out there for maintenance individuals because they do not get support.

They don't. There are companies out there who do a phenomenal job and to those companies, thank you. But the vast majority of maintenance in our industry have zero support.

What I try to do, what you're doing, what other, Paul Rhodes, Chris Karamanica, Scott Ployer, Mark Kukro, all these other individuals are doing, we're just, we're trying to be that voice and to help maintenance get the recognition that it needs and it deserves.

[Adrian Danila] (42:01 - 42:28) Thank you for your kind words, Mark. Thank you for everything you do as well to advance the maintenance cost of the industry. Let's continue the conversation.

Let's get you back here a few months down the road because these conversations are like, well, they're super important for the entire industry to advance. And thank you all for watching us. Another episode of Masters of Maintenance on TFamilyX Podcast.

Hope to see you back on the next one. Y'all take care.