How to Manage Your Rentals in 4 Hours Per Month

Most landlords don't quit because of money, they quit because of stress, the late night calls, the endless paperwork, the feeling that tenants run your life instead of the other way around, but it doesn't have to be like that. In today's episode, I'm talking with the authors of the self-managing landlord about the exact systems, tools, and checklists that turns rentals from a constant headache into a business that runs smoothly and gives back your time and sanity. Welcome to the podcast, Real Estate Investing with Coach Carson. I'm your host, Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson. And in this show, I teach you how to use real estate investing to achieve financial freedom, so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. Now, let's get into my conversation with Grace Gunkoff and Amelia McGee. So Amelia and Grace, this is the second time you've been on the channel, so welcome back. Thank you for being here. So I want to get into a topic where we talk about being more passive with your real estate, if that's even possible, and actually going from being like a mom-and-pop investor that you all call it to actually like being the CEO of your business and treating it like a business. But before we jump into that, I want to, for people who haven't heard of you and don't have your background, can you tell a little bit about what your real estate business looks like, each of you, and how many units you manage, that sort of thing. Yeah, so this is Amelia. If you're listening to audio, it's my voice. I'm based in Des Moines, Iowa. I have been investing in real estate since 2019-2020, so already coming up on five years, which is crazy. Thank you. Feels like no time at all, right? But I currently self-manage a portfolio in Des Moines, Iowa and a couple other smaller markets here in Iowa of about 40 units. They're a mixture of long-term rentals, mid-term rentals, and a few small but mighty short-term rentals. And I'm just really passionate about helping investors go from mom and pop to CEO of their business, because I think as real estate investors, we never talk about how we're business owners. And I think that's such a common misconception, so we're here to kind of break that down. So, Grace, what about you? Yes, I'm Grace Guttenkopf. I'm going to start saying Amelia is better hash, even though we don't invest together. But we have done almost our entire portfolio alongside each other. I'm also investing in Iowa, in eastern Iowa, but I live in Arizona. I've been here for about two and a half years. I self-manage my long-term rentals. I have a portfolio of about 30 units. I'm also embarking on a new build journey, about to finish my first triplex new construction. So that has been like being a rookie investor all over again. But yeah, we have been through so many things where we've realized, wow, we're trying to make real estate work for us, not the other way around. So how do we implement small things throughout our portfolio and our business to get that time and that freedom back? I love that. So we're on the same page. And one of the reasons I really wanted to pick your brain, both of you, you do a really good job of this transition you just talked about. I find, I don't know about you, but when you talk to most people who aren't really real estate investors, the reason many of them don't get into real estate is they're like, wow, I don't want to have a tenant call me in the middle of the night. It's going to be really busy. I'm getting another job. And so a lot of people avoid it for that reason. And I'm wondering, can you tell me just from a high level, has your experience been over the last five years that you can actually get to a point where you can step back from it a little bit? Or is it like, how much time do you actually spend on the day-to-day? Before we get into how you're doing it, what does your life actually look like from a real estate standpoint? Now, from the real estate standpoint, I'm checking my property management software probably once a week. I am really not super involved with the day-to-day and that goes for both of us. Of course, there's things that pop up, but we've implemented things like business hours, technology, delegating to other people to really protect our time and energy. Because another thing people don't talk about a lot is your real estate journey is an evolution. And at first you might be willing to do whatever it is to make an extra 200 bucks a month. And then you'll get to the point where you're like, actually, I'd rather pay 200 bucks a month to not have to do X, Y, and Z. And that's natural. And it might take you a few years. It might take you 10 years. But that is something you want to work toward because a lot of people like your story, Chad, they accidentally create a business where they're like, wait, I hate this. I'm working way more than I was in my W-2. I thought this was supposed to be passive, but I'm stressed out all the time. Exactly. Yeah. I always call that my Frankenstein business from 2006 and 2007. I borrowed goals from other people and I thought you're supposed to have a bunch of properties and ended up, the Frankenstein was controlling me instead of the business being something that served my life. So I a hundred percent agree with that. And what I'm curious about is, I think most people are on the same page about that. They're like, yeah, at some point I'm willing to do some work upfront to save some money. But at some point I want to start transitioning to where I own systems and a business. And maybe I can travel to Spain or I can do other things and have another job. And I can only work a few hours a week in my business. What would be some of the first steps or the approaches you would take to like start putting that business of real estate investing together? Well, I will say that it's never too early to start implementing those things. I think one of the biggest regrets that Grace and I both have investing is that we didn't start with any SOPs. We didn't have anything documented. So every time we would onboard a new tenant or handle a maintenance request or whatever, we were just doing it off the top of our head and trying to remember what we did the last time. So I would say like, even with your very first property, write down the process of, okay, what are you doing when you're listing a unit? What photos need to be taken? Where do you list the property at? What are your policies for tenant screening? Even if it's just a simple checklist, it makes it so much easier the next time around. Because when we talk about this, if you just have one or two long-term rentals and your tenant stays for five years, in five years, you're going to have no clue what you did last time. So if you can set yourself up for success just a little bit and write it down, it's so helpful. Another thing I'll add is one of our wire members, Zoe, went to Europe for a month and she said, Grace, Amelia, I'm stressed out. I need to make sure that I'm not answering phone calls and running around in Europe. I want to be able to actually enjoy myself. So we sat down and we got all of her tenants onboarded onto a property management software. And people don't realize property management softwares like TurboTenant can literally be like $15 a month. And I always say, we always say that is the best investment in your business because it helps you set business hours, helps you set a boundary. You can track maintenance requests, get automatic rent payments. It does so many things. So the very first place to start is get a PM system from day one. And there are systems out there that are free too, if you're worried about the money. But absolutely create that boundary. And she came back from Europe, our friend, and she said, Oh my gosh, thank you so much. It was stress-free. Nobody texted me. Nobody called me. All the maintenance systems went into my app and I was able to delegate it from there. I wasn't stressed out. And that's all over something that might cost $15 a month. Yeah. I'm such a big fan of software and I want to talk about software with you all because this is dating myself a little bit, but when I first started in rentals, like 22 years ago, 21 years ago, I mean, it was not the stuff you can do now was not possible. And the cost is almost free or very inexpensive. What the software we have now, a full-time property manager with 2000 units wouldn't have had as good a software as we have managing properties right now. That's really cool. So, and TurboTenant is actually a sponsor of this episode that works out pretty well as well. So there we go. There we go. There we go. TurboTenant. Good plug there. I want to ask y'all though, like, so let's talk about the categories of software, like property management software is one. I, I, I, I, I, myself managed rental. I use TurboTenant now and like them a lot. I've also used some other ones like Buildium in the past for some of mine. I know other people that there's, there's a bunch of them out there, but what would be some of the qualities of a property management software that whatever they use TurboTenant or something else Yeah. Number one, they have to have an app. It's actually surprising. There's a few that don't have good apps that, you know, they'll have the app icon, but it'll just forward you to a website. I think that's super important that they have a great app that they can do e-signing for leases. That's huge that they have low fees for tenants that want to pay rent via ACH and that can accept rent via ACH that have a really strong maintenance profile because that's huge. You should not be handling maintenance requests via text or email. Grace, what am I missing? Those are like my top four, I would say. Those are, I would say also the top four and then get one that doesn't make you pay per unit. For example, Buildium is an incredible software, but it's too much for 97% of individual real estate investors. You're going to get overwhelmed. You're going to get confused. TurboTenant and other softwares are very user-friendly because they get the job done and they charge you what you need to, you know, a reasonable amount to get what you need. So, I would say something that's a flat rate, that does all the things Amelia said, and that at the end of the day, if you grow to 30 units, you're not all of a sudden paying 250 bucks a month. And one other thing that I want to add to this conversation, because we talked to so many investors that are researching like 10 different softwares and it's like, they're pretty much all the same. There's maybe a couple small differences, like you kind of just pick one and kind of like go with it. And if you try it out and absolutely hate it, you can move on to the next. But like, I just think sometimes people overthink things and it's like, hey, here's three experienced investors saying TurboTenant's a great software. Like why are we over-complicating it and trying to research 10 different softwares, you know? Yeah. Just move on. There's lots of other things you want to focus on. It's an important part of your business, but it is a game changer. And I would add one other thing that kind of connects to my next software question is just the fact that you have a, what's called a ledger, like in the book, where you can see like, if you have 20 properties, 40 properties, like you guys do, as you get more than one or two, it sounds funny, but it's hard to remember who paid me, who didn't pay me, is this person late? So just having a list of all your tenants, who's paid you, when they paid you, if they ask a question, they're like, can I get a statement? You can press a button and send them a statement. Like that stuff, if you're doing spreadsheets and all that, and you're doing it manually and they're sending you Venmo, like, yes, that's possible to like duct tape all that stuff together. But like, why would you do that? Like, you have this like professional face towards your tenants that they feel more, you're more professional. You feel more professional. It saves you time. It just, it makes a ton of sense. And also how awkward to have to text the tenant, actually you're three days late and you need to send me another $50. By just adding automatically fees in your software, you'll probably pay for your software twice over. And then to your point of giving you that wiggle room, it gives you space to think things through when tenants ask you a question to say, actually, sorry, that's not company policy. Or I can't do that, but what I can do is this. And that boundary is so important. We had another person that we are working with who had a husband who was a night shift doctor. So what do you think he accidentally trained his tenants to do? Call at midnight. So she said, she woke up one day, realized why on earth am I talking to tenants at 11 and midnight? And how did this come to be? And it goes back to, will you train your tenants to work with you? And so if you can implement a process where everything goes through TurboTenant, responses come within 24 hours, Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 PM. People understand that it's easy to work with. It's predictable and they will work with it and it will make your life easier. That's part of the mindset overall of just being, you are a business. Most businesses have hours. So if you want to enjoy your evenings, don't have your phone that tenants text you on sitting around you. You're going to be bound to be stressed and look at it. And instead you have to have a protocol. I would be curious for you guys, what's your protocol for when there's a maintenance, there actually is an emergency. So how do you handle that? What do you tell your tenants to do in that case? I think I can count on one hand, how many emergencies there are. I've actually had happen in my portfolio over the last five years. Number one, it's probably going to be lockouts or plumbing. And if it's a lockout, this goes back to having a system where the second your tenant signs a lease, you're reviewing the lease with them and reviewing your lockout policy of, Hey, a lockout is not an emergency. We're not responsible for it. You have to call your own locksmith. Having that conversation before that happens is going to ensure that they understand that. And don't blow up on you when you try to tell them that at 11 PM on a Saturday night, because they just want your help. Number two with plumbing, of course, you've got to have your vendors in line and you've got to make sure that tenants do have access to an emergency number, whether that's you, a handyman. I know now with technology, there are emergency systems you can set up that are like call centers. But luckily my dad is my handyman. So he's an emergency number. I'm an emergency number. And honestly, it gets called very rarely out of all of our experience. We've had one midnight toilet phone call. It's hilarious story. It was mine and it was just honestly laughable. Yeah. I've had one or two. I'm 22 years and a lot of, I'm sure we've had more with some of our, some of them are third party managed, but I can remember one specific example. I was traveling in South America with my wife. We was 2009. And this was like, we didn't have a cell phone. We had these little laptops. You had to use Skype on, but I keep dating myself here. This is pretty embarrassing, but we got, we didn't know that I had a cell phone in 2009. All right. All right. We probably could have had a cell phone, but not on this, the bottom tip of South America. I didn't have my cell phone with me, but I had this little laptop and I called my plumber on Skype for like 29 cents a minute or something. I said, Hey, I'm about to go on a tour of this penguin colony in South America. Like this person has a hot water heater that's leaking. It needs to be cleaned up. Can you handle this for me? Like two minute call. And I trusted this vendor and he handled it and he sent me a bill and he handled it and my tenant was okay. So like there is a way to solve these things. You don't have to be the hero who runs in and like personally like does this thing. You can write like almost every problem I've had in real estate, you can write a check. You can solve this problem by paying somebody to do it. It might be, you might not like to pay that big old check, but it, you know, I would rather do that and go see the penguin colony and do my tour than I would like stress about it. Right. Another simple thing you could do is we always talk about getting to the proactive stage rather than reactive. So proactive manager would say, wow, in seven days, I'm going to have no cell phone service for eight days. Why don't I schedule a reminder that goes to all of my tenants saying, Hey, we're going to have very slow communication because of limited cell phone service. If there is an emergency parentheses, list out what those emergencies are. Please contact this number for regular maintenance. We will be a week behind. And tenants just knowing that ahead of time, it goes so far. There's so much less likely to make an emergency that involves you or is going to turn into something chaotic. They know what they need to do. They've got the numbers and they know, okay, I'm not going to get back to you for a week. That's super smart. So is there any other software? So we talked about property management software. That's essential for all of us, but what other softwares are on the highlight, the top list for you guys that makes your business run better and more efficiently and more passively for yourself? I love, Oh, were you going to say, Oh, you were going to say something else. I would say we both use QuickBooks. We don't use the bookkeeping software within our property management portal, but that's huge. And I'll take it a step further. I would say like one of your very first hires in real estate, once you get to a certain point should be a bookkeeper. I don't know, Chad, do you do your own bookkeeping? I have to imagine you don't. I've hired it out, but I done it myself because I'm a weird nerd. But like most of the time in my career, I've had a bookkeeper. So yes. Yeah. Well, I knew you were a weird nerd. So that's why like I wanted to clarify. Do you still do it or not? No, uh, we, like my time is so much better spent on so many other tasks within real estate than my bookkeeping. And honestly, it's not that expensive at the end of the day. And it's absolutely worth my time to hire that out. So QuickBooks, but Grace, what were you going to say? I would say monday.com is huge for my business. It is bigger with project management. So renovations, but a way that you can use it with tenant turnovers and how I use it is I can import some SOP line items. Like for example, I talked about how there's a list of things I'd And I can populate that as a checklist in Monday that tells me grace, you got to go through these 10 things with Serena on the day she moves in. So when Serena moves in, I'm going through that list and I'm marking it as done or not done. For example, making sure they do a practice maintenance request. So the first time that they do a maintenance request, they don't text and say, how do I do a maintenance request? We know you've got the app downloaded. We know you know how to I'll tell you that it has to have pictures and videos and a description so that we can solve it the first time we send somebody out. I'm also going through late fees. So they know it's non-negotiable. I don't do them. It's automatic in TurboTenant. So these are late fees. You've already agreed to them in your lease. And then other things like lawn care, setting the expectations there. These are all things that are in your lease, but tenants don't read them. I don't read half the leases I sign. Let's be honest. We are not reading these. So you need to go over that. And Monday is a really great way to populate checklists for things for you to do for people moving in, people moving out, and anything in between. That would go into the category of project management software, right? So Monday.com is one. I've used Asana is another one that has a free tier. The base of the idea though is people, if you've ever seen these little boards where you can move a project through like columns in a board and this status now on this status, you can do it with customer service. You can do it with tenant move in. You can do it with project management for like remodels. I live and die by that in my coach Carson business too. Like for every piece of content, it goes through the little boards. So it's a huge part of my business too. We use it for wire. We use it for our bookkeeping team and it can be used even more importantly for keeping track of leads for properties you want to buy. I know we're talking about management, but everybody knows that getting a good deal is in the follow-up. So how do you make yourself a little system to stay following up consistently on properties so that you can score a property later down the line that maybe they initially said no to? I think the theme I see and I really was impressed by you. And by the way, in your book, I didn't mention your book earlier, but your book about self-managing properties. So impressive that just the organization, this idea that a lot of people talk about the sexy parts of real estate investing and the buying the property and all that. But like where the rubber meets the road and rentals and buying properties is being organized. And so you guys have checklists and you have systems and you have processes. And ultimately that stuff's kind of like cleaning your kitchen or doing your laundry. It's not like that. It's not like the sexy stuff on the front end, but man, when it's clean and it's organized, your life is like so much more sane than in the end. I think that's such a big deal. We talk about that a lot. Like people talk about, okay, here's how you buy a property. Here's how much money you're going to make. Go and do it. And then when you get into it, you're like, oh my gosh, where do I go from here? Like, I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know how to set up systems. I don't know how to manage onboard tenants. And that's where the nightmares start to culminate where people get in over their head. But yeah, I honestly, I feel like our little book is such a good little $15 investment or whatever it is. If you're wanting to self-manage, I guarantee you'll at least pull out a few hot tips from it. 100%. I did. I did as well. I reread, went through it last night and there was actually a couple systems that I'm going to get into. We're going to talk about, you mentioned SOPs before. So for those who haven't heard of that, that's standard operating procedure. It's something in the corporate world people talk about a lot, but we real estate investors, we like to nerd out on that too. So I want to get, I wanted to get into that and also your quick guides, but are there, before we go there, are there any other pieces of software that like, I couldn't live without that. I got to have it. We've talked about bookkeeping. We've talked about property management, project management. What else would you say just for the small investors, what they need to focus on? These are little piddly as Amelia would say, items, but Adobe sign, like I'm using that multiple times a week. It's 10 bucks a month, makes your life way easier. And then also paying for, I believe it's called Google workspace. Now it used to be called Google suite. That's also like $12 a month. I think it goes a long way in having a professional email with a separate Google drive. You can get a Google voice number out of it, your own calendar for 12 bucks a month. The level of organization that's going to bring is highly, highly worth it. At least for me. Yep. Got it. Okay. And I would add in there, you talked a little bit in your book about banking. It's kind of, we take it for granted, but you know, having part of the bookkeeping thing that keeps me sane is having, you know, sounds simple, but it's like a separate, separate bank account. Don't mix that with your personal, you know, have, have a separate credit card, have it. So anything you want to say about the banking side of things? Yeah, just absolutely keep everything separate. We talk about this a lot with people as well, who are using their personal account for everything, their personal plus their real estate, even if they own their property in an LLC, which brings up a whole different slew of issues, right? Because you should not be commingling funds, but grace actually work. We actually have an internal bookkeeper at wire because we talked to so many investors that needed bookkeeping that were like, let's just create our own bookkeeping company. So we have a really great bookkeeper on our team, but grace, can you talk a little bit about the people that open too many bank accounts and why that's counterintuitive and actually more of a mess? Yeah. There's so much to say on the bookkeeping taxes organization side that basically, yeah, I do the bookkeeping calls. So I'm calculating people's pricing and it's based off of how many accounts we have to reconcile, how many transactions, all of these things. And people will come and they've got three properties, nine LLCs, 15 bank accounts, 22 loans, and it makes their bookkeeping price astronomical. And then on the other hand, somebody will come with 30 properties, one bank account under their personal name, mixed in with their personal mortgage and dining and everything. And on the bookkeeper side, we have to go through item by item and separate that out, which is extremely difficult. So from property number one, it should be free. Make your own bank account, make your own credit card, and you have to train yourself to keep those separate. It is so hard on your taxes, on your bookkeeping, and on your own mental state to try to co-mingle all of that, but also understand how they're working separately. You will make an ROI on tax time so quickly if you have a good bookkeeper and good systems to keep everything separate. So from property number one, keep it separate, but also don't go crazy with a hundred bank accounts because those are people who are trying to skip bookkeeping because they want to see at a flash looking at their bank account, oh, it's $8,000. That means for this property, I've made $8,000. But if you have 50 properties and 50 bank accounts, that's a lot to manage, where if you just have good bookkeeping, your books will tell you that. And you can do it all out of one account if you want. Yeah. Yeah. You got to think about scaling. Even if you're a small investor, what works for one or two properties is not going to scale to five properties, 10 properties from the software standpoint, but from the banking too. So I think that's such good advice. It's like Goldilocks. You don't want to be too hot, too cold. You don't want to be too big, too small. There is a happy medium with bookkeeping. And I'm a big stick on bookkeeping. When I teach bookkeeping, I'm a big Matrix fan, like Neo and the Matrix. And I say, when you know your books, when you're really good with your books, it's like you see the whole business in zeros and ones. You see numbers and now you can slow down time. You are a powerful superhero when you do your books well. I like that. I just see the green numbers running down the screen. Exactly. This is not a boring topic. You are like a movie star superhero, a Neo person. So do your books. You'll be happy you did. And I've seen the opposite. I've seen people who do not have good books and they think they're doing well. But then I look at their books. I'm like, no, you're not. You're not doing well. You're not even making any money. You're actually paying to be an investor. What am I doing here? Because here's what happens. People use their, they analyze deals on a per property basis, but your books look at your business as at a macro level. And so when people calculate their cashflow, they're going, well, that property is 500. That's 500. So I'm at a thousand. Well, no, you're also spending a thousand bucks on VAs and coaching and whatever. So actually you're a net zero cashflow portfolio. So you have to understand that how you're analyzing properties is not how much money you're making. You have a bigger business with more expenses that needs to be accounted for. Yeah. And you learn a lot too. Like I've, I've, I've gone through the exercise and I'm still doing it. I'm going back historically and looking at my properties and because I have good books the last 22 years, I've learned so much. Like I've, I've learned some things that I thought were working. They weren't working. And now I'm like, well, I'm actually going to teach that to other people. Like, no, maybe we shouldn't do that. So it's, it's like an education for our real estate investing business. And really like as good as teachers as you are, and I hope I'm doing too. The most thing everybody's going to learn is when you finally get in your business and have your own books and you're going to say, this is what works for me. This is what, and the numbers don't lie. Like if you actually make money or don't make money, that's like, that's the bottom line. And that's why we are so passionate. I just want to throw this in there. I know your community is full, but like if you, I feel like both of our communities are very reasonably priced if I do say so myself, but you're going to learn so much from just from our mistakes and mistakes of other people in the community that are willing to share that you will see your ROI 10 times over because we are the types of investors that are looking at our business. We're analyzing things. We're retroactively going back and seeing what worked and what didn't work. And then we're also not scared to share that with our community members. So you have to surround yourself with people like that, that are willing to share those mistakes. And then you can learn from them. Well, I will plug your community and put a link because you have an amazing community and our community is also, it is full, but we'll have a few open every month. So it's one of those things with a waiting list that we're working off of, but communities are so amazing because of that transparency. When you're just chatting on the internet, people don't really, they share a little bit there, a little bit there, but what you're saying, and I agree with, is that when you really talk to people and see behind the scenes, people are willing to share the good, the bad, the things in between. And that's where you really educate yourself. And you don't have to do that yourself. You can actually learn from mistakes and the reality of other people in your community. Well, that's a good transition point. We talked a lot about software, but I want to circle back to, you have all this software, but behind the scenes, there's a sort of structure of a business that really makes sense. And you guys talk about standard operating procedures, SOPs, and also quick guides. And to me, it seems like that's like the skeleton of your business. So can you unpack how you approach that? And maybe for someone who's just getting into that, what would be some ways they can get their toe and kind of start doing it? Yeah. So the way I look at it is how do we get everything out of our heads or out of our email, out of our notebook, out of our text messages into a nice organized, one source of truth. So the way that we do that and what we've coined at WIRE is quick guides and then SOPs. That's nothing new. Probably most of you at a corporate job have SOPs, maybe you don't call on that, but it's just a way that tells you how to do your business. So a quick guide is going to organize important information. For example, a properties list quick guide has every single property, when you bought it, when you refinanced it, the mortgage number, what you're paying. It's one source of truth. So whenever you have questions about a property, that is where you go to look. You're not digging through your email or your text messages or calling an old closing agent. You have the information there. On the other hand, you have SOPs that tell you how to do things in your business. For example, I have a properties acquisition SOP. It is a bunch of things I need to do to close a property. And one of the light items is once you close, add that property to your properties quick guide. I have the information fresh, top of mind. I know where the loan numbers are located. And I put that information into a quick guide. So those are the two things that hand in hand will honestly save you so much time and energy. We've heard from countless people saying even just the anxiety that gets relieved when you know that everything is organized and know where to find it is so helpful as a real estate investor because we're go, go, go. We don't think about making sure that things are written down. And one other story I'll tell is we had a gal in wire who was going through our CEO framework. And she actually got really sick and was in a coma in the hospital. And what do you think happened to her business while she was literally unconscious? Everything was, if she was an investor who didn't have these things, it's all in her head inaccessible. Obviously, the number one most important thing is we're getting better, not necessarily a maintenance request. But luckily, she'd been working with her husband to develop these quick guides and SOPs. So now that information that could have been stuck in her head is accessible. It's on paper. Somebody else can come in and take control of that. Or what if you just want to go to Europe for a month or take a break or you're going camping and you're inaccessible? Those are all things that could happen. And if you just have a system where you're writing things down and keeping good information in your business, it makes it immensely more helpful. So it sounds like it's a set of systems like the SOPs or checklists, they could be instructions. Are there any other like forms that SOPs come in? Or like checklists is the one I think about a lot, like an acquisitions checklist with here's all the things you got to do before you buy it. Are there any other types of SOPs that you can think of? Yeah, it's a checklist that explains how to do something. So like my most used SOPs would be properties acquisition, selling a property, onboarding a long-term rental tenant, raising private money. And you can either use that as a checklist or what I do is I make the checklist on Monday that matches the SOP. The SOP has way more information like links or hey, click this button. And then Monday it's just check, I did it, I did it, I did it. And that keeps you from making sure that you don't miss things, things don't fall through the cracks and that you're staying proactive in your business. So in terms of organizing them, I'm assuming digital files, I keep a lot of mine in Google Drive. I have like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, how do you organize them and then have some questions about actually like implementing and people starting doing this? We use Google Drive and Google Docs and Sheets, but actually your property management software is like we talked about at the beginning of the episode, they're super strong these days. So like a quick guide, for example, that I'm thinking you could actually just keep on your property management software is your appliances quick guide. You will save so much time going back and forth with the tenant if you have the fridge serial number, the stove serial number, dishwasher, all of those stored either in a quick guide on Google Drive or directly in your property management software. Because when an issue comes up, the first thing that they're going to ask is do you have the serial number so I can see exactly what I'm dealing with or whatever. So yeah, we use Google Drive or you can also use your software for a lot these things. Wait, one other really good management quick guide to have is maintenance troubleshooting. For example, we all have those random quirks in our properties that live in our heads. For example, the TV that's on the switch. A lot of tenants are not used to switches. And so they tell you the TV is broken, the electrical is not working. Well, no, it's just the switch that's on the right side of the doorway. So write that down and make it in your SOP that you check that before you ever send somebody out to the property. That's going to save you a lot of money. Or I have a lot of trouble historically with washers and dryers. So where I've learned the few little things that you need to do to make sure that they're balanced and doors latching, and this code means that. Write it down. It's going to save you so much money with vendors. And also it teaches your tenants to troubleshoot a little bit before just instantly making a maintenance request. See, I'm taking those for myself. Like some of these quick guides I do have. I have my checklist, but I'm like, the appliance checklist, I don't have... I'm so random with my appliances. I have a few more properties and they come in and out. I haven't taken the time, but that's such an important piece because even with my property managers, just this week, I've had, we've got to replace a stove or whatever. If I had that list, I could just put that in an email. Here's the one, find it on my list. Here it is. Then they could then take it and go to Lowe's to either to get a part if the person's repairing it or just to order the replacement. They know how wide it is now. They know all the specs. I mean, how much time would we spend going on it, looking up stuff and going... I mean, that could be like 30 minutes or an hour on one stove. It could have been solved by like a 10 second text response. And if it's a water heater in this example, and you're paying a plumber, that could be a hundred bucks an hour or more that you're paying them. I remember I started this appliance quick guide because I had to pay a plumber just to go see what the water heater was, to then go order the parts. And I was like, huh, how can I cut this step out? Or for example, when you're managing a lot of properties, you might start to forget, wait, does that house have central AC? Is that a gas stove? Like, I don't even know, I've got 30 properties and I renovated that six years ago. I don't remember if it's a gas stove. My favorite troubleshooting story is actually Grace's. And this is just like the chaos of being a landlord when you're just running around like a chicken with your head cut off. She had an MTR tenant tell her that the light bulb in the kitchen was out. And so instead of doing any sort of troubleshooting whatsoever to like get what size of light bulb or have them send a picture, this was before she was using like the maintenance software portion of her property management software. She runs around, she grabs light bulbs, she goes over to the property, she gets to the property, it's a freaking ceiling fan light bulb. So then she's like, dang it, I have to, now I have to go back to Menards, which is 20 minutes away and then come back, put the light, like it's, she wasted so much time when she could have just done a little bit. One more extra text message of troubleshooting. One more question. Yes, would have saved me an hour. Exactly. And just like the stress, I hate that. I know that feeling of being in that situation and you're just like so angry at yourself, like, oh, I'm wasting so much time. So a little bit of troubleshooting goes so far. Been there, done that, done some of those runs as well. I have a different relationship with Lowe's and Home Depot, Menards. I just, you know, just, I get that. I don't like going in there. I'll pay somebody to go in there. I don't even want to touch, go step foot in that place. That's just me. Maybe there's a lot of other people who are fine with it. So I'm just going to list some ideas like this. I definitely recommend your book to get like the full list of a lot of these guides and some of the checklists, but just things like door codes, list of all your mortgages. A big one for me is insurance. Like I, for years, I didn't really have my insurance list organized. That one has been huge. If I'm trying to get quotes from a new insurance company, if I'm just trying to make sure I have insurance, like I've had a couple of claims. I've had a bunch of them, but we had the hurricane that came through last year, Hurricane Helene, and I had to go look through my insurance and find it. It was so fast when I could actually just look at my list. There it is. There's the link. Everything's in a Google doc. I mean, it's that these kinds of things are, they save you stress. They save you time. And so what I would ask, like both with SOPs and with these guides, I think people are going to be like, yes, yes, yes. I need these things. But it also feels really intimidating. Like I'm so busy. I got kids. I have this thing going on. I'm doing my real estate on the side. Like how do you actually like start, you know, taking this on in a way that's like feasible for yourself so you don't overwhelm yourself? I'm huge on calendar blocking. So whatever time you can carve out, maybe it's only 30 minutes a week, make a recurring 30 minute reminder on your calendar that you go to a quiet place away from life and you work on these lists of things and you tackle it one step at a time. So in that calendar invite, write your top four most important quick guides that you need to create and just get in there and start working on it 30 minutes at a time. A lot of people make the mistake where they think this is all going to happen overnight. And then they start to dig in, for example, to the properties quick guide and they go, oh, I got to call this closing agent to get the paperwork. And remember when I closed and, oh, I got to go check my filing cabinet at my office because it's there. And it gets a little bit overwhelming. One step at a time, you will get there. 30 minutes a week could be more than enough to get this in order. It's not going to be tomorrow that this all gets fixed. But more importantly, once you do get them created, how are you making sure that you're sticking to them and that you're training yourself to fill them out? So whenever you can try to always work off of an SOP, try to systemize yourself. And I promise you, you'll be using a lot less brain power and things will be a lot easier for you. Or you can gamify it. Like if you're like me and you get distracted easily or I don't know, whatever the case may be, set a timer for 20 minutes and be like, I'm going to see how much I can bang out in 20 minutes. And you can bet your bottom dollar, you can get a lot done in 20 minutes if you throw your phone across the room so you're not distracted by it and you just work. Or like, you know, I do that when I need to clean my house too, right? Like how much can I clean in 20 minutes? I'm going to set a timer and bam, like I'm off to the races. You can get so much done that way. Yeah, I love that. A little hack, and I'm not sure if you guys have played around with AI side of things on this either, but like my coach Carson business a lot lately, I'll take a process that like, it just feels intimidating for me to put, you know, just type that SOP out. And then you can just, I just talk to chat GPT and say, all right, here's my process. This is what I'm doing. I'm going to tell you all this stuff. And I want you to put this on a checklist, do an SAP, you know, use this best practice. Like you can like get from your ideas in your head to like a checklist really fast these days. And I think this is like maybe going forward in the future, but like the fact that y'all have, and an investor could have all of these checklists and documents that that's what AI, when you train AIs, that's what they work off of. So like, if you have a really organized SOP, I can see like a customer service, you know, bot, for example, that says you talk to your tenants and say like, we're available during these hours. But if you want to talk to my customer service bot between 11 and 7 AM, they could like text with the bot and it would, it could have all of your, you know, your Q and A's and your responses, and you can train it on that. So not only is this something that would help you run your business, this is also like the next step of the evolution of your business is being able to train, train either AIs or train other people, like either way. Like, and so maybe, can you talk about that a little bit? Just like that idea of training. Wait, does that already exist? Or did you just share that right now and you need to run and trademark that idea real quick? I probably, I probably need to. Hold on. It's brilliant. That's a pretty good idea, right? Pretty good idea. It is brilliant. I would say, yeah, first and foremost in that, that idea in the simplest manner, if you don't know how to start a properties acquisition SOP, go ask ChatGPT, make me a properties acquisition SOP and then take things out that aren't important or add things in as you learn. And then, oh my gosh, the AI capabilities, that is incredible. There's so much that you can train your AI to do, but even just having them get you 60, 75% of the way to an SOP is going to save you so much time. I have no thoughts on that to add other than I want to be an investor on that idea. So when you, when you get that up and running, let me know. Okay. I think we need to work together on this. I think we need to put our heads together and leverage some of our software friends to help us out with that. The girl who I was telling the story about who went to Europe for a month used to be an app developer and she has always been on my case about making apps out of these quick guides and SOPs. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Cut that part. Yeah. Michael cut that part out. No, I love it. So the fun thing about all of this is that, you know, a little bit of work on the front end, like I love, Grace, I love your idea, just 30 minutes a week, you do this a little bit, but over time, like I remember the satisfying moment. This is, you know, ours is all on Google Drive now and we have the project management software, but I specifically remember we had like a three ring binder with this stuff. And like the peace of mind you have when it's the equivalent of like cleaning your kitchen, but when you clean your business up and it's systematized and it's organized, like it is such an empowering feeling. And it takes you to go back to the full circle to how we started this conversation. Like instead of the mom and pop investor, who's like flying by the seat of your pants and who's chaotic and the equivalent of you running out with a light bulb to one property, like instead you're proactive, you're communicating, you have these systems, these processes. The end result, at least for me, is like this, that I was able to travel. Like I was able to go to Ecuador and live for 17 months and have somebody else that I could hand these things off to. I could have tenants turn over and, you know, have a checklist on when things get painted and how they happen. So that experience has been really amazing for me. And I love for you guys just to talk about how this whole idea has affected your life and like what you've been able to do because you've focused on systems and processes. I just want to add the singular data point you could probably use to best measure how well somebody is systemized is how stressful is tax time. Because if you've got all these quick guides and you've got good books because you've got good SOPs and you can send that properties quick guide to your CPA so they know everything that happened in your business that year, tax time can be very easy if you have the right systems throughout the year. So that'll be a great measure. If you're somebody who's like, holy crap, it takes me a year and a half to file my taxes. I get further and further behind. You probably don't have any systems, so you need to put in some work. But yeah, at this point in our portfolios, Amelia and I are much more focused on... Amelia, what's your iconic line about hobbies? I'll let you say it. I don't even know. What is it? I've got too many hobbies to be employed. She's got too many hobbies to work. So we're really focused on, I feel like I've made the foundational portfolio that gives me the lifestyle I want. Now I want a better quality of life rather than maybe more properties. How do I work less? How do I have less stress? How do I get out of the maintenance side of my business? So I think that's what we're focused on. To me, having an organized business for all my girlies out there feels like having a perfectly clean house. It's a fall day. You've got a candle lit. The windows are open. You've got NFL playing in the background. Chili's on the crockpot. It's the best feeling in the world, right? So good. I was just telling Grace this the other day. When you truly start to treat real estate like a business, how lucky are we that we have that skill that we could turn into a multi-six-figure income per year, if not more, if we really wanted to? If we wanted to put in that work, we know how to source the deals. We know how to do renovations. We can, if you want to do flipping or whatever, it's just such a great skill that probably 95% of the population doesn't have. And it can truly change your life if you're willing to put in the work up front to get to that point. Well said. I think that's the best way to say it. And I want to make sure we've talked about your community, the WIRE community, also your book. I want a big endorsement for those. You guys are doing awesome work. I've been jealous watching all the pictures of Zion National Park and ATV riding. I'm like, what is up with this retreat? That's so cool. So it's Women Investing in Real Estate is your community and your book. Is there anything else you want to say about those? And I'm happy to put links to anything you have going on in the podcast and YouTube description. Yeah. Our goal is to help women become W-2 optional, not say they own a thousand units. So we're really focused on some of our core values, like being fearless, meaning you get to go do whatever adventures you want to do because you have the business that is systemized at home. So those are the type of people we attract, not the ones who are just grinding, grinding, grinding for every extra dollar. Nothing wrong with that. That's what you want to be in. But our goal is to help people become W-2 optional through real estate investing so they can have a life by their own design. Yeah. I would also just add that if you enjoyed this podcast, we have our own podcast as well, which is the WIRE podcast, Women Investing in Real Estate. So you can find us there as well. We'd love to have you. In an episode of the chat. Yes, I was on there. Yeah. One of the few guys that you let in the door. I felt very lucky about that, right? I know. I think we've only had like five at this point. Maybe we'll have to have you back on. Anytime. Anytime. Let me know. So really appreciate it. You guys, y'all have so many good things going on and your real estate businesses are inspiring and what you're doing is inspiring. So thank you for being here. And I know people will check you out and I look forward to connecting against you. Thank you, Chad. Thank you. All right. Thank you. In this episode, you learned about the overall systems and technology you need in your rental business. But there's one rental system that's probably more important than any other. And we really didn't cover it as much. And that's how to get your property rented with the best tenants. So I want to recommend my next episode called seven tips for renting out your house. It's perfect for beginner or experienced investors. So if you're watching on YouTube, you can click on the thumbnail above me here. Or if you're listening on the podcast or watching on YouTube, you can click on the link in the podcast or the YouTube description below. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next episode.