Nate Smoyer: How AI Is Revolutionizing Property Management

Kyle James (00:01.248) Hey, welcome to the ad Chronicles podcast. I'm your host Kyle James. And today we'll be diving in headfirst into how real estate company called Lula is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we talk more about that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT trainer. GPT trainer literally builds out and manages your AI for you, eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time of frustration is going to take you to get it finished. It may not be worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Today I have with me on the show, Nate Smoyer, who is a seasoned marketing leader and former podcast host, specializing in prop tech. With over 12 years of experience driving growth for startups like Avale and Obie, Nate is currently head of marketing at Lula. Residing in South Dakota, Nate balances his professional life with personal pursuits and ultra running. riding motorcycles and real estate investing. Excited to have him on the show. Hey Nate, welcome in. Nate Smoyer (01:31.834) Hey Kyle, thanks for having me here. Kyle James (01:33.614) Yeah, man, for sure. So doing a lot. mean, I've noticed you podcast host for a little bit, which is really cool. And I think that's, always fan. We have another, uh, podcast guests on the, uh, on the show, but like, tell me, like, tell me a little bit about Lula, maybe a little bit about your background, like how you ended up at Lula. Nate Smoyer (01:49.945) Yeah, so I'll spare you the long life story, but I mean, I've always been interested in real estate. And there was a moment when I bought my first house and did it all my own, found a for sale by owner. And it was actually a frustrating experience. I actually burned through like six different agents and I had agents like, I had one agent like yell at me because I didn't call them back and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. And the whole process was really confusing. And then it got even a little more confusing when I was like, okay, well, I'm going to rent out the bedrooms. You know, today we call it house hacking. just did what felt natural. And I went through this process of like, I didn't trust the tools on the market. And I was like, why does this feel so old? This feels so antiquated. Something has got to change. And that was, I looked back at that and I was back in 2015. That was the initial spark for me to pursue PropTech. And actually it went so far as to become a real estate agent, sold homes. I had worked with wholesalers. And really went head first into it. And it wasn't until a few years later that I really realized that I could take this interest for real estate, take my experience from working with software companies and combine them and really start finding my place. And that's actually how I came across PropTech and doing some research when I started an agency and, you know, finding my way to Lula was really just a matter of kind of you alluded to, I was a podcast host. I did a podcast called Tech Nest where I featured leaders and innovators all throughout real estate and technology, you know, working to transform the way we buy, and invest in real estate. And through those connections and networking, you know, for the last year and a half, two years or so, something like that, I've known the guys here over at Lula and I've been building that relationship, not knowing what it would come to. And the timing just came about where, you know, I was looking for that right next challenge. And the CEO hit me up and we were able to make it make sense. And, know, here we are a few months later. Kyle James (03:52.814) Yeah, for sure. you, it's exciting. mean, I knew what prop tech is, but I think for some of our listeners, like what, what does prop tech, like, what does that mean exactly? Break it down for us a bit. Nate Smoyer (03:59.984) Yeah, it's really the, you know, I define it rather simply, although it's a very broad category. But it's really just the intersection of property or real estate and technology. Now, I'm also a critic of the term itself, because I don't even know what that means anymore. Like if you have a website, and let's say, even as a real estate brokerage, You have a website and there's an IDX feed and it connects to your CRM. Your CRM has a chat bot and there's automations that push out emails based on actions or triggers. And maybe you do some, you know, maybe there's still like some additional list building and scraping and then you have social media ads built. Is that really like what to what degree level do we call this technology or is that just standard business as usual? I look at that as business as usual. I've always looked at, know, PropTech is really kind of taking us the next level above what has already become status quo. You know, at some point you could say that fax machines were so they were fintech, right? They made it possible for financial transactions to occur, you know, with authorizations and whatever else as you needed them to go. But they're not. Fintech, they're not really PropTech, you know, and it became the status quo. And I look at that as like it's antiquated. So I kind of, it's an evolving term as we move forward and as we continue to, you know, create new technologies or new ways of doing things, you know, that's the next wave becomes what PropTech is and everything else just becomes as part of business as usual. Kyle James (05:39.97) Yeah, for sure. And so now you kind of got into like the prop tech and obviously the real estate that sparked the interest way long ago from the experiences that you had, but like, so right now you're, you, mean, I'm sure you've been using AI well before, like being on board with Lula, but like what exactly like is Lula like using AI for like, and what types of like challenges are being solved, like within the AI to make things a little bit better, both internally, maybe you next turn. Nate Smoyer (06:05.185) Yes, let me set the stage here little bit. Our customers are third party property management companies in residential real estate. So think single family homes and small multifamily, maybe two, three floors up. We prefer to those as garden style. These property managers typically manage somewhere between 200 up to 10,000 doors. So they're not typically the owner, but sometimes they're owner operators. But usually they're managing these properties on behalf of other investors who want more of passive investment. And so there's a lot of challenges for property managers today aside from maintenance, which is really where we focus. know, everything from getting the house ready, interviewing applicants, taking in applications, doing the screenings, scheduling move-in, doing move-in inspections, and then managing the relationships between the resident and the owners throughout the year. Now let's insert some maintenance. maintenance can be simple and it can be really nuanced and layered and complicated quickly. But if the tenant sends an email to the property manager, hey, the heat doesn't work. What does that mean? Is the thermostat broken? Did the HVAC unit blow up? Did the power go out? We don't know. So now we have to triage back and forth with the resident. Once we've determined, hey, this is something that requires someone to fix or we need someone to go look at it, if you're lucky, and you have a large enough company, you send your internal maintenance guy, you know, person, go and take a look. And maybe they can fix it, maybe they require an HVAC technician. But even so, if we determine it requires a technician, now we have to coordinate the tenant schedule with the technician. But you also go back to, there are certain spend limits pre-authorized by the owner, some that you have to get additional authorization. So now we have to go back to the owner and say, we've gone back and forth. We've done all this investigation. This is the problem. This is the cost of the fix. Do you want us to do it? And so once we get that coordinated, then we have to confirm that we have all the parts and the company's available at the time that the resident is available to get the fix, confirm it's been completed. And then, yes, still someone has to pay the technician and then they bill back the owners and wait for the owners to pay the property management company. As you can see, this becomes complicated. Nate Smoyer (08:27.692) rather quickly. And there's a lot of back and forth. So if you're trying to show units, move people in, move people out, and all that's happening, you can see really quickly how this would eat into your day. So setting the stage, this is what Lula handles for property management companies. First off, we built a network of 7,000 vetted contractors nationwide. We're in about 50 markets. And so when an issue arises, we have someone to be able to handle that issue. And then it's the underlying technology of information back and forth, communications, and even some of our automations that enables for us to move quickly. We can't spend as much time on every ticket as you normally would. Otherwise our business wouldn't be able to scale exponentially. We'd be a very linear growth business. So today we have about 15 different specialized agents handling some of the admin and tedious items that would be behind the scenes. Then this can be an array of different tasks like pulling specific information, being able to get pricing on things and that sort of thing. We also have a co-pilot that all of our internal project coordinators have access to. And we've been training this co-pilot for the last two years. you know, as the way we've been operating, we've been in operations for about eight years. We've been able to harness all of the data, real maintenance tickets. real discussions, real solutions and even real problems along the way and been using that to train our co-pilot internally. And what this does is this enables that order intake. Hey, the heat doesn't work. Let's standardize that once we triage. We need to put that in a uniform pattern so that we know what we're reading, our property management customers know what they're reading, the vendors that we're working with know what they're reading. So we're really consistent across the board. And so, We're able to make every one of our project coordinators on the moment a subject matter expert because of that co-pilot tool. So we have a broad range of applications here, but that gives you a very high level view of really what we're trying to accomplish and then what we're using technology to help us with. Kyle James (10:36.227) Yeah. Kyle James (10:41.198) Yeah, for sure. So like, is it, you know, cause like when you, for the first time, are you shares, like, Hey, some properties could be like 200 up to 10,000. Like, man, I can't imagine like managing 10,000 or even, even 2000 properties. Like that would be a full-time gig. And even if I made a bunch of money, I probably wouldn't be able to have time to spend it. Cause I've just been back and forth. Like, so essentially it's like, Louis is able to help reduce the amount of maintenance time on this, but on the flip side is like, okay, you're taking these 15 really specialized AI agents. Nate Smoyer (10:53.51) Hehehehe Kyle James (11:11.502) And allowing, guess it's just like internally, right? Cause there is so many intricate like pipes that it goes through like, okay, here's the triage first. And, I feel like the triage is like pretty basic stuff. But like, when you get to the more, Hey, the AC is broken and now you have to go back and forth to owner. that's like the, okay, human probably needs to spend more time with the owner and collaborating back and forth, but everything in between. That seems like that could, that probably takes, you know, 60 % of the time. So it's like. Nate Smoyer (11:14.898) That's correct. Nate Smoyer (11:24.944) Hmm. Nate Smoyer (11:34.097) Right. Kyle James (11:39.414) Essentially having the AI to handle a lot of those, a lot of those tasks, right? Nate Smoyer (11:43.666) Right, and so it's really important to remember, so property managers typically operate out of one single source of truth or system of record. And this would be their property management software. This is really designed around managing the property. Now, some of them have maintenance modules and different things that plug in to assist with maintenance, but they don't go to the final mile, which is finding the contractor, coordinating with the contractor, and then dispatching that. This is really the difference maker with Lula. And we've recognized that. We also know that we don't want to try and get property managers to switch. So it's very important that the data that we pull from and then push back to their true source of record or their system of record or source of truth, it's very important that we're able to do that efficiently, consistently, and in a way that our customers expect that. That's something that we've really honed in on developing and spent a lot of time. In fact, one of the exercises I've been working with one of our head or lead engineers recently, it's just fine tuning some of those communications. The framing of some of those communications. So they're going back and forth. Not only are we communicating relevant information, but we've just been inserting a little bit of personality and making this a little bit more fun so that maintenance doesn't feel like such a chore. And it really is, and there really isn't. anything you do to like take away the burden of maintenance, but we can make the process of handling those concerns a lot faster, more efficient. And ultimately at the end of the day, that, know, the jury has already concluded on this. It's not only rough for debate. The way you handle maintenance directly ties to necessary and unnecessary turnover with tenants. And Tenant Churn, Kyle James (13:36.216) Tell me more, tell me about that. Like, cause I know that's a big, it's a big deal for a lot of, you know, property owners. Nate Smoyer (13:37.946) Yeah, so the living experience, if the residents are unhappy, you know, it takes too long to get a response. It takes too long to get someone out. You know, it's too cumbersome back and forth trying to figure out scheduling. And so feels like things never get done. They move out. And when they move out, then you're doing a turn. You're cleaning the unit. You're doing all different painting and fixing and things that you shouldn't have to necessarily maybe do if they were to stay a second year. So now you're incurring new costs, you're having time offline, which means you have less rent collected. Ultimately, this reduces overall return on your investment. So from a property management perspective, it's important to do that, but not only because of reducing the churn and maximizing return on investment, but when you have regular turnover from tenants, this can cause owner churn. And owner churn directly impacts the property management business. Kyle James (14:31.406) Wow. Nate Smoyer (14:34.864) So by solving the experience around maintenance and truly making it easy for all three of these parties involved, you actually solve many headaches. The residents don't have to pack up and move, which is very expensive in and of itself. Owners feel safe and secure with their investment so they're not at risk of churning. And for the property management company, it's less unnecessary work and costs. Kyle James (14:57.838) Hmm. love that. Cause like it goes back to like the mindset of like the pain in this case. Cause like, I think a lot of people would realize, okay, it's, it's the tenant, right? Like the tenants churning. don't want, I had a tenant and the tenants gone, but it's like, no, it's not just that though. If I fall, all these property management, if they, it's one thing to the tenant churns, but it's also okay. If the owner churns, but it all goes back to the user experience kind of in a way, right? Like the tenant experience and even the owner experience, if they're all having these headaches, then you know, Nate Smoyer (15:21.222) Yeah, absolutely. Kyle James (15:27.948) Where does it end? ends in churn, which never helps any company anywhere. When the churn happens, unless this is like a absolute train wreck, right? Sometimes in some cases it might be best to let things go, but like for the most part, right? It's keeping the clients, keeping the tenants, keeping the owners from churning, you know, from going away. And I like this, I like this conversation here, Nate, because like, like I mentioned before, it's like, it's going back to like the pain because I think a lot of companies out there today and people in different organizations. It's like, okay, what do I, what do I start putting the AI? do I start on the AI side? It's like, okay, first things first. What is the most annoying thing that you cannot stand to do? And let's figure out a way for AI to automate that. And that's essentially what you're doing internally, right? Nate Smoyer (15:58.726) Mm-hmm. Nate Smoyer (16:05.733) Yeah. Nate Smoyer (16:13.004) Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a really like brass tacks example. So when I was a podcast host, I felt bad because I had a full time job and I just didn't spend a lot of time in my personal inbox. Like I didn't want to manage all the inquiries. And at some point I was getting several inquiries a week on top of everything else. I'm trying to keep them on top of, and I was just like, I'll get to it on the weekend. But then that meant like people were following up every two and three days. And it, I'm not trying to ignore people. didn't want to ignore people, but that's what it ended up turning into. And so I was like, okay, I turn on auto responder, but I got an auto responder to everybody. So what I did was, I had a form on my website and that's where people were filling out the form to come on the show. And so I was like, okay, let's just play around a little bit. Let's see how this works. And this was pretty early. I can't remember exactly when ChatGPT and Zapier integrated, but I was like, okay. Let's take the inquiry results from this air table. We're gonna then put together a prompt and it's gonna trigger a prompt into chat. And I gave it a rather warm temperature on like, know, freedom to write a new email for me. So it would write an email for me and it take some of the input fields and then, but also it looked for stuff that was in the message to include in the email to make the email unique. Kyle James (17:27.022) Mm-hmm. Nate Smoyer (17:39.088) And then it would write the email for me. It would send it from Gmail and then it would archive it in for me in a spreadsheet. And the idea here was first I wanted to see everything that was actually going out. Because now I didn't have to monitor it as closely. Everything was going into my air table so I was able to manage like my inbound leads that way. I didn't manage it in my email inbox. But now I got an immediate response back to people letting them know, hey, I just have my hands tied a little bit. I'm going to get back to you. I got your request. And it was very important I did it, you know, in a way that It wasn't purely based on merge fields because the merge field, sometimes the person filling out the form was themselves. Sometimes it was a PR agency and it was in the message that usually that information was clarified. And I actually, I found out it was very accurate in being able to like figure out who was pitching who to come on the show. So my email was intelligent going back to them. And if, if, you know, that's one little thing that you didn't like doing, well, that took off my plate. was like 50 emails a month. Kyle James (18:30.552) Hmm. Nate Smoyer (18:40.094) And it was instant. went right out. It was relevant. You know, it helped me save a little face. These are the little things that you could get started with when you like how you put it, like what annoys you the most or what don't you like using? But today, today I've got different workflows for all different kinds of different kinds of things. I mean, I saved, you we you know, you're probably a lot of the marketers who may be listening to this. Kyle James (18:47.106) Hmm. Nate Smoyer (19:08.262) You're probably familiar with what's called scenes. You know, if you're for design, you'd have a scene for like maybe a plumber, maybe an HVAC guy, maybe someone doing door repair appliances. The cost of hiring designers on that can get pretty substantial. And I was actually able to create almost like a hundred different scenes in a day or two of sitting down and like working through this. And now as a marketer and not really a designer, When I need assets with light design added and giving them a little bit of personality, I don't have to go back to the designer. I have a whole library of scenes I can pull from already created. That's what we talk about. it's not, it doesn't have to be, you know, next generation way out there. I've never heard of this solution before. There are true gains of efficiencies and you know, we're an earlier stage startup. So I'm a team of one. I handle our CRM. I write all of our email copy. Kyle James (19:47.5) Mm-hmm. Nate Smoyer (20:07.974) That's to our providers, that's to our residents, that's to our property management companies. Company announcements or social. I've been working as a BDR for the last three weeks to get the first-hand experience of working with our BDRs. And so anything else that gets done, all of our conferences, traveling for that, the booths for that, the print materials, and then all of our integration partners and all the sales, collateral that go with that. Without being able to leverage these tools, and having a solid foundation of first what I wanted and then being able to expedite the time it takes to create. It's just as a one person show, it's just not possible. Kyle James (20:45.198) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And what have you, I mean, I appreciate explaining just kind of for you, like what, I want to try and go back to like, like Lulule here and like even the experience, like what, what types of results have you been seeing like since, because I think there's a lot of companies who are like trying to, they're doing it manually and it's just, that's working. They got to have more people. I got to get VA's on the team. Like what has been like the key result that's worth maybe noting since you've been implementing a lot of AI. Nate Smoyer (20:55.633) Yeah. Nate Smoyer (21:04.028) Mm-hmm. Nate Smoyer (21:08.804) Yeah, so that's a great question. So our project coordination team, as I mentioned, you know, first, you know, internally, we have about 15 different AI agents handling administrative tasks behind the scenes. And I know earlier this year, and I wish I would have pulled the numbers here to get you, but basically we could look back and earlier this year, we were able to see that our intake was up nearly a hundred percent year over year without any staff increases. So if you could take more requests, if you could take more orders, Kyle James (21:34.328) huge. Nate Smoyer (21:37.714) If you could take more jobs at the rate of 100 % year over year without having to add to your staff count, that's what we're talking about, the real change makers here. And furthermore on that, we've been able to improve, we measure our MPS scores with both our providers as well as our own MPS score. And we've been able to improve with that as we've been building out our own AI solutions internally. Kyle James (22:00.192) Yeah, that's cool. That's, that's a huge, mean, a hundred percent year over year is that's a big number. Like that's, that's something worth noting. You know what mean? Nate Smoyer (22:05.362) Yeah, and you know, there's other markers to that, you know, people are feel free to validate this. We were just named Kansas City's fastest growing business by Ingram's magazine. We were again, one of the fastest growing in the last year for Kansas City Business Journal. And then I think it's safe to say because of when this podcast will release, but we'll be on the Inc 5000 list for the third year run. Kyle James (22:32.12) that's awesome. It's incredible. And what would you say like, I mean, within these next couple of years, where do you feel like Lula is going to be focusing their AI initiatives, you know, next couple of months, couple of years worth mentioning. Nate Smoyer (22:44.37) Yeah, you know, I'm glad you asked that. mean, one of the most exciting things we have is a product called Foresight. And this really is a full solution. A lot of people know Lula First is because of our vendor network with over 7,000 maintenance providers available nationwide. That's tough thing to mimic and to do and to build. And I've seen now how it's been made and it's hard. It's very hard. But the next iteration to this is really, truly customizing and work order management. And what we've been doing internally, we can now hand over to companies that want to take it on all inside their own house. And so that's a product called Foresight. And that's what we're really excited to get to market and to release. We've been doing basically private testing with a handful of customers. going through all the scenarios, making sure it works. Because this is kind of, this is a really big deal. So we're really excited for that this year. We have another tool that has yet to be announced that I don't even think we've talked about it publicly yet. And I'm probably gonna still hold back a little bit on this, but for just the work order intake, this in and of itself, the ingestion of work orders. As I mentioned to you earlier, how we help our internal team become essentially Kyle James (23:54.594) Yeah, but SK, probably so. Nate Smoyer (24:08.322) a subject matter expert on the spot with the use of our co-pilot, being able to release that technology and now you can plug that into your business. So you can put it on your website, you can have it as part of your resident portal or inside of your other systems of record that we integrate with. This is gonna be a really powerful tool that I think a lot of people will add on to. And then we do finally have one other service offering aside from that, that we're gonna be announcing. So we've got a ton of stuff in Kyle James (24:36.749) Yeah. Nate Smoyer (24:37.37) in the works that is really being enabled because of the tech we've been investing in. Kyle James (24:41.454) Yeah, that's cool. I love the, it's like not just the one two direction, like you have multiple different like facets that you're aiming towards. know what mean? And that's, that's wise, right? Especially with how fast AI is moving to have these sorts of integrations and these, applications ahead. Cause who knows where it's going to be in even next month. I don't know. Well, we'll find out. So, and as we start wrapping up, Nate, man, it's been great having you on the show and where can people learn maybe a little bit more about you and then maybe a little, a little bit more about Lula that you recommend them, you know, check out next. Nate Smoyer (24:46.972) Yeah, absolutely. Nate Smoyer (24:59.538) Yeah. Nate Smoyer (25:10.544) Yeah, I mean, if anyone's interested, know, certainly look me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to find me is just Nate's Moir on LinkedIn. I'm the only one, so I'll be easy to spot. You can check out Lula. It's just lula.life. If you have any specific interests or needs that I would say reach out to me first. You know, I'm happy to get you connected with the right people and make sure you get taken care of. Kyle James (25:33.358) Awesome. Love it. Thanks so much. Nate's been great having you on the show and appreciate your perspective with everything going on in the real estate and the industry. We always enjoy having people on the real estate space. So appreciate your time today, And thanks again, everybody for listening in. Please remember, if you're looking at implementing AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself. The time is just the AI could cause. It may not be worth it. So schedule a call with GPT trainer and let them build out manager AI for you. Once again, that's GPT. Nate Smoyer (25:45.862) Yeah, was an honor. Thanks, Kyle. Kyle James (26:02.514) signing off for now. a great rest of your day, everyone. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.