How Brian LeBow Grew a Property Management Company From $100K to $450K/Month

Brian LeBow (00:00)

Yeah, I mean, the monthly revenue has expanded significantly over the last five years from probably five years ago, we were doing maybe 100,000 a month. Right now we’re closer to 450 a month. So really substantial growth over the past few years really tapping into our resources, which includes agents, brokers, folks that send us business, making sure they’re well taken care of and their clients are super well taken care of. Also really exploring government contracts has been a huge benefit to us and really just taking care of our clients. We schedule monthly calls with them. I do those calls myself and I spend about two days every month.

Joseph Crooms (02:13)

Hey everyone. Thank you for joining Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcasts, huh? I’m your host Joseph Crooms I’m your today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with his name is Brian LeBow and who’s been making some serious moves in the property management area. know a lot of you are interested in that. Hey, Brian, say hello to everyone.

Brian LeBow (02:37)

Hello everyone!

Joseph Crooms (02:38)

Great and we’re glad to have you here. I think our listeners are going to take away something from you from your approach to property management especially in the area that you’re primary you’re sort of like in an urban area primary. Is that correct?

Brian LeBow (02:54)

Yeah, we’re expanding our reach, but right now we’re in San Francisco and Los Angeles and working towards Sacramento and San Diego and the other smaller markets throughout the state of California.

Joseph Crooms (03:05)

Sounds good. Let’s dive into this. So first of all for people who are not familiar with your world give us the short version What’s your main focus these days? What markets are you operating in?

Brian LeBow (03:16)

Well, we’re in San Francisco pretty heavily, about 2000 units in San Francisco with two other portfolios coming online within the next six months. That’ll bring our total Northern California unit count to around 2600. And we’re also very heavy in Los Angeles, in LA County with another 2000, 2500 units in SoCal and looking to expand that into San Diego, Sacramento and other smaller markets throughout the state this year.

Joseph Crooms (03:43)

How have you been working with them?

Brian LeBow (03:45)

Yeah, so super important that we’re connected with our community and real estate brokers are certainly part of our primary network that we try to connect with and share information with and resources with often through podcasts and other communications. And we try to provide really substantial referral fees when realtors and brokers send us leads and always promise to give those leads back to the agent or broker at the end of our life cycle with them.

Joseph Crooms (04:12)

you said you’ve been in business for 15 years. Let’s look at ⁓ over the last five years. How has your business grown? What has it done for your monthly revenue?

Brian LeBow (05:10)

Yeah, our business over the past five years is really exploded over the past five years. I mean, prior to the past five years, we’re managing primarily mom and pop single owners with a single family residence, duplexes, triplexes, that sort of thing. About five years ago is really when we hit our growth spurt and we signed up 300 units in the city of Bell, which actually just funnily enough correlates with my initials, Brian Edward LeBow

So we signed up a portfolio in City Bell, also City of Los Angeles, Housing Authority, HACLA, signed up about thousand units. And City of San Francisco, San Francisco Housing Authority also signed up around 1300 units in the past three years. So that’s really where we’ve really found some momentum around those city contracts.

Joseph Crooms (05:59)

How is that translated to revenue for you, say on a monthly basis?

Brian LeBow (06:02)

Yeah, I mean, the monthly revenue has expanded significantly over the last five years from probably five years ago, we were doing maybe 100,000 a month. Right now we’re closer to 450 a month. So really substantial growth over the past few years.

Joseph Crooms (06:18)

Let me ask you this question. So you talk about sort of building a relationship. What’s been the key to keeping your machine running smoothly?

Brian LeBow (06:27)

really tapping into our resources, which includes agents, brokers, folks that send us business, making sure they’re well taken care of and their clients are super well taken care of. Also really exploring government contracts has been a huge benefit to us and really just taking care of our clients. We schedule monthly calls with them. I do those calls myself and I spend about two days every month.

making sure our clients are being taken care of, and just making sure the employees are providing the service. And so that’s something else we added within the past five years is really significant KPIs to make sure the service is being delivered properly.

Joseph Crooms (07:06)

What do those KPI look like?

Brian LeBow (07:08)

They’re substantial and so every role has roles, responsibilities and KPIs attached. And so whether it’s somebody from marketing or somebody from operations, everyone has probably a set of at least 15 to 30 KPIs and every week we’re tracking things like occupancy for business development. It’s things like calls made, calls returned, ⁓ timeliness of responses. We want all the operations team to be returning calls.

within 24 business hours and really dialing in on those metrics to make sure the service is being delivered. It’s kind of the worst thing that can happen in a service-based business is taking your eye off the deliverables. And so dialing into those KPIs was really significant for us.

Joseph Crooms (07:54)

Thank you for sharing that. So, Brian, I’m a real estate broker. Why should I deal with…

Brian LeBow (07:59)

Because we’re gonna take care of your client, we’re gonna provide the service at a very high level, and we’re gonna take care of you as well financially, provide you really strong referral fees, and make sure your client comes back to you at the end of the relationship. Most clients come to us, property management owners will come to us with their portfolio. On average, it’s about four years. So we know we’re not gonna be with them for a decade. So at the end of that time, if you know you’re…

real estate broker, obviously we’re not gonna try and steal that transaction from you at the end if they’re gonna sell it or something changes with their family, we’re gonna make sure that we refer them back to you.

Joseph Crooms (08:33)

Great. Now I know every operator I know has had a moment when things just got real. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that they had to pivot fast. You mind sharing one of those moments with us?

Brian LeBow (08:44)

Yeah, I mean, I’ll share with you one that recently happened to us and it was very new to us is a tenant at one of our large multifamily sites, 110 units in Los Angeles has a pet that wasn’t being taken care of. And it really exploded on social media. It exploded on, I mean, all our Google reviews kind of took a hit. All the animal activists from Los Angeles and really

nationwide were providing us feedback, telephone calls, emails, reviews. And so we took fast action with the tenant and the calls continued, even though the tenant had cleaned up the pet situation. The perspective from the animal activists was that the pet wasn’t being taken care of. It was left out on the balcony. And so they were up in arms. They actually started protesting one of our sites and we had to get legal involved.

There was one main player who was posting really old dated information, even after the pet was started, was being taken care of. So we approached them and had to get legal involved and they quelled the situation on their social and their followers kind of followed suit and everything kind of went away. But it was a new situation because it was something that was not really within our full purview.

⁓ You know, we can do a lease violation, we can call animal control, which is things we did, but the animal activists were still quite upset. And so we had to involve our legal team to get that quelled.

Joseph Crooms (10:52)

So what have you learned from that? What have you, have you had a new KPI for that?

Brian LeBow (10:58)

Yeah, I don’t know how we build a KPI around that, but maybe it’s maybe it’s making sure pets are taken care of and site walks are done. This specific property has, you know, it’s a larger building 110 units and there’s a porter there. Somebody that takes care of the building and make sure it’s clean and trash is taken out. And so we have added a responsibility to his checklist that if he sees these kind of things, you can’t just walk by it. It’s a.

Making sure those on-site staff are proactive in taking care of the building and providing the service at a really high level. And so we built KPIs around that for the porter to inform us if he sees those kind of thing to let us know. And just taking quick action. And then also, you know, we started out with the stance was from the social media that we would, you know, try to appease them, let them know that we had taken care of it. And.

Then at the end, we had just had to get a little forceful. And the more we stood up, the more they stood down. And so that was a little bit of a lesson for us to really take things into our own hands and make sure that ⁓ the communication was coming from us and not coming from all the animal rights activists or tenants.

Joseph Crooms (12:11)

Thanks. It seems like you have a pretty well working team. Who’s on your team?

Brian LeBow (12:16)

Yeah, we do have a really large team. We’re about 110 staff right now full time. Couple of part time folks and so it goes for myself down to regional VPs and we’ve got a regional vice president for Los Angeles on the property management side and the maintenance side and the same is true in Northern California. So regional VP property management regional VP for maintenance and then it goes down to regional managers and those regional managers usually oversee.

up to three property managers and up to 1,500 units. And below them are site staff and property managers, ⁓ occupancy specialists, ⁓ leasing specialists, and maintenance and porters.

Joseph Crooms (13:01)

How do you cut through the minutiae of when you were telling me in beginning in the pre-podcast about what your thread is right now? How do you cut through that?

Brian LeBow (13:13)

Yeah, the most important thing that we can do is really be proactive and keep track of KPIs. I mean, with the large organization, especially focused on providing a service, you’ve really got to dig in and take proactive measures to make sure the metrics, the service is being delivered in a really great way. And so for us, that used to be two or three times a week being on the phone with the staff, and there’s just not the time to do that. And so now we have

really ⁓ intricate KPIs. And so every week those property managers tell us, tell their managers things like number of vacant units, number of applicants, service issues that have gone on beyond a week, any mold growth or any kind of urgent maintenance issues. We’ve got a really dialed in set of metrics. And so we’ve got our eyes on all the KPIs.

to really make sure the service is being delivered at a high level and that we’re out in front of issues before they become larger issues as much as possible.

Joseph Crooms (14:11)

has those metrics that you can put out front when you like talk numbers to to new people is that what sells a lot of them?

Brian LeBow (14:58)

It is yeah, because there’s a lot of people that don’t have this kind of system into their service and so they can’t get ahead of issues before they become larger issues. And that’s really a differentiating factor for us is being able to take proactive measures. And you know it’s it starts from the moment we take on a portfolio. We’re out there doing inspections proactively, making sure those units are in good condition. And then if not making sure that we’re out there within a week or so.

shoring anything up, taking care of any major issues. And then it’s ongoing as we get into a unit, you know, if somebody calls for a dishwasher problem, anytime our staff or a vendor even are out on the property, they’re making notes about deferred maintenance, ⁓ know, signs of moisture intrusion, all those things that are important to get in front of, they’re providing that feedback to us anytime they’re in a property, not just like on an annual basis.

But anytime they’re in a unit, they’re letting us know about those things.

Joseph Crooms (15:55)

Thanks for sharing that with us, Let ⁓ me ask you this. What ⁓ are you most focused on solving or scaling next? What’s your next real goal?

Brian LeBow (16:05)

Yeah, the next thing is really expanding the footprint and we want to get into more commercial office space. Right now we’re really heavy in multi-family and so the opportunity is for us to grow into other areas and that’s commercial office. We’re set up to do HOA management now and so that’ll be something we venture into in the next six months is providing HOA maintenance or HOA service. And then we’re also starting a construction company to service our clients.

And we let them know about that company and the company name out front so they’re not surprised when they see that company’s logo in their stack of quotes. And so really providing great service at a great value is our most ⁓ opportune thing we’re working on right now.

Joseph Crooms (16:49)

Man, Brian, that’s really huge. Especially when you got these new things that you’re putting in place, the next move can either compound things or create chaos depending on how you play it. Now, I know a lot of people listening are either early in the journey or looking to level up. I think they’re gonna benefit from this question. When it comes to building relationship and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Brian LeBow (17:16)

Yeah, one of the, one of the expressions that I leaned into years ago is your Rolodex is your Rolex. And I believe that a hundred percent like having contacts with brokers and realtors is the most important thing. Before I started property management, I was a office manager at a Cobalt banker branch in Southern California, about 200 agents. And that’s one thing we really leaned into. was kind of the early stage of CRM.

and computers, I’d say, you know, we were just getting into CRMs, but always emphasizing that you got to be in touch with people. If you want to connect with people and solve issues, you got to be a resource. And so a lot of times, you know, we’ll get inquiries on the website or phone calls, and it’s from somebody that just started out and, you know, folks that might have one or two units and always happy to just share resources and stay in touch with those folks.

And as their portfolio grows, we’re happy to answer any questions that come up for them. I mean, especially in Southern California, it’s tough to be a landlord. It’s tough to own property. There’s a lot of rules and a lot of forms and a lot of new stuff comes out, a lot of tenant protections. And so we’re always available to be a resource for new property owners or folks that are just getting started and really maintaining those relationships.

Joseph Crooms (18:37)

You can’t fake that relationships are everything especially in your space, you know in real estate as a whole but you know You are interlinked with real estate. So thank you for sharing that. All right before we wrap up of Someone wanted to reach out connect with you maybe collaborate and learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way to reach you?

Brian LeBow (18:57)

Yeah, I’m super available. Folks can call my office directly. It’s 213-510-6000. My extension is 204. We also have some other phone numbers, but my email as well is super easy. It’s brian @bpmgt.la. Just my first name @bpmgt.la And folks can reach me on email or just call me.

happy to answer any questions that they may have as they’re getting started and trying to build their business and their portfolio.

Joseph Crooms (19:26)

hey Brian,

you mind repeating that one more time just to make sure they got it?

Brian LeBow (19:30)

Yeah, absolutely. Brian with an I, b-r-i-a-n @bpmgt.la is the easiest email. I’ll give you the other one as well. It’s a little bit longer. brian.lebow, b-r-i-a-n.L-e-b-o-w @bellprop.com, b-e-l-l-p-r-o-p dot com. Goes to the same place.

Joseph Crooms (19:52)

Great perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time your story and your philosophy on doing business especially ⁓ You didn’t get to be 15 years in business without developing a philosophy. Thank you for sharing that with us We need more people in this space who are doing the right it the right way. Thanks again for being here Brian Yes, and for those of you tuning in

Brian LeBow (20:13)

Absolutely. Thanks for your time.

Joseph Crooms (20:16)

I know you got some value from this make sure you subscribe we got more conversations coming from operators just like Brian LeBow and who is a big-time property manager and Californians so look him up who are building real businesses but helping real people so I’ll see you on the next episode of what Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros podcast Brian say you talk to everyone later

Brian LeBow (20:42)

Yeah, we’ll speak to you soon. Thanks, Joseph. Appreciate you.