Matt Hitchcock went from living at home until 27 to avoid paying rent to managing 1,000 rental units and $150 million in assets — and in this episode, he breaks down exactly how house hacking, in-house property management, and surrounding yourself with the right people turned a side hustle into a full-scale real estate company.
Episode 10: Real Estate, Property Management, and AI with Matt Hitchcock
Building a real estate business that can scale is about way more than just owning one. That’s the meat of the conversation Save to Zero hosts Zach and Mike have with Matt Hitchcock of Common Wealth Collective. From house hacking and multifamily investing to in-house property management, systems, and AI, Matt shares how his team built a company that now manages around 1,000 rental units and roughly $150 million in assets.
Matt walks through the lessons he learned early, why he and his partners chose to manage properties in-house, and how technology helped them stay lean, efficient, and competitive. He also shares how COVID-19 pushed them further into keyless entry, contactless showings, and AI tools that now support leasing, maintenance, renewals, and rent collection.
If you’re interested in learning practical insight into real estate investing, property management, building systems, and using AI to grow without getting buried in the day-to-day, this episode is for you.
“We found that when we started getting into it, we were like, well, why do we play so small?”
“Leaning into technology from the start was really the biggest way that we wanted to be in-house self-managing.”
“There’s got to be a better way.”
Prior to co-founding Commonwealth Collective, LLC, Matthew was a successful independent
real estate investor, having purchased and managed properties in the Massachusetts Merrimack Valley, an area and market he knows well.
Matthew deftly applies his professional skills in marketing and management, honed through years of sales and recruitment experience, to creatively market the company’s properties, secure and manage renters, and strengthen the company’s ever-growing social media presence.
Find Common Wealth Collective Online
Email Matt Hitchcock at mhitchcock@cc-rei.com
For Investors & the Fund – Learn how the Fund works and book a call
For Borrowers & Deals – Get funding and support for your next investment
[00:00.1]
It's not so much us handling the day to day of, okay, is this unit lease, but it's more of me and Mike, like, looking on the acquisition side. Like, what's the next territory we want to go do? We just want to scale in this market and then, also other businesses. We're starting to get into a little bit of hospitality.
[00:15.2]
So we have a couple of deals that are in the pipeline that deal a little bit more on the Airbnb side. So we're starting to create verticals out of the stuff that we've already developed insight in over the years. It's just really exciting, kind of where we've come, but it's not so much day to day on, like, the property management side. It's more of just like, kind of overstay, more of like a board is what we kind of call it, so to speak.
[00:36.1]
Most people think saving money is the answer, but the truth is, saving only gets you to zero. Join Mike and Zach as they flip the script from saving to earning, from zero to unlimited potential. Welcome to save to zero, everybody.
[00:54.4]
Welcome to episode 10 of the Save to Zero podcast. We are here with Matt Hitchcock from Commonwealth Collective. He's actually one of our clients. We've done a, bunch of deals together over the past few years. And I know on your own and with partners, you guys own and manage around a thousand rental units with $150 million assets under, management.
[01:17.1]
So, Matt, thanks for coming on. Yeah, I appreciate the time, guys. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so, like, we were talking about beginning. We kind of focus on mindset and people's attitude around money, and a lot of that takes people to being a business owner. So how did you get started into real estate?
[01:34.1]
Because most people don't set out to do real estate when they're. When they go to college or whatever. Yeah, I definitely didn't necessarily. So kind of, I think my backstory on where I started. I had, an uncle that was involved in real estate. And, you know, just over the years of being at Thanksgiving and Christmas, he would kind of randomly talk about it.
[01:53.9]
It's almost funny because I think of him almost, you know, rich dad, poor dad. Instead of it being the dad, it was like the rich uncle. Okay. So he would be at the table and he'd kind of be talking about investing and all these things. And, you know, most of my family was not business owners or didn't really invest in any of that type of stuff.
[02:10.6]
So kind of fast forward. After college, I was working my normal W2 job. And you, guys obviously know Michael Ketch, my business partner, and he ended up catching. We started talking about, you know, just trying to do a side hustle of some kind of. But the side hustle always seemed to be some form of real estate.
[02:27.0]
We thought real estate investing was flipping houses, which we started to learn. Like, that's really not. Like, that's just a grind. It's just another job, really. It's not exactly investing as much. And then we listened to bigger pockets, and then that's kind of where we went in terms of, like, starting the company.
[02:42.8]
But honestly, it's funny how, life goes again. I initially started. I lived at home until about 26, 27. Cause I simply did not want to pay somebody else to live. So I learned early on about house hacking and, you know, trying to safeguard my money to a certain degree to try and give myself a leg up in terms of most people my age.
[03:04.3]
So I did a house hack with a property in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It was a three family. Lived in the second unit, rented out the first and the third unit. And then it actually had two garages on premises. So I rented those out as well. So I was living completely free and I was making some money on top, which was great. And then had that conversation with Mike about, you know, just trying to do that side hustle, because he's like, well, you, you're doing a little bit of real estate investing.
[03:26.2]
Let's maybe do some other stuff. And then fast forward. We've gone into a major company, so it's been a wild ride. Yeah, that's cool. What was your W2 job? So I started out at Enterprise Rent a car, which I would advise anybody that's looking for, an employee, anybody that comes out the management training program.
[03:45.6]
That's a great program to like, find people's resumes. It's just a, it's a hustler's mentality job. I mean, and it related really well leasing apartments into operating a rental company in general. Because essentially your goal is to never have any cars on the lot.
[04:02.0]
So think of it almost like an apartment building. Like you want to have all your units rented, but you have a very dangerous game because you're like, well, I want to have inventory, but I also want to have all the units rented. If I have all the units rented, though, am I being too cheap with how much I'm getting for rent?
[04:18.0]
So it's a balancing act that way. Maintenance involved. You have to make sure you're on top of, like, getting maintenance on the vehicles. So we would be super low on inventory. And there's a car that has an oil change that needs to be done. So you're trying to figure out a way to get the oil change done quick and then rent it.
[04:33.7]
So it was just a, very chaotic job, but I think it suited me very well for transitioning over into real estate and actually property management, which is one of our niches. Because I feel like most people that invest in real estate don't necessarily manage their own properties. They kind of pass that off to somebody else.
[04:50.4]
Are all of your units owned with your partner or did you have. Do you have some on your own that you started with before you guys partnered up? Yeah, so that three family is the one that I own by myself. And then starting to get now a little bit more into some airbnbs.
[05:05.4]
But primarily the multifamily aspect is all owned by myself. Mike Ketchin. And how did you guys get together as partners? How'd you meet each other? I met them when I was. Well, I met Mike first. I actually went to school with his, middle brother, Teach, and, great friends through high school.
[05:23.3]
And then, you know, it's funny how people transition. You meet new people. I met Mike around 16. He actually was given me and Teach a ride to Blockbuster to go get video game. Definitely not having any real estate or anything on the radar, just goofing off, being normal teenagers.
[05:40.8]
But that's my Blockbuster. You're old. I know, right? I remember that. To go rent a video game. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Friday night. It was the best. You go there, then you hit dominoes, you come back with a Mountain Dew, and then you crush N64. It was great.
[05:57.3]
Yeah. But, yeah, that was so he, he was, he was able to drive a lot sooner than we were. So I met him at 16. I think that's one of the dynamics, that works really well because I think there's a lot of people that go into business together that, you know, you might meet somebody for a couple years and you think they're fine, or, you know, you meet them right away and you're like, well, this person has a ton of experience.
[06:16.6]
I'm just going to partner with them. We just had a long standing relationship way before business was even involved. So we've already known our characteristics for, you know, at that point it was over 10 years. And we've just always gotten, gotten along well, communicated really well.
[06:32.8]
He runs At a certain pace, I run at a certain pace. And we just kind of complement each other, as well as Hannah as well, because she kind of keeps everybody all organized. Me and Mike are just like out here doing this whole thing and then she's the one that's like, all right guys, but we got to bring it back together.
[06:51.3]
So you guys do in house property management. I always hear, two sides of that. People who do it wouldn't do it any other way. People who met, who let somebody else manage it, let somebody else manage it and they don't want to deal with it at all. So tell me, why is it that you guys choose to do it in house?
[07:09.5]
What product? Yeah, I just think that we have a better pulse on our products than other people. So I think the people that are saying that they wouldn't go the property management or do the internal property management route, I think they may or may not be buying a better quality asset. Like maybe they're buying an A class asset.
[07:25.9]
And at some point, if we go down that road and we get to an A class asset, it might be one of those conversations where you do outsource it. Right now we buy C class, like multifamily value add. And our thought process, well, first of all, when we first started, it really came down to dollars and cents.
[07:41.1]
We didn't have the money to hire property management company. That makes the choice easy, right? Yeah, we got a 13 unit apartment building and we were like, all right, well, I managed my three family in Haverhill, so how hard can it be with another 11 residential units and two commercial units? Like, I can't be that much more involved.
[07:57.8]
And honestly, if you put the right systems in place, like we've really leaned into technology. We've done clear cut systems. One of the things that we decided the first ever time we closed on that 13 unit apartment building, which was the first multi family, we did this downtown Manchester.
[08:13.0]
They're 300 square foot studios. We're at the closing table and we get a big bag of keys and we're like, this is wild. Like, this is nonsense. Like we're not going to be carrying these keys around. So immediately we switched everything over to keyless entry.
[08:28.6]
So we put doorknobs on that had like the keypad on it. And that allowed us the flexibility, one, to not have the keys, which was crazy. Two, you could program it with multiple different codes so you could do it for your tenants. You could also do it for our maintenance. So our maintenance would Be able to have access to go in if an agent for some reason had to go on site or an insurance person had to go on site, fired inspectors, whatever it was that made a lot more flexible than us always having to drop whatever we were doing, try and show up with someone, provide keys, coordinate all those things.
[09:00.6]
So leaning in tech to technology from the start was really the biggest way that we wanted to be in house self managing again because we didn't have money. But on top of which it just seemed like it made logical sense. I would say too, because of the C class, like value add that we do, we have a better pulse on what's going on with the property.
[09:18.8]
Meaning our goal is we buy it for X, we're going to rehab and fix up the units. And then at the end of that business plan we want to refinance and then do a cash, like do a cash out refinance so we can reinvest. And if you're relying on a, property management company to execute a business plan, that's not always going to be the case.
[09:37.6]
They have however many people in their portfolio of their business and what happens is. And I run into it. We actually, the building that we first bought, the Manchester one, those guys that sold it to us, they reached out to us, I don't know, probably a year later, and they're like, hey, how's that building going that we sold you?
[09:55.0]
Oh yeah, like your rents that were a 700, we're getting like 1100 for them now. They're like, what, you guys get 1100? What are you doing? I'm like, well we, we fixed it up and we just put in new people at market rents. Oh well, do you want to check out our other two buildings that are down the street and see if you can like help us manage those.
[10:11.6]
So we went, so we showed up, it's Manchester. I know what we're renting our apartments for. They had six vacant units and they were a lot nicer than ours. And I was like, guys, what's wrong with the these units? And they're like, I don't know. Our property manager saying they just can't rent them. To me.
[10:26.9]
They probably tried renting it for one, maybe a higher price or two. They just weren't paying attention. They had too many other prospects in their portfolio that they were just a low man on the totem pole, didn't really care. So that was like our first experience with like the industry and property management. And we were like, we're not ever going to Go this route.
[10:45.0]
So do you have once you get it stabilized, Obviously you're hiring GCs or trades to stabilize the property. Once it's stabilized, do you have in house maintenance people or these 1099 people? Yeah, good question. No, we have so a little combination of both depending on where we are territory wise and how many units it is.
[11:03.2]
Like Manchester right now we have like one central, 1099 maintenance guy that's on, on premises. He's, he's actually more of our like head of maintenance for all of our portfolio. And then we'll have what's called Boggs. We'll have like boots on the ground and they're like different people that we have in the area that can facilitate most of the work that needs to be done at the properties.
[11:23.6]
Generally speaking, we try not to hire someone full time. Most of the time, once we go in and we rehab everything if we do it correctly in the first place. We're trying to mitigate a lot of maintenance stuff. Initially of course, Manchester, it's a lot of older buildings, so there are things that come up.
[11:39.1]
But for the most part we try and have like those boots on the ground that just facilitate things as they come up. So you have properties outside of your immediate area. If I'm not mistaken, you've got Missouri. Ohio is off the top of my head from what I remember.
[11:55.3]
How are you finding maintenance people in those areas if you don't have a large footprint? Yeah, good question. So again we kind of treated the same as New Hampshire. We were like, when we started in New Hampshire we probably built up to about 400 apartments. And what we found was the systems that we had in place.
[12:12.9]
We were like, there really is no reason why we can't duplicate this process across the country. We're doing all the same. So we have all this technology in place, we have all these systems in place. So it just seems like it doesn't matter if we're here in New Hampshire or we're closer in Ohio. As long as we have that primary boots on the ground person, it should be fine.
[12:31.6]
So we have our property management Software, we use RealPage. So anybody that has a maintenance issue, I mean they're going to put it into the system. From there it dispatches out one to our head of maintenance who's located in New Hampshire, so we can kind of monitor and make sure everything's getting closed out when it needs to be. And then two, usually when we close on a property or we go see a property, they Generally speaking, have a maintenance person that's established and already on site.
[12:53.1]
So depending on that person, usually when we close on a property, we'll keep them for 30 days. We'll kind of vet their process and see, you know, if they're worth their weight. If they're not, then we usually get rid of them. Or like, in that period of time, we might be interviewing other maintenance people to see if they can facilitate, or we'll get some.
[13:10.1]
Just a contractor that's, in the area. And we'll say, hey, if we ever have a plumbing issue that comes up, if we ever have an electrical issue comes up, would you be willing to come on site and take care of things? And then also we do our clean, safe readies, which is kind of a tribute to one of our team members, pj he came from Starbucks.
[13:26.8]
And that was one of their sayings. Is clean, safe ready? Like, is, the branch clean? Is it safe for the customers? And is it ready for anybody that's coming in to purchase, you know, coffee? We kind of apply that same mentality to our properties where we have someone that, generally speaking, goes usually twice a week, and they run a clean, safe, ready protocol.
[13:45.6]
Or at least once a week, and they'll just verify and make sure that, like, okay, there's no debris or there's no trash on the ground. Everybody's throwing away their stuff the way they're supposed to. We do light checks too, to try and mitigate one, liability. Two, if a property, is dark, then it usually makes it so you have, like, nefarious behavior that can come.
[14:04.6]
Come about. So we try and make sure we have lights and things like that that are always being checked constantly to help with those. Some of those things. So really, honestly, the same process that we do in New Hampshire, there really isn't any special sauce. It's the same thing we do in New Hampshire. We just do it across the country, utilizing our technology and dispatching it out to, our point of contact that we end up finding once we end up purchasing in that other location.
[14:26.4]
Well, sure. I mean, Ray Kroc did it with hamburgers. Yeah, you work up your systems locally, you figure it out, and then you just roll it out nationwide. And if it works for hamburgers, why not? And ultimately, McDonald's doesn't sell hamburgers. McDonald's owns real estate.
[14:41.8]
That's where the money,
[14:46.3]
yeah, but that. That's very interesting. Cool. So when you're with your uncle, you're, you're, you know, your uncle kind of got you into real estate and business and. And now you guys, you don't do like. I feel like most real estate investors, they buy two, three families all the time.
[15:01.5]
Right. When you're with your uncle, like, how did that go? How'd your relationship with him kind of change when you started buying these big properties? I mean, did he just talk about that a little bit? Sure, yeah. No. So, unfortunately, he didn't get the chance to see really where we're at now in terms of how big a property is.
[15:23.5]
At the time. I think I had 26 units, I think under my belt when he was still around. But for him, still the same thing. He was only buying like a three family here, a condo here, a four unit here. Like, it wasn't, it wasn't the same. We just found that when we started getting into it, we're like, well, why, why do we play so small?
[15:42.8]
Like, we have the ability. It doesn't seem like that much of a difference between buying a 3 family or 4 family versus a, 10 or 13 unit. Like, if we have the opportunity to buy it, if we can raise the capital for it, if we can roll the money that we have from some of our other deals or other equity into a bigger property, it doesn't make sense to really hang around with the smaller stuff.
[16:03.2]
We were trying to go at scale because we knew if we went to that scale, now you have the opportunity. To your point, Mike, you can hire like that head of maintenance. So when we were there, we didn't hire him right away, but we contracted a person, they kind of helped us out. Once we grew into like 40 or 50 units that were all within that Manchester Metro, that allowed us the flexibility to be like, okay, we can have a head of maintenance that's really going to take on all of this work.
[16:28.1]
So that, that's kind of how we, how we, we looked at it. We were like, let's scale. And now at this point it's like, all right, well, the 50 to 100 units aren't super enticing to us now it's the next level. It's like, okay, we're looking at like 150 plus type units. I mean, everybody always says, right, they wish they went bigger sooner in terms of buying multis.
[16:47.5]
And yeah, it makes a lot. And you get exactly, you get those economies of scale and like, if you're doing heavy value add, like you said, makes a lot of sense to have that management, that maintenance in house. Yeah. I mean, if you talked to Mike and you asked him the question is, like, we were still playing small, buying 13 units. We should have been starting with like, 40 units.
[17:05.5]
Like, what are we doing? Yeah. But the thing is, though, you dip your toe in the water and you say, okay, this wasn't that bad. And everything you thought ahead, that was going to happen. I know. I did a loan one time. The largest loan I had done was 450,000.
[17:21.5]
And then I had somebody who, oddly enough, lives in New Hampshire. He was doing a large purchase. He did a large, raise. And he had $4 million that evaporated 24 hours before closing.
[17:38.1]
That person was supposed to sell a property. It didn't go through. So he was out 4 million bucks. He had 24 hours to raise it because they had a million dollars. That went hard. And to add to the fun and the spice of the situation, the seller would not give them an extension for two reasons.
[17:55.9]
One, he knew he already had a million bucks. And secondly, somebody offered him more than he had agreed to sell it to these guys for. So my buddy was on the phone and he's doing his thing. He called me the next day and he needed $2 million by 5 o', clock, and he was going to.
[18:14.6]
He said, whatever you have, I'll take, and we'll tie it up any way you want to collateralize it. And I said, well, I think I have the 2 million. And I had never done a $2 million loan before, but I was kind of flexing that. Gee, I got 2 million, I think I could do this.
[18:30.2]
Then when I got off the phone with him, I vapor locked. I'm like, oh, my God, you're going to send $2 million to one guy. Yeah, I know, right? Even though I had the capital, I had never done it. I wanted to spread it out. And, long story short, we're able to pull together a $2 million loan in six hours.
[18:45.7]
That's fine. When I sent the wire, I put the information in for the wire and I copied and pasted it off of the sheet that he gave me. I called, I confirmed the number. I happened to be at a mastermind for private lenders. I had somebody else come out and read it to make sure that I put it in.
[19:04.0]
Right. Even though I copied and pasted it because I was so stressed out about it. And five minutes after I sent it, I called the, title company said, did you get it? Well, when did you send it? Five minutes ago. And she said, sir, it takes about 30 minutes to get to us. It's gotta go to the fed and you're okay.
[19:19.5]
Well, this is. I've never sent a loan. This is 2 million bucks, man. I'm checking on it. I said, I've never spent a loan this size before. So, I need a little grace here. Can you call me when it comes in? She said, oh, absolutely. I didn't know. Yeah, I'll call you. So she called me like 50 minutes later, said, it's in. I said, oh, thank God.
[19:35.9]
I still get nervous with wires. I hate them so much. I mean, it's just the cause, like you have to do them for business wise. But I. Yeah, I hate them so much. Yes, me too. I get so nervous every time. I always double checking and always making sure. Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[19:51.7]
But I know what you mean about as far as you know, I could have gone bigger. Now if I send out a $2 million loan, I can do that. I double check everything and I make sure everything is correct. But I don't get sphincter lock anymore. And then you do $100,000 loan and you're like, I really got to do all this, all this work.
[20:08.6]
The same amount of work, right? $20,000 draw. Okay. Yeah. What a waste of time. Another thing that I know you guys do a lot of, is technology. You mentioned it a little bit. But some of the stuff I think you guys do with like the remote showings and stuff is really cool.
[20:26.2]
So talk about how that, I mean it's. I'm sure it saves money too, but I think more so lets you guys position your, your product, so to speak, more competitively. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's a good point when we so kind of rewind a little bit.
[20:41.9]
So when Covid happened, that was really how contactless showing started and keyless entry kind of started. So we put keyless entry on before and that was fine, but I was still like usually going on site and showing a unit to people. Then Covid happened and then we still had vacancies.
[21:00.7]
Nobody wanted to meet in person. But to us, the world stopped. We really didn't stop our day to day operations. We were like, all right, well we know people still need a place to live and we will still want to make revenue, so this should be an easy solution to solve. So all we did was we were like, all right, well we're going to roll the dice and we're going to give people a code that's going to give them access without us ever meeting them.
[21:22.1]
Which is kind of crazy when you Tell people that they're like, well, aren't you worried somebody's going to damage the unit? And, I mean, they could in theory, but we still have cameras that are up so you can see who goes in. And ultimately, I mean, it's a 300 square foot studio apartment that generally speaking, someone's in theory, unless they're really nefarious and they want to do damage, I don't see how someone's just going to go in and trash an apartment, really, for no reason and never meeting me or talking to me just for the fun of it.
[21:47.9]
So anyways, we rolled the dice. We gave people a contact with COVID and I was like, hey, you're going to go to XYZ building. You're going to go up the stairs, you take a right, it's unit three. You press this code, it'll get you in. You walk around when you're done, let me know if you have any questions or I would just follow up and call them and kind of walk through, like, the next steps of them filling out an application.
[22:06.9]
But Covid was really the big kickoff for us, like, leaning into it. I think we would have gotten there anyways. A lot of places are starting to do that now, but really we kind of focus on three things. So we'll do either in person showings, depending on what territory we're in for a property, or if it's a property that's getting in the middle of, like a rehab and it doesn't look the most ideal, we'll usually kind of have our leasing agents on site to really walk them through and sell them through the experience of, like, the next evolution of what the building is going to look like.
[22:32.8]
If a building is already rehabbed, then we'll do the contactless showings. So again, property looks pretty. Everything's looking great. Again, we give them really specific instructions about using the keyless entry code to go and check out the unit. And then we follow up and do the application after.
[22:48.9]
And then we do hybrid showings as well, which is pretty much the combination of the second one where we'll be on the phone when they arrive, and they just want to make sure it's not a spam situation or they're not getting scammed at all. So they'll end up being on the phone with us and we'll kind of talk them through the property as they go and show up.
[23:05.0]
But those are kind of like the three things that we leveraged, really based off of COVID and it's been great. We've had another evolution in terms of our keyless entry. Our keyless entry. Now we use, Brevo, which is the system. And that system allows us actually not to just give someone like the press code.
[23:24.7]
Like the old one was like the turbo lock, you know, like the rubber knob, like numbers. So those ones you couldn't, you'd have to be on site and program them. Now with Brevo, you can, you know, remotely program them and we can monitor stuff from our phone. So that one is nice.
[23:42.4]
Two things. It's nice for the showing side. It's also nice for the security side. So obviously again, we're doing C class multifamily, which we probably get to like a C plus B minus type multifamily. But still you're dealing with a certain clientele that they may or may not to be into things that we don't want to have on our property.
[23:59.5]
And when we tell them like, hey, we have a camera over here and we have keyless entry. And the great thing about it is so secure, we can monitor like people coming in and out. When you use those buzzwords, if it's someone that's really trying to do something sketchy, they're probably not going to be a fit for our property. And they know that out the gate. So we don't get in bed with someone that's, not going to be a good, great fit and it's going to affect our, our community.
[24:19.3]
So that's kind of on the keyless entry side. The other technology that we started to lean into, obviously AI is a big thing that everybody has buzzwords. There's a company called Elise AI shout out to them. We started utilizing them and what they do is they allow, it's, they allow essentially, communication to happen without someone having to pick up the phone.
[24:39.1]
And what's wild is that it's like, it sounds like an actual real person. It's not like A. Press 1 to talk to leasing. Press 2 to this. It's like, hello, thank you for calling Residence First Property Management. I'm leasing agent Emma With AI. This is a recorded call.
[24:54.9]
How can I help you today? And it'll go right into the whole spiel of, oh, we're looking for a one bedroom. Oh great, we have a one bedroom apartment available. When's your next availability for showing? Would you like to do an in person showing? Would you like to do a contactless showing? So, again, just always trying to stay ahead of the Game and kind of use any type of leverage that we can at scale.
[25:16.0]
Now, what is the name of that program? The AI? Yeah, it's called Elise AI E L I S E A I Release AI. Okay. And is it meant specifically for property management? So they do it for, the hospital industry and they also do it for, real estate.
[25:31.6]
Yeah, they do it for both. And the nice thing is, on top, and even going past that, like, we initially wanted them because we were like, well, we're in some of these territories and we're finding is that, you know, we're running a company, we have our leasing agents and they're great. But there does come a time where they need time off or they need hours off.
[25:49.1]
Like, it's. It's a very big balancing act because when I was in the position and I was doing most of the leasing, I work until 1 o' clock in the morning. I'm on Facebook marketplace at 1 o' clock in the morning, talking to someone about, there's no way that I'm going to have anybody as passionate about filling a unit as I am, because it's like, it's money coming out of my pocket.
[26:09.5]
So, we were like, there's gotta be a better way. We've used call centers before, which those helped a little bit. But again, we still felt like we just didn't have enough control over it. This allows us to see, like, the transcription. So when they call in or they text in or they message in, it transcribes the whole conversation.
[26:28.7]
So we have a report that we can look back if we see, like, where they fell off, if they did a tour, if they didn't do a tour, where we need to follow back up with them. But on top of which, it does a lot of our other stuff. So maintenance requests, we can have our current residents go on. They'll send a message like, hey, my sink's leaking.
[26:43.8]
And they'll say, okay. Like, it'll respond back and it'll be like, is this an emergency type situation? Like, is it dripping down into the next unit? Or is this something that we can push off and have someone come out to tomorrow and do? Oh, yeah, it's not an emergency. Okay, great. I submitted your ticket and we'll be out within the next 48 hours to repair it.
[27:00.5]
So it does maintenance, it does leasing, it does, renewals. So anybody that's coming up on renewals, like 90 days out, it'll say, hey, your lease is about to expire. Are you thinking about renewing with us. What could we do better? Like it'll follow up with that, at the end of the maintenance one.
[27:16.5]
Also it does say like how did we do so that we start building up our Google reviews, which is great. And then the one that's my favorite is delinquencies because following up with people and trying to get paid is brutal. Sometimes they work.
[27:32.1]
Three, six, this thing works. 365. No holidays, no time off. It's calling, texting, emailing, hey, you're late on your rent, you need to pay. Hey, you're late on your rent. We're going to be going through eviction soon. Hey, you're. And it goes, it goes through that. So it's been a really good tool and I feel like we've only kind of scratched the surface, with it.
[27:49.9]
We've been using it probably for about four months, I'd say five months. But yeah, so those are kind of some of like the tech stack that we, we currently use that I feel like is a little bit. Well, the sweet thing about that is if you're frontline customer service, you're a human being, you're going to get agitated at some point and respond in a way that probably isn't the most professional.
[28:11.1]
Whereas when you have an AI and somebody isn't going to pay their rent and they want to get agitated at you, the AI just listens and says, well, I certainly can appreciate that feedback as opposed to, you know, giving it back to them and say, well, I got mad, Matt, I'm sorry about that.
[28:29.0]
Or I'm ma. Michael, sorry. It's just AI. It just sits there and it takes it. Let me ask you any of the, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say, yeah, our customer service agents too. I mean they've, they said that right out the gate, like starting to lean and use it. It's probably saved them 10 hours a week of just, you know, nonsense follow ups with people.
[28:47.0]
Like going through the list and calling, sending mess. Like it's just tedious. If you can get ahead and kind of wipe out 90% of that headache and then just follow up with like the 10% that's still lingering around. It's, it just makes people aware. Like they can't just like run off the leash.
[29:02.1]
Like if, if someone's not paying and then nobody's following up with them. They're like, well, they're not paying attention to me, so I don't have to really worry about me making my payment. Whereas this is just constantly reminding them, like, hey, somebody is paying attention. Somebody knows that you're not paying. Like, you got to figure this out. Sure. Front of mind awareness.
[29:17.7]
Yeah. Interesting. Have you guys ever had a situation because you said you're in, you know, you see C to B properties or C minus properties? Have you ever run into a situation where you had to evict a fair amount of people or it was a very.
[29:33.4]
It was known as a bad property and the police were coming all the time. Anything like that? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, if. If we're not buying a property that has bad reputation that we're not making any money. So I think. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think one of the properties that we, So Granite.
[29:50.8]
Granite Place was. Zach, have you been up to Granite Place or like the North. Old Northgate up in Rochester? Is that the Rochester one? No, I haven't been there. So that one. When we first bought that property, I think they had. It was like 400 first responder calls, I think, like in a year.
[30:07.5]
Wow. How many units? I mean, now, granted, it's 111 units, but I mean, it's duplex. When you say first responder calls, like, I'm talking about, like, it's just drug activity, prostitution, like, it's, it's aggressive. That one, we actually purchased it.
[30:22.9]
We ended up getting private security for the first four months because it was, it was just out of control. Yeah, they let the inmates run the asylum on that one, but that was like an extreme case. But to your point, though. Yeah. Even our smaller buildings when we first bought them, usually, again, if they're C class most of the time, it's a long term owner that's not really paying attention too much to it, which.
[30:42.1]
That's where, you know, the value can come in or where we can increase the value. Right. Like, they're just having rents that are 700 bucks a month that are cheap. We know that they should be at least $300 more increase. And those people are just running them up because the person's like, well, I'm getting paid my $700. I have low debt on it.
[30:57.6]
I don't really care. They're not even really paying attention to maintenance that much. And they don't have to because even the residents understand that they're way below market and what they're paying. So they can't really ask for too much or they don't even care to ask for too much to like, you know, sound the alarms. So, yeah, we have gone through a Bunch of, bunch of evictions.
[31:15.3]
But one thing that was nice is when we first started, in New Hampshire, and funny enough, our company was called Commonwealth Collective because we were all from Massachusetts and we thought we were going to invest in the state of Commonwealth. That's why it was called Commonwealth Collective. But glad we didn't do that because nightmare.
[31:32.6]
So when we came to New Hampshire, we realized, oh, okay, well, evictions, like, they only take about a month and a half. And again, kind of pivoting back to self management. We didn't have enough money to hire attorneys to do evictions. So guess who did the evictions. Oh, you had to do it. This guy. Yeah, I did one by myself.
[31:49.1]
Yeah, I learned real quick how to do evictions. Yeah, you go to the courthouse and everything, file the paperwork. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah, they were like, oh, yeah. The average is like between 800 to $1,200 per eviction. I was like, I feel like we're looking at like two or three a month. We can't afford this. Let me see if I can just do it.
[32:05.1]
And it wasn't that hard. It's very, it's actually pretty easy process. A little tedious, but it's pretty easy. We still keep it in house too, even to this day. Like we have people on our team that just, just run it. But, for New Hampshire, I mean, some of the other states must be. Some of the other states, you can't. So Ohio, we attorneys that do it, but we kind of get.
[32:23.1]
We, we do it as much as we can. So you can do a couple variations. Like in New Hampshire, we run it all the way through Ohio and Missouri, we drop off at least letters. Like, we don't have the attorney go and drop off letters because that's just an hour of like, you know, that's monkey business. Anybody can kind of drop that off.
[32:38.6]
Text, is the same thing. We do some, some stuff on our own and then we do some filing on our own where we need to have an attorney, we will. But for the most part, it's, it's all kind of. Now when you're looking, you said that, you named it Commonwealth and now you're glad that you don't have doors in the Commonwealth.
[32:54.8]
When you're looking for new markets, do you look for ones that are landlord friendly? Yes. Red states. Red states, which unfortunately, what we realize is that in Ohio, that's a red state, but we're kind of in a purple market.
[33:10.5]
So that was a Little bit of a gray area. But overall, yeah, we're red states, which is very landlord friendly. So usually most of the places that we invest in, I would say it's probably a month and a half to two months for an eviction. Texas is crazy. It's like four days or whatever it is.
[33:26.9]
Yeah, it's wild. Texas is also crazy, too, because, we found out that you can, like, depending on how much they're behind on rent, you can actually go into their unit and you can commandeer, like, something that's of close to that value. So you can actually go in and take it.
[33:42.7]
You could take a TV off the wall and you could put it into storage, and then they have to, like, pay you the rent, and then you can give it back to them. Wow. Wow. Lateralize it yourself. I've never heard that. That's interesting. Yeah, we learned that when we. We didn't know either, but when we first got into that territory, that was like, one of the things that you could, like.
[33:59.2]
You can get nitty gritty in Texas. Yeah. Texas is very much into property owner rights. Yeah. I lived in Texas for a couple years, and they're not messing around when they say, don't come on my property. They're not kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Really, the only thing you can't take is obviously anything that was.
[34:15.3]
Prohibit them from doing work. So you couldn't, like, take a laptop? Because generally most people are using their laptops for work. I see. You can't take car keys or block their car or anything like that. But like, anything that's usually the TV is the go to. Or like a video game console or something like that. The checkbook. Yeah.
[34:33.1]
I like where your head's at, though, Zach. You'd be good at this. Wait a minute. That's a home dialysis machine. Sorry, ma'. Am.
[34:46.8]
Eat better. Yeah, right. Wow. So switching gears a little bit more. One thing we talked about a little bit before is I understand your wife still has her W2 job, and she loves doing that. And so how'd that go when you had a W2 job?
[35:05.0]
And then all of a sudden you're like, let's do this real estate thing. And I'm sure it put a dent your finances, and you had to go through all that. And. Yeah, what's interesting, I guess my story is not that spectacular because I actually was with someone prior to, like, going full time, into real estate.
[35:23.0]
And so I end up ending that relationship going into this role. So there was a. Like, when I met my wife I was already kind of doing this, so she knew. I see. Okay. She knew a little bit more what she was getting into. It was still a little weird, though, because, like, the. Like, we were talking in, like, my first. Our, first date that we were supposed to have.
[35:39.7]
I was like, oh, well, actually, like my friends in a country band. She was going to be doing a set down at the beach, and I was like, oh, I'm actually, like, doing my retirement party, so if you don't want to come, like, we can hang out. And she was like, retirement party? I don't know. And essentially it was just me.
[35:57.8]
Yeah, it was my. Me leaving my W2 job, and she didn't show up for that date by way. The way. So. Oh, that's funny. But we. We kept talking and then. Yeah. And then kind of fast forward, like, she was pretty comfortable with, like, what I was doing. I was already pretty established at that point anyway.
[36:14.4]
Like, I already had my three family, and then I had a. To your, point, Mike? I did have a condo at one point, that I was living in at the time Covid happened. And then that condo just had a lot of deferred maintenance, and the condo association wasn't great, so I decided to end up selling that.
[36:30.7]
And we rolled that into our primary house that we have, in New Hampshire. So it all worked out. But, yeah, she. She was on board from the start, and now she's a real estate investor as well. She has her own. Pretty much the property that she had in North Andover was a duplex. She owned one side of it.
[36:46.6]
So she's renting that out, and that helps us with our living expenses for here. So, and now she's looking for more Airbnbs, and we're looking at motels and crazy stuff, so. Oh, cool. That's cool that she's that on board, you know, to do some of her own investing. A lot of times it's like, yeah, just do your thing.
[37:03.0]
Yeah, I think it helped, too, because a lot of the, like, my inner circle was a lot of, like, real estate investors or agents or, you know, just people that were in real estate. So it wasn't as hard, I feel like, to digest as, like, someone coming in, like, completely novice, like, renting apartments and not knowing, like, the world of, like, homeownership or anything, so.
[37:20.6]
And obviously, she also came from a great family, in terms of, like, finance. Her dad was accountant, so she kind of understands a little bit of that world, too. That's cool. So let me Ask you went into property management. I'm just circling back slightly. For me, as a lender, I want to lend and I don't want to deal with tenants toilets and termites.
[37:43.2]
What do you think it is that makes that an appeal to you and something that you want to deal with? Now I understand you want to have it in house and I get that. I like the Steve Jobs model at Apple of controlling the hardware and the software so that you control the whole experience for the user.
[37:59.9]
So that I understand. But as an owner having to deal with it, it sounds like, you're very much involved on the day to day. How do you deal with that? Well, I would say that now I'm not as involved with the day to day. Now we're at a point where we do have staff members.
[38:16.4]
So as I mentioned, we have a couple different roles. So we have, resident care representatives. Those are like our RCRs. Those are the ones that handle the customer. Any maintenance requests that come in usually go to maintenance people, but sometimes they'll oversee that and they'll communicate with the resident and let them know someone's going to be going into their unit.
[38:32.1]
Or they'll also handle the eviction stuff. They'll just handle all the customer service stuff. Then we have leasing agents or our LAs, so they handle all the leasing, all the marketing for our apartments at this point. And then we have our bogs, which are usually like our maintenance boots on the ground people. Those are kind of like our key functions of like our property management that me, Mike and Hannah used to kind of facilitate.
[38:52.9]
And I'll help and manage. I used to do mostly most of the tenant facing stuff. Hannah did, like a lot of the hr, the lender forms, like all the banking, all the nuanced stuff that Mike and I are not organized enough to do. And then obviously Mike's really good at talking, so he would end up talking to guys like Zach about, hey, what favorable terms can we work with today, Zach?
[39:15.3]
So that's kind of the dynamic of how we started. But yeah, now at this point we have staff members that are in there overseeing. We have a VP of our company, Adam Johnson, and he oversees making sure like everybody in the different sectors are performing the way they need to.
[39:30.7]
We have scorecards to monitor, like if our staff members are doing what they need to. So it was one of those things that evolved into a full company instead of us just being real estate investors. Now we're like real estate. We're a real estate company. Like we actually Own a company that invests in real estate.
[39:46.5]
And so now it's not so much us handling the day to day of, okay, is this, this. This unit lease. But it's more of me and Mike, like, looking on the acquisition side. Like, what's the next territory we want to go do? We just want to scale in this market. And then, also other businesses, we're starting to get into a little bit of hospitality.
[40:03.0]
So we have a couple of deals that are in the pipeline that deal a little bit more on the Airbnb side. So we're starting to create verticals out of the stuff that we've. We've already developed, insight in over the years. And yeah, so it's just. It's just really exciting kind of where we've come. But to answer your question, yeah, not. Not so much day to day on, like, the property management side, it's more of just like, kind of overstay.
[40:22.9]
More of like a board is what we kind of call it, so to speak. Gotcha. I'm gonna switch gears slightly because you talked about Airbnb. I know that a lot of areas, like New York, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't allow the. New York City doesn't allow the Airbnbs anymore, if I'm correct.
[40:40.6]
So, when you. And you also mentioned earlier about getting motels, hotels, have you ever considered a situation where, because it's already licensed for it, you turn a motel into an Airbnb where you get 15 different units, but it's already licensed for it, so there's no blowback?
[40:57.0]
Yeah, that. That would definitely be the play. That. That's kind of. That's kind of the idea. I mean, again, same thing. We wouldn't invest in anywhere. That's usually anytime you're going. Going to invest in Airbnb, you got to do your research, you got to know your markets. Like, my wife and I have been looking at South Carolina a lot, and, unfortunately, South Carolina just is not the most friendly state.
[41:13.8]
It goes by, like, different towns. Certain towns will allow you to do it. Certain towns have a limited amount of, certifications that you can do to use for actually running an Airbnb. So that's not really like a play that we've decided to go down. But we're looking at different areas.
[41:29.7]
Like right now, the one that we. The ones that we own, we own four Airbnbs currently up in Kenny Bunkport, Maine, or Kenny Bunk, Maine. So it's a summer destination. Those are the same Thing, there's only this kind of a certain amount of people that can run them, but as long as you provide your information, which we've never had an issue.
[41:45.2]
And this was when we started investing there. That was prior to them putting the initiative out where the state wants or the city wants to get extra revenue for no reason, essentially. But yeah, so we started investing there and, the summer season is just crazy out there.
[42:02.3]
But to your point though, yes, we would generally speaking, like a motel or a hotel. We would probably run more Airbnb wise again, same systems that we do for our normal multifamily keyless entry on it. And then you have a direct booking website, but then you also have it on Airbnb and you just rent out individual units.
[42:18.2]
Not so much having someone on site for a check in, but just really trying to go over overboard with different amenities that people are looking for these days. Saunas, hot tubs, pickleball courts, pools, like all those things are going to really drive traffic to your spot over the competitor down the street. Absolutely.
[42:35.8]
So do you guys have a long term plan as to how many doors you ultimately want to have and then maybe do an exit, or do you not have a plan that far down the road? We. So our plan for 2026 right now, as, Zach mentioned, we're at about 150 assets under one, hundred fifty million assets under management.
[42:52.1]
Our goal for 2026 is to get. So we're trying to double. So that doesn't really. We're not necessarily looking at the door count. It's more so the assets under management count. And then, yeah, I mean, for the most part we're buying hold people, so we're not really trying to sell.
[43:08.0]
However, what we have noticed is that over the years, like when we first started buying properties in Manchester, New Hampshire, we had the, the edge because you were buying stuff pretty cheap then you were putting some work into it. You were. You're pumping up the numbers and then the value was, you know, exponentially more than what you paid for it.
[43:24.7]
Now what we're noticing is that the replacement cost. It just like we have these older buildings in Manchester that we're like, all right, well, does it make sense to start selling some of the stuff? Because now you can pivot it into a newer asset and we might. We're starting to think about like ground up development up in, New Hampshire and Manchester, New Hampshire, just because, you know, the brand new cost of construction is about the same as what it costs per square foot of like Selling a building like the older buildings now, it's wild.
[43:48.9]
Yeah. And if you get something brand new and not built in 1910. Exactly. Without the deferred maintenance of, you know, tenants that are complaining about certain, again, we try to go in and we go behind the walls and we do really try and fix like basic plumbing issues that will be a headache down the road.
[44:06.3]
Which I think a lot of people don't do. They put like lipstick on a pig, like internally. They do some paintings, some cabinets. Then they don't really fix a lot of like the root issues that tenants are going to complain about when you know the ceiling's dripping because someone's toilet over overflowed or a bathtub overflowed or whatever the case is.
[44:21.7]
So we try and mitigate a lot of that stuff. But yeah, again with those older buildings, water just seems to find a way sometimes. Well, I didn't explain my background, but my second company was a restoration company Fire.
[44:40.5]
So we loved old buildings like that. They made us very happy. Yeah, those are all the calls that you get. And what we used to like is, what you're describing is when it comes from a, from a ceiling and it comes down. Well, now we're talking at a Class 3 loss.
[44:56.7]
Those are very expensive. Those are wonderful losses. It just means more air movers and you just leave them in there for a little bit longer. So those made us very happy. Yeah, not so much us, but luckily, like I said, we haven't had really any nightmare stories in terms of like water damage like that for the most part going.
[45:15.3]
We do it right the first time. So at least we'll get, you know, seven to eight years out of, out of any deferred type of maintenance. And then, you know, as turnovers happen and things happen, then you have to go in and do some fixes. But again, some of our older products, we're starting to think about peeling those off and rolling it into a little bit better product or just a bigger product.
[45:33.4]
Sure. We only have a couple minutes left, so I just want to switch gears a little bit one more time. And you guys have gotten more into education recently. I know, you guys started the Mastermind and the Club down there in Manchester. So talk about like, I'm sure you didn't set out to, you know, start something like this.
[45:52.2]
Did you get to a point where you realized that, oh, maybe we have something that we want to share or want to be around more like minded people or how did that come about? Yeah, I think that just came from going to, like, the real estate meet. Like, initially, when we first started, we were. We were going to real estate meetups because obviously, bigger pockets told you, like, hey, you got to get in the room.
[46:10.0]
You got to talk to people that are in the industry. You got to pick their brain, you know, try and see if you can buy them a coffee, try and add value to whatever they're doing. So you just kind of learn a little bit. So we did that. Like, we were going to those, and then we're like, well, I don't know, maybe we should just run our own real estate meetup.
[46:25.3]
We know, like, people that are starting to buy property up here. We know a couple of the business owners up here, so we can host one at, you know, the local bar or restaurant. So we did that. And it wasn't so much like an education. It was just more of a we're hosting it, but we're just networking type situation. And then, from there, Mike, obviously, his background was in, academics.
[46:44.7]
So he was teaching at Lawrence High and kind of being. He was an admin there for, He got to. He got to administration there, pretty high up, and he was teaching. And I think that's kind of where it started to fold. It was like, well, we can start coaching and guiding people on some of the mistakes that we've made and just make it just an easier process.
[47:03.8]
And I think that, you know, had we had more of a mentorship going through what we did, we wouldn't have made the mistakes we did. And I think it's just our way of kind of giving back, people starting out. So that's kind of where it transpired is mostly, again, Mike's always loved teaching and coaching. Even I remember, like, back in the day, like, there was a flag football team that we had a group of our friends, and he used to coach that.
[47:23.3]
Like, he's just always been that type of person that's been like that leader, coach type thing. So, yeah, it's just kind of been a way that we've folded into it. And then, yeah, to your point, we had the standard, which we have the vault coming up. Did you get an invite to the vault? Yes, I did. I can't wait. Did Mike get an invite to the vault?
[47:39.9]
Well, I live a little further away. I live in Idaho. That's no excuse. You can hop on a place
[47:48.9]
with no excuses here. No excuses, Mike. I'm just kidding. But, yeah, so the bolt's very exciting. It's gonna be our new like, co op spot. So we're pretty excited about that. But again, yeah, it's just the opportunity to kind of lean in, show what we know. And then obviously, the best part about that, and honestly, like, even martial arts, like, I've been doing jiu jitsu a long time, and, I'll roll with, like, guys that are, like, lower ranks, and you always learn something new.
[48:12.9]
It might not be, like, an experience, but move or. It's not an experience thing, but it's like this minor nuance thing that you just didn't. Didn't know. I mean, again, to my point about Texas, like, going down there, I had no idea you could take a TV off someone's wall. Yeah, right. That alone is worth it.
[48:28.3]
And. And that was. That's not somebody that's like a property manager. Like, they're not a property manager at all. They just were someone that, like, we were talking to, networking with, and they're like, yeah, you know, like, if you do X, Y and Z, we're like, really? So you do just conversations and meeting people. You just learn, like, you just learn so much.
[48:45.5]
So, again, that's kind of how we got into the whole coaching and leadership thing. But, yeah, cool. Yeah. So. All right, go ahead, Mike. No, that's fine. I'm just saying we're pretty much towards the end if people need to get a hold of you. Would like to get a hold of you. Matt, how do they do that?
[49:02.1]
Yeah, they can find me on, Instagram if they want. My email Instagram handle is njhich h I t c h. 86, I believe. I don't use Instagram a ton, but they'll be able to find me if they type that in and then email, if they wanted to get a hold of me, which maybe you guys will put in the show notes or whatnot.
[49:19.6]
Yeah, we will. We'll put all this in the show notes. First initial Last name@cc-rei.com. awesome. Awesome. Mike, this has been, Matt, I'm sorry. This has been a great call. I really appreciate your time. This was fun. Yeah, I appreciate it, guys. This is awesome. Sam.