Scaling Multifamily Through Better Operations, Data, and Focus

Drew Hall: Welcome back to the Peak Property Performance Podcast. I am your co-host Drew Hall, and today's theme is ownership and operations working together. The lessons from building a vertically integrated real estate platform. So welcome Bill Douglas, co-host. Bill, how you doing?

Bill Douglas: Great. Happy to be here. To start, this recording is happening on a Monday, so happy Monday, everybody, regardless of when you're listening.

Drew Hall: Absolutely. All right. Before we introduce our guest that relates to this very theme that we're talking about today, let me just remind our listeners to do all of those things, like, subscribe, share, hit the bells where the bells exist, because that'll notify you when the new episodes drop. And the only reason for all of this, as we always say, is this is how we are spreading word on the Peak Property Performance movement and with that overarching goal of changing the industry. So if you think you would provide value as a guest here, as you listen, or if you know someone who would, if you think that they would provide value as a guest, we welcome commercial real estate thought leaders from all stages of ownership and operation, even sometimes like commercial tenancy as well. So please reach out to us via peakpropertyperformance.com, or you can find us, either Bill or myself or Optiwise itself on LinkedIn. But honestly, peakpropertyperformance.com is probably the best way to go. So everything is loaded up there.

Drew Hall: So without further ado, Bill.

Bill Douglas: All right. Today we're joined by Andrew Reichert. Andrew, say hello to everybody.

Andrew Reichert: Hey everybody. Thanks so much for having me on, Bill and Drew. So excited to be on the show.

Bill Douglas: And where are you hailing from today? I forgot to ask that.

Andrew Reichert: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Bill Douglas: All right. Well, back to your intro. Andrew is a real estate operator who has helped build a vertically integrated multifamily platform spanning approximately 3,600 units. across multiple states and a team of more than 100 employees. Andrew sits at the intersection of ownership, asset management, and property operations. He's experienced firsthand the challenges of scaling a real estate organization, aligning ownership goals with operational realities, and creating value through execution rather than simply acquisitions. Andrew, again, welcome to the show. We've been looking forward to this.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, I've been looking forward to it as well. Really excited to be here.

Drew Hall: Nice. Okay, Andrew, so you've helped to grow this vertically integrated real estate company from startup phase to this multi-state operating machine now. So as you consider that journey, and you look back, what are some of the biggest lessons that you think you've learned?

Andrew Reichert: Oh, well, I've learned all my lessons from doing all the things the wrong way. It's funny to hear, you know, talk about vertical integration, because frankly, I had no idea what I was doing back in the day. So I bought my first duplex the year I graduated from college. I had read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Yes. And I understood the power of investing in real estate. But unfortunately, I had no money, you know, came from Very humble beginnings. I was working 2, 3 jobs at a time.

Andrew Reichert: And after graduating from college, I was like, I really want to do this. And so I bought a duplex, actually ended up walking away from closing with a check. I was just doing everything myself. You know, it's like I didn't really have the means to hire the maintenance person, the property manager, the bookkeeper, right? So I was just spending evenings and weekends leasing out units, painting the units, you know, fixing the thermocouple on the furnace and watching YouTube videos on how to do that. And so it's like I had this idea of let me build this vertically integrated real estate machine. It was really just, I had to by necessity do all of the things myself. And that's really how I got into it.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, I mean, at what point along the way did you actually realize that you weren't just buying real estate, but you were beginning to build an operating company?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, right around where I got to 20 units was that sort of, I would say, pivotal point for me. You know, I took that check for $20 grand and I went and bought another property and then I refinanced that and bought another property. And then I started to raise some outside money right when I got to about that 20-unit phase. And that was really when I said, okay, now not only am I stewarding my own money, I'm stewarding other people's capital. Let me make sure that I'm doing this in an institutional professional kind of way.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Nice. Well, I mean, so again, just kind of reflecting on the building process, is there, you know, positionally, not by name of course, but positionally, is there a hire along the way that sticks out in terms of being the absolute most effective or helped you get to the next point in your journey?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I think there's always a question of, you know, Particularly in the early days, do I do this myself? Do I outsource it or do I hire a person to do it? And so, again, just in the early days by necessity, I was doing a lot of things myself and then I started just hiring contractors and vendors. And so I'm learning everything I need to know about plumbing and HVAC and understanding electrical equipment and really the nuts and bolts of making real estate work. But I knew that I couldn't be the subject matter expert in everything. The reality is you just can't. knew everything that there is to know about HVAC and, you know, leasing units and property management and bookkeeping. And so along the way, I just found, you know, once I got to the point where my own expertise had sort of hit a limit, it was time to hire somebody that's much smarter than me in that area to do that thing. So if I just look at the history, you know, it started with maintenance, the nuts and bolts of really making the, you know, the assets work, and then property management, and then sort of by association with property management, the accounting function.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So if you pick one thing to do differently if you were to start over, is there one thing that stands out there to do it differently?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, 100%. Again, I could, I could go through many examples of all the things I've done wrong, but the main thing that I would've done differently is focus. So if you just look at our history, our first fund, our goal was to raise a $10 million fund in 2015. We ended up raising a $17 million fund, and with that fund we bought 800 units of multifamily and about 300,000 square feet of commercial. And that commercial was about half retail and about half office. But at the time I was doing everything. And when I say I actually mean our firm was doing everything. So we're acquiring multifamily that's stabilized.

Andrew Reichert: We're acquiring multifamily that's value-add. So we're doing some construction. We were doing brand new construction, building new townhomes. We're renovating historic units. So buying a historic unit and doing a renovation. And then we're doing some commercial, you know, property management, commercial leasing, retail property management, retail leasing. And it's just Way too many different things and there's just no way that we could be good at all of that. So if I could start it all over, I would've picked one thing.

Andrew Reichert: I mean, for us today, we do one thing. We do that one thing well. It's multifamily in the sort of Midwest of the United States, 100 to 150 units, Class B workforce housing. It's a super tight niche and that's all we do. But it took us a decade to really zero in on that niche.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that's interesting.

Bill Douglas: I had a mentor that told me once, Bill, the jack of all trades is a master of none. I didn't get it until I tried to have a second business and it was so different from the first and neither one of them worked. So he was right the whole time. Um, but back to this vertically integrated point, uh, one of the advantages is that ownership and operations sit under the same roof. So where do you typically see disconnects between those 2 perspectives?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, well, if I just go all the way back to the beginning of We're even thinking about buying a property. You know, it really starts at underwriting an asset. When we underwrite an asset, you know, we can get all the market data that's available. So go on CoStar, look at rent comps, sales comps, and put together this really nice pro forma. But until the team that's going to actually manage that asset has looked at it and, you know, kicked the tires, so to speak, and said, I understand what it's going to take to manage this asset, to maintain this asset, to do these capital expense projects, That underwriting model is just theory. And so I really feel like the connection between ownership and operations happens before you ever even buy the asset in the underwriting phase to understand, okay, what are we actually getting ourselves into? I think that's really a collaboration between all parties that are going to execute on a business plan.

Bill Douglas: Is there something that property managers see that ownership misses or something an asset manager sees? That role itself is the viewpoint. And how do you handle conflicts? When they don't see the same?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, well, they never see the same. The answer to that is absolutely yes. You know, the property managers, and rightfully so, are going to take a very practical approach of, hey, I understand what it's going to take to, you know, get this turned over. I know how long it's going to take to turn these units. You're saying to execute on, you know, let's just say it's $10,000 a unit business plan and it's going to be paint and flooring and whatever else the operations team really needs to sink their teeth into. to that so that it's not just, you know, the philosophical side of things, but it's actually like, okay, I understand what it's going to take. Now the asset management, or maybe you'd say ownership side of things, they're there to kind of push the envelope in my opinion and say, hey, we really think we can achieve $200 per unit per month, you know, rent premiums after we achieve that renovated business plan. And here's exactly how we're going to get there.

Andrew Reichert: So there's this natural tension between, you know, stretching to achieve the business plan or the pro forma that we put together and the practical realities of the nitty-gritty work that needs to happen to actually get there. And so it's really about bridging that gap. And you said, you know, you talk about how can you bridge the gap? I mean, I think it's really hearing all perspectives, making sure that everything gets incorporated into the business plan, the underwriting and the model. And then from there, coming up with a unified perspective. You know, we use the term internally a lot to disagree and commit. It's like, hey, has everybody said what everything that they want to say about this? You've disagreed and that's fine. Now, can we commit to this underwriting model and to achieving it?

Bill Douglas: And if not, what What operational issue taught the ownership the biggest lesson? Like, I know you're dealing with occupancy versus profitability, and those groups are arguing based upon what, you know, their KPIs are, but what taught you, the owner, the biggest lesson? Give a story example if you got one.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, I'll give you an example. I mean, we bought a, I would say like kind of a B asset in sort of a C neighborhood, if that gives you a little bit of a picture of, you know, sort of what we were dealing with. And we've realized that we We won't do that again. We'll, we'll only ever do the reverse because we've found, you know, on the ownership team in particular, that the pro forma might say, hey, we can retenant this building over the course of a couple years. We can, you know, get some of the riffraff out. But if the market doesn't actually support that and is not conducive to executing on that business plan, no matter how good your projections are or how good your plan is, or even how good your operations team are, you're just not going to achieve it. And so for us, that was just an eye-opening example. Hey, this neighborhood is really a C neighborhood and this B asset is never, ever going to improve beyond where it is because the market is frankly just not conducive to executing on that.

Bill Douglas: The market is the greatest truth teller.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah.

Bill Douglas: Brutal too, sometimes.

Andrew Reichert: For sure. No doubt.

Drew Hall: That's definitely a tall order. Yeah. Pushing, pushing from that direction. Okay. So let's think a little bit about creating value through those very operations though. It seems like for years investors relied on the basics, appreciation, market momentum, but there's a lot more metrics these days. There's a lot more knobs and levers out there, and operations has certainly evolved. So from your perspective, what operational metrics do you think matter the most?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, well, first of all, Drew, you're 100% right. You know, for years it was, hey, a rising tide is going to raise all ships and the old playbook. And frankly, we were the beneficiary of this. You know, our first fund, 2015, For a long time, the playbook was like, let's just buy right, ride that cap rate compression, and sell the asset. And it worked. I mean, you could generate 20% plus IRR by frankly not doing everything all that well on the operations side of things. And as you guys know, that lever is no longer there. And if it is there, it's a lot weaker and it's certainly not in our markets.

Andrew Reichert: And so, you know, today it's really about Creating value through NOI growth. And concretely for us, I mean, you asked about the metrics. I really think it's taking a disciplined approach to the entire P&L. So, you know, we look at those P&Ls day in and day out and we say, okay, where are the opportunities for us to really add value? Delinquency, you know, first, obviously that compounds fast. And if you've got delinquency and issues, it's one of those things we just have had to actually move even more towards sort of zero tolerance. Because again, just the NOI is really the most important metric and that can bleed really fast. Turn times obviously really matter. We're turning over units as quickly as possible.

Andrew Reichert: Then I would say leasing velocity. I mean, it's really about how long has it taken us to get these units leased? What's our total vacant days and can we continue to reduce that? And then I would say retention. We're really big on resident retention and resident care. It's a lot cheaper to keep an existing resident and keep them happy than it is to replace them with a new one. So, you know, really focusing on retention, keeping, you know, heads in beds and keeping people in the units is really what we focus on to make sure that the full P&L is healthy and continuing to grow.

Drew Hall: Well, and this might relate to that very list you just laid out, maybe, but what mistakes do owners continue to make these days when trying to improve those very operations?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of places you can go wrong. So let's Start at top line. And I'll just give an example of some, a place where we've made a mistake. You know, a top line, you could easily have a projection that says, hey, you know, and again, I'll just give an example. If we put $20,000 into the unit, we'll get a $200 a month rent bump. If we put $10,000 in a unit, we'll get a $100 a month rent bump. Well, what might happen is that $20,000 a unit is just not going to create, you know, the rent increase that you're expecting to create. So it's not creating the value to the asset that's flowing through to net operating income.

Andrew Reichert: So I think if you're just looking kind of top line, it's really got to be a disciplined approach to saying, okay, you know, our rents are at market and we're going to keep them in market and, you know, kind of make sure that we're understanding that we're not getting above the market in terms of the rent that we're charging for what the market would actually, you know, yield or pay for this unit. And then obviously I talked about vacancy and delinquency. You know, those are big things to be paying attention to. I think on the expense side of things, I mean, it's been really interesting. Inflation has been tough, you know, for a lot of real estate operators. Insurance, I I'm sure you guys know insurance is through the roof. It's been really a challenge for a lot of operators. It's one of those things on the expense side of things where having some scale helps because we can negotiate contracts for waste management and, you know, a lot of the things that are on the expense side.

Andrew Reichert: But those are areas where we've gotten ourselves into trouble in the past. Either a tax reassessment happens or an insurance, you know, increase happens. And those are the kinds of things that can just totally wipe out NOI.

Drew Hall: Yeah, definitely. I know, you know, from, from our perspective, working with... sometimes there's vertically integrated ownership and management specifically that we work with our customer base, but sometimes they're not. And I'm just curious to get your take on this. You know, I feel like I often think like, hey, we're working... if let's say that you're working with a management company, in my mind, I'm thinking we're working for the same boss, so to speak, right? It all goes back to ownership. It's their asset in the first place. And so the goal is to improve the value of that asset, generally speaking. So I'm just curious to get your take. I mean, when you're vertically integrated and you wear both of those hats, you've got the best in mind the whole time, no doubt.

Drew Hall: But, you know, when those 2 functions exist in 2 different entities, ownership and management specifically, I feel like sometimes, you know, we might see a little bit of a lack of execution from the management side in terms of really trying to focus on dollar improvements, you know, whether it's driving out costs or improving NOI in one of these various factors. So, I mean, Do you feel the efficiency there? Because I know that you guys don't manage everything you own. Is that right? Mostly, but not all.

Andrew Reichert: That's a great question. And yeah, I think it's really challenging. Frankly, I think there's really good arguments on both sides of the table there, and I don't think there's a silver bullet or a right way to do it. I can just tell you our experience, and this is again, just coming from where we've gotten it wrong in the past. We would buy 100 units or 150 units in a new market, and we didn't know that market. and we'd try to self-manage it and would just totally fail.

Drew Hall: Yeah.

Andrew Reichert: We didn't know the vendors, we didn't know the local, you know, market in terms of the rents. And so hiring a third-party manager is so much better in that instance because they know the market, they have the people, they understand the vendors, they've got the maintenance. And so we've found now when we enter a new market, we just entered Louisville a couple months ago, we entered Cincinnati. And so when we enter those new markets, We hire a third-party property manager in those new markets. We frankly just found that they're better at it than we are. Now, maybe you could get to a point of scale, let's call it maybe 800 units where, okay, now we can afford a regional manager for that region that's going to manage multiple property managers and we're going to set this thing up and we can actually employ the staff there. That does de-risk it a little bit, you know, once you've got some scale. And so that's kind of where we've landed.

Andrew Reichert: I'll be frank. I think, I think there's good arguments on both sides there, and I don't think there's a definite silver bullet either way.

Drew Hall: That's good. No, that's good perspective.

Bill Douglas: Well, you outlined both sides, but you outlined a changing scale or a tipping point where it became worth it to change. So that's a number I like. So it's a hard number above 800. We do this.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah.

Bill Douglas: And that's just what comes from the school of hard knocks, right?

Andrew Reichert: Exactly. That's just what we did in Western New York. You know, we bought enough properties in the Buffalo area that we said, hey, okay, now we've got a region here, regional manager, property managers, and we can really have enough scale to make this happen. And as we've done that, we've seen the improvements to the actual bottom line by having that kind of scale in a region. So yeah, we, again, we learned from, to your point, the school of hard knocks, Lou. We learned from making the mistakes on other regions.

Bill Douglas: We see CRE owners are collecting more information than ever, but we all know that doesn't always lead to better decisions. And a few minutes ago, you alluded to the things you pay attention to, but I saw them all as top line P&L, It was all revenue-facing. It was all market-facing. So if we could shift for a second, what information relative to the operating or OT, operating technology, you mentioned expenses and trash, but what about some other operating expenses? What information do you actually pay attention to as an owner-operator?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, well, look, I know that AI is a big buzzword and a word that folks have in many ways abused all across our industry, but we're really big on data and have been for a long time. And frankly, we're really big on AI and have been before AI was cool. I mean, we were using machine learning to do some predictions across our data years and years ago, you know, before ChatGPT was a thing. And so I really do think the data tells the story. And I think you've gotta trust the data, rely on the data, but you gotta have good data, you know, garbage in, garbage out. I'm sure you've heard of that before. If your data's not good, your judgments based on that data are not going to be good. So look, our property management system is AppFolio.

Andrew Reichert: We've used that for a long time and it's been a good system for us to kind of warehouse the data, but we've always kind of missed that predictive analytics piece. So we built that on top of the system that we use on the backend and it's just allowed us to make real-time decisions. I mean, I think that's really the important place that you got to kind of get to. It's one thing to look at a P&L a month in arrears, And you're saying, oh, that stinks. It's another thing to say, okay, we've got to make this decision. What's the budget say? What's the business plan say? You know, do we want to spend this money? You know, talking about the expense side of the P&L and really making a decision based off of that in real time. That's how we use data.

Bill Douglas: Well, to your point about AI being an oversold buzzword, we talk about this on the show a lot. We completely agree. Where we see AI fail is not because the model or the software didn't work. It's because the data is not owned or not accessible. So the model and the piece of software is the most inexpensive piece of the whole puzzle and the most replaceable. So I was glad to hear you bring it up without prompting, but I'm actually going to speak about that on a panel tomorrow in Vegas for the very subject right there, because everybody's wanting to know how to do AI. And you know, you can't drive a Formula 1 car if you don't have a track. Like it's basically, that's the analogy I like to throw.

Bill Douglas: We like sports analogies on the show.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, I love it.

Bill Douglas: So back to the conversation here about what you were doing with machine learning and data What metrics tend to predict future performance? I like forward-looking KPIs. Backwards-looking, like the P&L, maybe I can react, kind of get to the root cause. That's one thing. But what are you looking at to look forward?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah. And just to clarify the question, so you're asking about forward-looking data, metrics, whatever, and what data drives those metrics for the operations of the asset? Yeah. I mean, I really think there's a lot of things that you could be looking at. I like to think of those as lead measures. So, you know, there's lag goals, which are lag measures, you might say, which are the things looking in arrears. And then there's the leads, which are like the things that are going to ultimately end up on the P&L, but that they're not actually, you know, showing up there today. So like one example of that is projected occupancy. So we'll look at, yeah, I know what my occupancy is today.

Andrew Reichert: Obviously that's important and I've got a rent roll, but what's my projected occupancy 30 days, 60 days, 90 days from today? And what am I doing to make sure that that's that's trending in the right direction. It's a little bit too late to start leasing if you're needing to do it next week, right? Like if you need a bunch of move-ins next week. So for us, it's really where do we need to be 30, 60, 90 days in the future? And then let's start building that into our plan today.

Bill Douglas: Let's shift the same forward-looking mentality into assets. Since you like acquisitions, what do you wish you knew sooner about any property when you're evaluating any property? Like before data was available, now that data's available, even if you had a wishlist of something I wish I could have, what would that be?

Andrew Reichert: I'd With deferred maintenance, you know, answering that question, I mean, I think the big surprises whenever we've bought an asset that we're like, oh, I wish we'd seen that coming, is when we just didn't get a good handle on deferred maintenance at the asset level. So perhaps it's, hey, we did our inspection and the HVAC units all looked good, but they were kind of, you know, 5 years into a 10-year life, and now we've owned the asset for 5 years and they're all breaking. That can be really expensive. It can crush a deal. Or, oh, the roofs, you know, they looked okay when we bought the asset, but now we've owned it for 5 years and they're all failing. That again can be really expensive. And so I think it's that, you know, predictive maintenance years into the future of, hey, what's going to go wrong? Where's the deferred maintenance and how can we, how can we prevent it or at least predict it on the front end?

Bill Douglas: Have you come across an asset for sale that actually gave you a full operational maintenance asset management history that was valuable versus just saying, go look at it?

Andrew Reichert: Got it.

Bill Douglas: Okay. So that would be of value.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah.

Bill Douglas: I kind of knew the answer, but I wanted to hear you say it.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, for sure.

Bill Douglas: All right.

Drew Hall: Well, so Andrew, do you think it's in this category right here or do you think it's something different? When you think 5 years from now or even maybe 10 years from now, what do you think the best operators will be doing differently? Yeah.

Andrew Reichert: I mean, if I just fast forward 5 years, 10 years from now, I do, again, I know AI is a big buzzword, but I do think that whether you call it AI or machine learning or predictive analytics, what we really are moving toward is the ability to synthesize a lot of data and do prediction. I mean, that's what AI is really good at. What AI is not good at is the human intuition, the human decisions, the human element of judgment. And so I think we're starting to use data in a way that is moving decision-making to that much more real-time. So if I just fast forward 5 years from now, I see like a live, you know, dashboard saying, ding, ding, ding, you know, here are the things to do today versus looking at the P&L after month-end close and saying, oof, we missed that. So I think that's the direction we're heading in. And frankly, I don't even think it'll be 5 years from now. I think it's, it's coming faster.

Andrew Reichert: And a lot of that technology is actually here today, but that's really where I see, you know, the industry getting to.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that's good. Like more specificity in the data and the analysis of that data and therefore the guidance of what to do in response. It's good.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, exactly.

Bill Douglas: What if instead of a dashboard, it was autonomous and it could actually make decisions and react?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, I think that's where we're going. That's a great point.

Bill Douglas: Instead of being smart, make it autonomous. Like if this, then that. We, the more we operate these, the more iterative loops we have, the actual more smart they are. They're not really smart. They just know all the decisions to make and they do them really fast.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah. Well, it's funny too, because that's really the concept of agency. Like I'm right next to a Mac mini. I've got multiple 24/7 autonomous agents running on it. And people talk about using AI agents, but the, what they're really talking about using is skills because those things that they're using don't actually have agency. And so what you just described is a true agent that has agency that can say, okay, not only have I done the research, come up with the predictive analytics, but I've made the decision and I've acted upon it. That's really, you know, where, where I think the industry and the data is getting to.

Bill Douglas: Well, we call that the property brain at the property level, and then move up one and it's a portfolio brain where you can compare the data from property 90 9 to property 1 in context, and it's actually valuable. And, you know, leverage anything you can get from your machine learning or predictive analytics from there.

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, exactly.

Bill Douglas: We're big on agency.

Andrew Reichert: So love it.

Drew Hall: Right. Okay, Andrew. So before we wrap up, we always do this shift toward the end. We call it the extra floor, just in the spirit of commercial real estate. But it's really just a big shift from talking about the industry and experience and examples and all these things to you as the guest, you know, so that our listeners can just hear some personal things about you and just ask you 3 questions here. Gut-level response, obviously no right or wrong answer, just whatever comes to your mind. So number one, what would you... what do you say is a really great piece of career or life advice that you've received?

Andrew Reichert: Well, if I just look at my career, back in 2012, I had a great job and was working a really good corporate life. And I had a mentor say, hey, Andrew, you know, if you want to your real estate business, you can do it. And if it doesn't work out, you can always get another job. And I thought that was really good. Like it gave me the wiring of thinking it's okay to fail. And so that was a really important piece of career advice that I needed to hear at the time. On the personal front, you know, from my standpoint, I think that relationships are really what matter in life. You know, it's easy for, we just had an entire episode talking about numbers and transactions and real estate.

Andrew Reichert: But from my perspective, real estate is just a means to an end. It's the lives that we impact along the of our residents and our employees and our investors. And so I think about my girls and the lessons that I have... 3 daughters... the lessons that I care to impart upon them is not that they see daddy as like a great real estate investor, but that they see daddy as a human that loves them and that loves people in this world. And so I've always tried to, you know, kind of orient myself around that.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that is excellent.

Bill Douglas: Wonderful. Well, what's one habit or practice that consistently makes you more effective?

Andrew Reichert: My number one, I would call keystone habit, is my morning routine. So back in 2014, I was one year into marriage and I got diagnosed with cancer. And it was really, you know, just this earth-shattering moment of, oh, Andrew might die. And they told us we might not be able to have kids. And so in that year, I read this book called The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, and I put together this morning routine based on what he recommends there. The acronym is SAVERS: silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, scribing, or journaling. And I've done that for the past decade plus, and it's my number one most important habit. I do it every single day, and when I don't do it, I can tell that I haven't done it.

Drew Hall: Wow.

Bill Douglas: Love it.

Drew Hall: Wow. That is fantastic. Okay. Last one, Andrew. Would you consider yourself an early bird or a night owl? And has that changed?

Andrew Reichert: It's definitely changed. Uh, I would've considered myself a night owl for Uh, the first probably 25, maybe 30 years of my life, I remember the all-nighters I would pull in college to get that report done. I was doing my best work between midnight and 2 in the morning in front of a computer, not out at the bar, but like that was where I, that was where I thrived. And today I'd say I'm slightly leaning morning bird, but probably somewhere in the middle. I get up at 6:00 AM, so I'm not a 5:00 AM guy, but, uh, 6:00 AM to get my 90-minute morning routine in before the house starts waking up is Uh, most important thing. And gosh, I can't remember the last time I've been up since midnight in the past decade.

Drew Hall: So that's fair. Absolutely.

Bill Douglas: Well, Andrew, thanks for sharing your story. I'm glad you're healthy and happy and loving life and on the other side of that big sea. So, I mean, Drew and I both had to deal with that in our families in the past 5 years. So we know what that's like. So how can our listeners contact you? This will be in the show notes, but for those that are only listening, what would be your preference?

Andrew Reichert: Yeah, from a personal standpoint, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message. I'll plan to get back to you. So that's Andrew Reichert on LinkedIn. And, you know, if you're interested in our company, what we're doing, it's birgo.com, B-I-R-G-O.com.

Bill Douglas: I love it. And again, that'll be on the show notes. So thank you, Andrew. This has been a pleasure. Thanks to all our listeners. And Drew said at the beginning of the hour, be sure to like, follow, subscribe, you know, click the bell so you know when new episodes are And we'll see you on the next episode of Peak Property Performance. Thank you.