When You Can't Raise the Rent: Rethinking Affordable Housing Performance

Drew Hall: Welcome back to the Peak Property Performance Podcast. I'm your host, Drew Hall alongside Bill Douglas. And today's theme is when you cannot raise the rent, an affordable housing asset manager on expenses, the 24/7 desk clerk and going autonomous by 2027. So before we introduce our guest, just do all the reminders up front here for our listeners. Please like, subscribe, share, ring the bell... might be the most important thing. I don't actually know if that's the most important thing, but it's really important because it helps you know when it's time to check out a new episode. And why are we talking about this? This is how we're spreading the word on this Peak Property Performance movement and changing an industry. That's the reason why we are here.

Drew Hall: So if you think that you would provide value here as a guest, or if you know someone who would, please contact us, let us know. We welcome CRE thought leaders from all stages of ownership and operation. Just please reach out to us. Best way honestly is through peakpropertyperformance.com or find us OpticWise on LinkedIn. That's fine as well. So Bill, welcome.

Bill Douglas: Hey, glad to be here as always, Drew. Never dull moment. Today we have Trevor Jones joining us. And Trevor, before I read your intro, say hello and tell us where you're hailing from today.

Trevor Jones: Hey Bill and Drew, thanks for the intro. I'm hailing from San Francisco. On this beautiful cloudy day.

Bill Douglas: Beautiful cloudy day. So imagine that it's not sunny in San Francisco, but boy, do I love San Francisco. Yeah. So Trevor has spent more than a dozen years in multifamily on both the market rate and the affordable sides. He came up through private equity with Hamilton Zanz, where he worked in asset management and dispositions overseeing 30 to 40 properties at a time with 6 regional managers. Today he's senior asset manager at Mission Housing Development Corporation. a San Francisco nonprofit that owns and manages about 1,300 affordable units in one of the most heavily regulated housing markets in the country. He brings a private equities investor's discipline to a world where grants and public funding set the revenue.

Bill Douglas: So the expense side is where the work gets done. So Trevor, welcome to Peak Property Performance. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Trevor Jones: Absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, most important thing is I'm actually a director now. Oh,

Bill Douglas: okay.

Trevor Jones: But no, I'm just saying, no, it's Congratulations. Yeah, it's, it's been a hell of a year and I'm really excited about the progress we've made.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, Trevor, it's always fun when the theme of the show sort of drops some nice nuggets about what we might be talking about. So let's jump right into it. We mentioned in the theme about not being able to touch revenue necessarily. So let's just jump right into that. Tell us about like in your transition from private equity to this world where you cannot raise the rent, how did your playbook change?

Trevor Jones: Oh, it changed drastically. You know, in private equity, you have a lot of levers. You've got, you know, the optional disposition, refinance, recapitalization, supplemental loans. You can go with a renovation plan to raise revenue. You can go down a different marketing hole. You know, you've got just infinite opportunities. It's capitalism at work. And that's all well and good, but, but, you know, on the affordable side, you're serving a specific and acute population that doesn't necessarily have the ability to match what the market demands.

Trevor Jones: And it's a sad reality, especially here in San Francisco where we do have extreme wealth and extreme poverty. And it's important to have certain programs, but the programs to me, it's important that they're run as if it's a private equity group and we are running as efficiently as possible. So that's kind of the take I've brought into it. The difficulty is, like you said, our rents are actually set at either a federal, state, or local level. We have so many degrees of regulations over each unit specifically that just understanding what your max allowable rent is changes every year or throughout the year. And so, you know, some, some of that is out of our control and, and COVID certainly put damper on it as we realized that, you know, we weren't raising rents In line. So, you know, on one hand you have this 4% rent cap that may be applicable across your portfolio under a governing body, but we haven't been instituting that 4% increase or that increase at the federal or state or city level, local level has increased higher than 4% year over year. So now you're trying to play catch up and you have to really make a case for if there's an opportunity to increase someone's rent that still aligns within Not only the company's mission, but the governing body's mission and the economics of the family itself.

Trevor Jones: So we may spend what in the private equity world, we have YieldStar, we have LRO, we have all these different beautiful algorithms that have been created, probably using AI now. But back when I started, it was essentially a giant algorithm that would determine your rents like it's a seat on a plane or You know, a hotel room, higher demand, lower occupancy, higher rents, you know, more units expiring a certain month, you're going to have lower renewal rates. It's just all very much auto-calculated. And you generally have someone at the YieldStar level or the LRO level that is 100%. That's their job is to make sure that you are catching everyone up each month and bringing them up to that market rate. Whereas, you know, we're in the affordable space or the space I'm currently in and have been in for the last 3 years, it's harder to play catch up. That's been the big thing. It's, and when there's a national event like we had in 2020, there's a lot of rules and restrictions that go into place that take years to burn off.

Trevor Jones: Even after they've ended them, we're still dealing with the aged receivables. We're dealing with the people that have fallen way behind on rent and a 4% increase on a couple hundred dollars. because, you know, that's, that's our max, isn't going to catch you up. And we're seeing that delta grow between new people that recently moved in and people who have been there a long time. And that's something that I think historically has always plagued rent-restricted places. Yeah. When you're given a max, that delta between your lowest paying resident for the same exact unit and your highest just continues to grow over time because 4% for this higher person is a bigger number than 4% for this person. So if they're both getting 4%, this person's going to continue to grow.

Trevor Jones: And it was actually one of the first things that, one of my larger achievements back in my Hamilton Zanz days was that we noticed this happening where we, you'd set parameters when it came to renewals. And the parameters were, I want everyone to have a minimum of 4% and the maximum should be 10%. And Everyone should live in that area. And then what we started to see was that delta would grow. And in the market rate, the logical thing is I'm going to add another parameter. I'm going to say I actually want everyone to be within 80% of the most recent 3 leases of that unit type. And now you're getting the people on the rent roll to kind of catch up to new lease rates. And, you know, that's, that's a huge lever to have, something that we definitely don't have on the affordable side.

Trevor Jones: It's just more restricted in terms of How we go about it. It's just a bit more of figuring out exactly how to present this to the governing body. You know, we know in our, in our own mind what makes sense. And to you and the listeners, I'm sure you know that having that delta between your lowest paying tenant and your highest paying tenant, the person that just moved in, if they're neighbors and they start to talk, and then all of a sudden you're realizing, hey, why is this guy paying so much less? I'm paying more and I just got a higher increase. These questions start to come back to us and that's when we find ourselves in a world of hurt and a difficult position to explain that. I mean, it really is difficult to explain to a person who's paying more why they're getting a higher increase than the person paying less.

Drew Hall: Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, a couple of things it makes me think of too is just like, you know, the ability to introduce more metrics into these decisions that you're making, you know, more data points. I mean, generally speaking, a good thing, right? I mean, if they're not appropriate for all parties, for sure, it may not be helpful for all parties, but in terms of analyzing performance of the asset, things like that, and we'll get more into that later on today's episode for sure. But more data points, it sounds like, is, is something that's like brewing and on the table. And we've got some follow-up questions on that as well. So real quickly though, before we move on to that, you know, everything so far we're talking top line, some limitations that are set by grants and regulation and stuff. But what about, what about on expenses? Are there particular expenses that you're focused on most right now? And have any of those expenses surprised you specifically?

Trevor Jones: Oh my God. Uh, yes. The big surprise, uh, which, which is no surprise to anyone, I'm sure, is insurance. Insurance, you know, especially here in California, it's amazing to see how difficult... no one underwrote 5 years ago that we're going to double our rates in the next 5 years. And that's what we've seen in our portfolio. That's what I've seen in some of my private equity investments in old companies that over the last 5 to 10 years, rates have doubled. And it's funny to think that back in the Hamilton Zanze days, we were looking at Texas and Florida and some of the Southeast as these places that had insane insurance rates because, you know, they have hailstorms and natural events. But now we're here in San Francisco where we have relatively moderate climate and we have earthquakes.

Trevor Jones: We still have this insurance premium that's doubling. And it's a really difficult thing to deal with when you don't have that top line leverage. So on the insurance side, what we've been doing is we've been vetting each claim and that claim really has to pass a certain number of metrics. One being it has to be about 20% over our deposit. It has to really have a material effect to the point where it's worth even filing the claim because our deductibles are so high already that it's gotta be a big event for insurance to even kick in. And we're already paying such a high number that, you know, even though it's far and few between, insurance companies seem to have an idea of their game is to make money, but not to completely decimate your bottom line. So, you know, we have a great working relationship with our insurance provider. We stay in such close contact with them.

Trevor Jones: We've actually had them come to each of our sites annually and take a look and give us a list of every potential liability that they see. So anything that would make them want to raise our rates, that goes into our capital plan for the following year, or for that year, for that matter, if we have the cash on hand. And, you know, I'll give a sad example. If a kid has fallen out of a window, you know, this is something that obviously goes to our insurance. And now we're looking at our whole portfolio saying, hey, where do we need window guards? We're going to proactively go and install these at the insurer's recommendation so that this is not something that may follow us and carry us forward into another multiplication of insurance rates over the next few years. So we've been really proactive on that front. But there's so many expenses that we're really looking at. The cost of human capital is a big one.

Trevor Jones: It's not something that we ever want to do away with. But what we're seeing is that through some of these technological advances, that we are able to reallocate that human capital into a way that is more productive than someone sitting at a door staring at for 8 hours.

Bill Douglas: So what are you doing to reduce those staffing costs? And what were you doing this year? What are you planning on doing next year?

Trevor Jones: So the plan for, for staffing costs is to, well, one, we're setting the building up so that inevitably when some of these systems are universally accepted, that we're in a position to take advantage of them. Things from access control, we have replaced our entry systems so that they are not only a fob, but they're trackable to see who came in and have a whole list of people coming in and out so that we can really figure out what's happening inside our building when we do have an incident report. That sort of capitalizes on the person that sits at the front desk because yeah, they're monitoring who comes in and out. But you know, there's maybe a dog fight on the 3rd floor happening or, you know, a dog's using a restroom in the corridor again. And that's not being caught by someone sitting at the front desk. You know, they might lean over and see it on the security camera. But some of the systems that we're currently evaluating, they integrate directly with your existing security camera, which is great. It doesn't require any infrastructure.

Trevor Jones: It is purely software. Of course, they have recommendations of where you can add cameras or quality cameras or speakers.

Bill Douglas: But... If you remove that person from the front desk, how do you anticipate the resident experience to be impacted?

Trevor Jones: The resident experience to be impacted? Well, so when you remove the person from the front desk, then you have a roving security team. You have a set of SOPs for reacting to any resident disputes or issues with, I mean, for any issues with the residents. There is someone on the other side of that camera. They have a 5-second response time from the time that they identify something to the time that they're either on a speaker telling them, or they're actually reaching out to a central desk clerk who is located, you know, We were lucky and fortunate enough to have much of our portfolio in a specific area of San Francisco. So we're trying to build on that region, that consolidated regional area that we have, that we can have a more centralized approach to this instead of having one desk clerk here and one next door. What if we combine them? I mean, we're already doing that at the staffing level anyway. We're taking, I'll give you an example where we took a property that's 30, 20 units and it had a full-time property manager and no maintenance. So we were bending out maintenance full-time.

Trevor Jones: You know, this property has one move-out annually max. So why do we need the property manager there for the full-time? So one of the things that we did last year was we combined 2 properties under one manager and one maintenance person. And we've been able to cut out all those things that we were bending out. And, you know, we're able to save people that have high-paying jobs for the industry by assigning them to more units and using that geographic consolidation to really build up our economies of scale. And the feedback on things like that, the resident experience has been fantastic. They're so happy to have a maintenance person that they can call, and it's not them calling a property manager who's then going to call a vendor who's going to come out at some point. It's a person who's walking across the street from the property that he's been working at for 20 years. So there's a lot of that that we're considering within This special high acuity area that we're talking about, what you're referring to is the SROs, single resident occupants.

Trevor Jones: They have shared kitchens, shared bathrooms. They're transitional housing. And those properties require significant more amount of either human or financial or technical oversight because they're just, it's a more acute resident group. We have 20% to 30% turnover at those sites. We have legal cases open that take a long time to solve. It's where we tend to have a higher amount of incidents that do go to insurance. So, you know, it really depends on the property that we're talking about. But in terms of the 24/7 clerks, I mean, like I said, right now it's someone at the desk.

Trevor Jones: At most, they're buzzing people in or calling police. It's very similar to what we'd be doing with an AI system regardless, with a person on the other side with speaker controls throughout the building and cameras. So, I mean, the resident experience, it's yet to be tested. It's something that we're exploring.

Drew Hall: Well, so tell us a little bit about... I mean, my understanding here is that you've got this cash flow sheet, you know, that's influenced by several reports so far, right? I guess maybe start by talking to us about what's that process like, you know, pulling those multiple reports each month. Just kind of start with, with what you do today and we'll kind of work through what your hope is for the future and automation and that sort of thing.

Trevor Jones: Sure. Yeah. So the cash flow sheet, we affectionately call it the Bible. It is a relatively simple sheet when you think about it, but basically it's just a bunch of IF functions, index matching, and it's able to take your T12, your balance sheet, your aged receivables, aging payables, and consolidate into what I would call a dashboard in today's sense. Reality, it's still a spreadsheet, but it looks pretty when you print it. And it is a really nice visual for, you know, if you're a director or executive director, you want to snapshot the property. The other great thing is, is it has a qualitative and quantitative component. And that's something that's, that's really been important to us as we evaluate these opportunities to fully automate things, right? There's certain things that you can fully automate.

Trevor Jones: I'm sure there is a way to do it that we're yet to figure out, but you know, this sheet is partially automated and then partially it's something I need to fill out when I get an update on leasing for a specific unit or someone just signed a stipulated agreement for a payment plan. There's a legal case of when someone's in abatement. These aren't things that you can pull from a single source. You actually have to go and find it. And, you know, wherever you're putting it in, into an Excel spreadsheet or into AI, it's something that is still living in a... it's in a government website that we have to find the abatement and then update these systems with. So to talk about the cash flow sheet, it's a bunch of reports that's consolidated into one nice centralized dashboard as a qualitative and quantitative

Drew Hall: Yeah. How is it today versus goals that you have for the future, just in terms of decision-making based on, you know, last month's information versus data that you anticipate? I mean, is that happening yet or is that in the goal of,

Trevor Jones: We're currently uploading it into... I mean, we have uploaded into Claude and it certainly works. You can just drop in a whole financial package and that 20 minutes I was spending pulling individual reports, pasting it in, making sure it crossed over correctly, that's been a time saver. It's a huge time saver. And I think I mentioned it when we first spoke, but it's like our job has gone from 80% analysis and 20% implementation to 20% analysis and 80% implementation. Been the biggest win for us. And it goes for everything from, you know, we have something like 20 elevators. Each one has an individual contract that was signed over the last 30 years. And you kind of read through each one, figure out When the expiration date is, what your window of renewal is, or if you can cancel or renegotiate something that's just been building over years.

Trevor Jones: So to your point about expenses, I mean, elevators is something I could talk all day about. Most of our agreements are 20 years old and they, there's like a CPI number that they're attached to when they increase it. It's kind of like, oh, the cost of steel went up. So our rates go up by this, or, you know, the union said that the wages are this. So our technician's rate has gone up to this and You know, we own a significant number of older buildings in the city with either 1 or 2 elevators. And when they go down, it is so expensive. You have to hire runners. And now we're talking about, you know, again, city regulatory bodies getting involved because there are bad actors out there who will just leave a property and say, hey, you know, Otis will get to it when they can, or TKE or whichever provider will get to it when they can.

Trevor Jones: And, you know, the result has been that now we're required to hire runners. So someone to make sure that you're... the people that are unable to walk down the stairs are able to get their, their medication or food or whatever's needed. And, and that's a requirement. It's a big topic right now. It's becoming more and more regulated. And I would encourage you to take a look at what I think it was Berkeley or somewhere in the East Bay. But they said that if, if you're going to have an elevator down for like a 24-hour period, you have to offer relocation to the entire building.

Drew Hall: Wow. Wow.

Trevor Jones: Imagine being,

Bill Douglas: how old are your buildings?

Drew Hall: That's aggressive, right?

Bill Douglas: Yeah. And what do you do with a building that has one elevator?

Trevor Jones: Well, that's the thing. I mean,

Bill Douglas: wow.

Trevor Jones: If I were a lender or an investor looking in the East Bay right now and it had an elevator in it, I mean, I'd be really cautious. Yeah. That's so critical. It's something that gets tossed around like it's a utopia, right? Like, it's like we're not living in a reality. Oh, well, the elevator goes down, everyone gets relocation or the opportunity to relocate. But in reality, that would destroy any company's entire year. I don't know how many companies have reserves that could sustain, you know, 100-plus person relocation.

Drew Hall: Well, so Trevor, you're talking about a really, sounds like a very successful beginning to this transformation, I would say honestly, from, you know, analysis to action, flipping it from 80/20 to 20/80. How is the alerting going in that whole... in this system so far? Like, are you getting preemptive alerts from the system yet, or do you anticipate doing that soon?

Trevor Jones: So preemptive alerts when it comes to the financials, no. Personally, we use Yardi. Yardi's, you know, we talk about our data. That's our data. We own it. If we transfer it to a different PMS system, it's going with us. Doesn't stay with Yardi. The downside is that what I've seen other companies do is They have a CTO who's going to go create a, it's like a, uh, what do you, it would be a carbon copy of Yardi in a different, um, database so that it just keeps copying over the data from Yardi so that then you can link it up to Claude or some of the AI intelligence things.

Trevor Jones: But right now Yardi is very protected and it makes sense because we're dealing with people's Social Security, personal information, all these things that people don't want out. In public. And for us too, we don't want everyone having access to our rent roll. I mean, imagine,

Drew Hall: Sure.

Bill Douglas: Having it protected is one thing, but your data is another. So we had a data privacy attorney on the show last month and he said the, the bigs, you know, I'm not, I don't, I haven't looked at your Yardi contract, but the bigs are the most guilty of that. They actually own the data and they license it back to you. Even at Yardi?

Bill Douglas: You generated it. Yeah. And he was a really strong advocate of read the contract because they are changeable. They are negotiable, but The standard contract in most of those platforms is that. I'm not trashing Yardi, just saying this gentleman, and you could go listen to the show yourself, he said it's worth a look because that's the standard.

Trevor Jones: I believe it to an extent.

Bill Douglas: And you can change PMS, but that doesn't mean your data goes with you. That's sometimes, I'm not saying it works forever. Yeah, sometimes. So if you've done homework, great. But we've had other people on the show that said, I had to buy my own data back.

Trevor Jones: That's wild.

Bill Douglas: Uh, isn't it wild?

Trevor Jones: I've, I've made a transition or two and, and that hasn't Been the case for me. We've switched between,

Bill Douglas: I'm glad to hear that. We're strong advocates of you own the property, you own the digital infrastructure, you own the data. So we try to follow that line no matter what vendor or what system or what dataset we're talking about. So you, you and I had a conversation, uh, recently and you brought it up here, but you're uploading things to Claude, hats off to you. And you're trying to build towards automation and that's a great step along the way, right? So what should stay under your control? No matter which AI tool you're using, and Claude's one AI tool. And how do you know which documents go into the AI and which stay with you? Like you had privacy and security concerns about Yardi. Don't they translate into the AI tool as well?

Trevor Jones: Yeah. So especially with, you know, pulling tenant data, if we're going to upload a rent roll, things like that, we transcribe it. I mean, we, I say we try, but that is a manual thing that we have to be super cognizant of is that we don't upload the names and personal information of people. We try and protect anonymity in that. That's where I wonder about linking Yardi. I mean, will Yardi ever be able to link with Claude or will they stay in their own ecosystem?

Bill Douglas: Well, we get asked that a lot, Trevor, but the answer from our opinion is it's your data and you, yeah, you can link to Yardi, but you don't have to link it right to Claude. You could link it to your data lake and then use it at will. And Claude is just one tool that there's Gemini, there's OpenAI, there's, you know, et cetera. There's many AI tools that you could use on your own dataset and your own brain. I'm not advocating you just go link these 2? Because we've had very large presidents on here say all our systems are integrated. And when you drill down into it, they didn't actually have their own data. Yes, their systems were integrated, but they were just listening to each other and making their own decisions. There was no way for them to do any control in between.

Bill Douglas: Take it up to 100,000-foot level and look at it architecturally, just like if you were going to build a building, you wouldn't start with, here's what the sign's going to be. And, you know, here's how big the front door is. You'd say, what am I trying to do with this property in this space? I think that's, that's what I would suggest. And if you, here's another question. If you had to switch AI tools, say you had to switch from Claude in 2028 and you've been running on it for 2 years, what would you want to walk out the door with? What do you want to make sure is yours?

Trevor Jones: That's, that's one thing that I've been thinking about a lot as we consider that opportunity to, you know, there, there is a world where you can, there are other companies doing this where they upload all their, all their loan agreements, all their promissory notes, everything that would go into an audit of a property is uploaded into a folder and you can just start asking it questions. Hey, you know, I'm thinking about raising rent, rents over 4%. How would I go about doing that? Which regulatory body can I reach out to? And so, you know, when you think about that, to me, the data still belongs with me because I uploaded those things and I'm going to have those original docs. And so I can always bring it to a different company if needed. But once they're out there, they're out there. And that's a big concern.

Bill Douglas: If you architect it right, you can maintain your own data and then use the AI tool to analyze it and you still retain the intelligence. The data and all the intellectual property. You don't have to just upload it and hope that this one... because you may want to use 10 different AI tools on your dataset because this one's better at numbers, this one's better at research, this one's better at creative, this one's better at content, this one's better at email. I mean, I'm using real case studies from the biggest 5 LLMs I can think of right now, the large language models, which are just AI tools. So just like we advocate you control the data in your facility, And the, you choose your vendors. The AI tools are just vendors. It's still your data. So own it.

Bill Douglas: Like we say in the book, own your damn data.

Trevor Jones: Own your damn data.

Bill Douglas: The publisher challenged us on that line, but we got away with it.

Trevor Jones: Nice. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's been so interesting to see the big players, like you mentioned, you know, Yardi and RealPage to me are 2 of the larger players in the space. And originally it was Yardi with an overlay of Of RealPage, RealPage gave us our data, or not really actually. Before RealPage, it was AxioMetrics, and then RealPage bought AxioMetrics, and then it was YieldStar, and then you know they bought LRO. But Jeff Sessions blocked it for a period. I think actually ended up going through, and now RealPage all of a sudden is running the entire revenue side of our portfolio effectively. And Yardi is our base accounting.

Trevor Jones: That's where we track our expenses. We pull reports. We update our internal what was proprietary spreadsheets now is. becoming something else. But it's really interesting to see that Yardi is now doing the same thing. They're just on a buying spree of, you know, website developers. They're buying, leasing. Have you heard of Elise AI? I mean, some of these groups are like,

Bill Douglas: There's been some interesting news about Elise in the past 2 weeks. We have talked about it on the show and we blogged about it a lot. Some starts and stops involved around it. Yeah. I'm not going to pass judgment. Just go search and do your own.

Trevor Jones: Sure.

Bill Douglas: News fact-finding. There's a lot of moving parts to that.

Trevor Jones: Yeah, that, that was a really interesting one. When I heard that they had 20% of the market signed up with them in the US, I was pretty surprised. You know, given this is a people business, at the end of the day, it's your life. It's where you live. It's, I mean, where you raise your kids. Like, this is a home.

Drew Hall: Absolutely. Yep.

Trevor Jones: You can only automate that to an extent. At some point, you know, you're going to want to sit in front of someone and sign your lease. Maybe not These days you're, we're, we're doing everything through DocuSign, but you still have to like at some point interact with someone just to make it feel like the home that it is to you, whether it's handing keys over or just something as basic as that. But it's the small stuff.

Drew Hall: Yeah. There's a, and there's value in human touch too, even though, you know, the mechanics of delivering that quote unquote human touch are changing in ways, very real ways, like we're talking about here. So Trevor, everything we've talked about so far is, you know, business and case studies and the journey, success, some successes for sure. So. What we love to do at the end of our episodes here is to just switch gears into what we call the extra floor. And these questions are just like rapid-fire, gut-level responses about you, you know, so that our listeners can get to know the human side of, of you. So 3 questions. Here's number 1.

Drew Hall: What would you say is a great piece of career or life advice that you have received somewhere along the way?

Trevor Jones: Career or life advice? Yeah, I've always liked the one, uh, Be smart enough to know you're not the smartest one in the room. I've always loved that one. You should constantly be learning, whether it's from someone that you look up to or someone that maybe even reports to you. Just keep an open mind and be willing to adapt. There's so much of this industry that's been constricted by the unwillingness to continue to grow with the times. And we've seen it happen so many times throughout, throughout my career. I've seen it where, you know, a company adapts. an idea and it's like, we're going to staff it this way and that's it.

Trevor Jones: No one revisits that decision. I mean, I'm talking about elevator contracts that are 25 years old and we're still paying them. I mean, they, the whole elevator's obsolete, so the contract doesn't apply to it, but we're still paying the maintenance agreement. But it's the same thing with all these things that we need to be willing to evaluate and reevaluate and just question everything throughout your career. I mean, there's no harm in asking. And That's always been like the biggest thing for me is just to know that you can ask for help. And when you ask for help, it's not admitting that you're dumb or, you know, not thoughtful. It's trying to get someone else's perspective on why it has been done that way for so long and why you think there might be a different way to do it better.

Bill Douglas: So what's one habit or practice that consistently makes you more effective?

Trevor Jones: Consistency. That is absolutely, I mean, for running a property portfolio, you need to be consistent. You need to have uniformity for your sites to the best of your ability. You might have, you know, family sites, might have mixed-use sites, you might have SROs, you may have student, but to the, to the effect that you can somehow boil each one down to something that you can set a benchmark against and consistently evaluate it against that benchmark, whether it's internal or external, you're paying for the data, you're using your own. It's so important that you consistently look back and reevaluate whatever you're looking at. It's just, it's It's the consistency of being on top of a new lease or someone coming in that needs... you have a new property manager or whatever, and having the consistency to be there to support them and your team. That's been a huge one for me.

Drew Hall: All right. 3 of 3. Last one. The most high-pressure question of all. Do you consider yourself an early bird or a night owl? And has that changed?

Trevor Jones: Early bird all day long. Yeah. That's been... I used to love to stay up. I mean, that's the truth. When you're a little bit younger in your career, in your 20s, I mean, you definitely want to stay up and go out. And I've actually seen a shift even in some of our younger employees and people that are recently joining the companies I'm at. People are going to bed earlier. They're taking care of themselves more.

Trevor Jones: It's like this strange thing that is like recently happening. It feels like maybe it's just here in the Bay Area, but it really feels like people are taking care of themselves more and really valuing sleep and thinking about that in a profound way.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Interesting. No, it's not just there. I agree with you. Taking that more seriously. Yeah.

Bill Douglas: At all ages. Well, thank you, Trevor.

Trevor Jones: All right.

Bill Douglas: Thank you to our listeners. All the listeners, Trevor's contact information will be on the, in the show notes and on the page. Feel free to reach out to him. And as Drew said at the beginning of the show, be sure to like, follow, subscribe, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Peak Property Performance.