Consistency Breaks Around 350 Doors
Shankar Thayver started TG Property Management in 2011 with three doors. Since then, the company has grown to manage about 800 doors.
Growth brought problems to TGPM. “The hardest nut to crack,” he said, “is how to maintain a consistent experience across a thousand doors with different owners and different tenants.” Most companies stall around 350 doors. At that point one person can’t handle every call, so the company hires more PMs, and each PM runs maintenance their own way.
“If one PM gets to an issue within an hour, another PM gets to it after two days. We were not being consistent,” Shankar said.
Work orders sat untouched over the weekend. PMs had their own vendor preferences. Communication broke down. And when that happened, Paul Downey, TGPM’s Director of Operations, ended up having to field upset calls.
Owners asked about a $4,000 AC estimate they’d never heard of, they called about charges on their statement no one had explained, and tenants called due to radio silence on their issues.
In Florida’s summer HVAC season, Paul handled these escalations several times a week. Some tenants skipped the office altogether. They Googled Shankar, found his cell number and kept calling.
“It doesn’t matter how much training you give,” Shankar said. “When PMs are on their own, they just start doing what they’re used to doing.” Hiring more PMs didn’t fix it either. It gave him more people to manage, and none of them became more consistent.
How Mason Grew at TGPM
Mason started small. At first he only handled troubleshooting: Did you check the drain line? Is it dripping? Is there a clog? Did you send a photo? Molly, a property manager, said that alone took a lot off her plate. “There are so many follow-ups you have to do with troubleshooting with the resident.” Some issues got fixed without a vendor at all.
Some staff worried AI would take their jobs. But after one PM, Katherine, started using Mason for more and more of her work, their perspective started to shift. They saw that they could treat Mason like an assistant and “once they could tell [Mason] what to do, it was full charge ahead,” Paul said. Molly remembered the change: “I wasn’t looking at Mason as a person. I was looking at Mason like AI. Once I started accepting Mason, it just skyrocketed everything.”
Molly said, “I’m obsessed with Mason’s owner notifications. My owners love it.” Her owners also replied faster, because Mason kept following up. “Some people need follow-ups every hour to get a response out of them,” she said. “I’m not going to remember that.”
Mason as a Member of the Team
Nobody at TGPM considers Mason software. “They all see Mason as another employee,” Shankar said. “It’s not just a tool.”
PMs text and email Mason the way they’d talk to an assistant: send this email, update this tenant.
Allison had started at TGPM a year earlier as a PM assistant. Now she’s a PM, and Mason does the job she used to do. “I can pretty much bluntly be like, ‘Can you tell the owner this?’” she said. “And he words it well and gives it to the owner in a way that’s easy to digest.”
Paul oversees more than 400 owners and said, “I’m very particular about what gets sent out to them. And Mason’s emails look like something I would have written when I used to manage properties.” After seeing examples of Mason winning over owners, Paul led the charge for Mason to handle owner communication across the entire portfolio.
Most owners treated Mason like staff. “A lot of people are like, ‘Thanks, Mason, for your help,’” Allison said. “Most of them think he’s my assistant, or someone who works in the office.”
The Confidence to Scale to 10,000 Doors
Shankar names confidence as one of the biggest results of working with Mason. “If I can consistently treat all my owners and tenants with the same quality of service, that gives me confidence to scale,” he said. He believes TGPM could grow to 10,000 doors, by buying companies and by signing new owners.
The data from Mason has helped him and his BDM sign up new owners. They show how fast TGPM handles maintenance now: within hours, where it once took 24 to 36 hours. “It just blows them away,” he said. Younger owners especially want to see what was happening at their property in real time, and Shankar sees Mason as his competitive advantage.
The day-to-day at TGPM changed too:
- Escalations have fallen about 90%. Paul can’t remember his last call from an upset tenant.
- Shankar’s phone went quiet. He hasn’t had a tenant call his cell in six months.
- PMs spend about 10% of their time on maintenance. Mason does the other 90%.
- PMs can now visit 80% of vacancies at move-out. They had never had time for that before. “In Jacksonville especially, we have properties all over,” Paul said.
What They’d Tell Another Property Manager
“Dive right in. Don’t hesitate. I wish I would have done it right from the start.”
“Just do it. It takes so much time off your plate.”
“Embrace it. I didn’t in the beginning, and it has changed my day to day so much. Mason is my go-to now.”
“I don’t think anybody can hide from AI. Either they embrace it or they’re gone.”