Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Stacey Salyer Show, the podcast for property management leaders ready to think bigger about growth. I'm Stacey Salyer and the only acquisition strategist in this industry who sat on all sides of the m and a table. I've been the buyer acquiring a 370 door competitor during COVID using seller financing.
I've been the seller building and exiting a seven figure business. And I've been the corporate evaluator as director of acquisitions, assessing over hundreds of companies nationally. That means I know exactly what you're thinking, what you're missing, and what actually works when it comes to buying and integrating in this space.
On this show, we dig into acquisitions as a real business tool. Not luck, not someday. You'll learn positioning, strategy, numbers, and integration from someone who's actually done it all. Let's go.
Stacey Salyer: So today I have [00:01:00] a special guest. We are going to be talking about ai and I know that AI is. All the rage across all industries, but especially property management. And you might be wondering how we're gonna tie that into buying and selling property management companies.
We'll stick around and take a listen because we've got some really cool things that my guest is going to be talking about. So I'd like to welcome onto my show, Nitin with Mason. So welcome.
Nitin Gupta: Thanks for having me.
Stacey Salyer: Awesome. Well, yeah, if you don't mind uh, giving my listeners a little bit of a background of you and we can kind of dive into your business and talk a little bit about that, that'd be great.
Nitin Gupta: Cool. Well, hey, thanks for having me. My name's Nitin. I'm the CEO here at Mason. Mason's a relatively young company. We've been building in the , AI for property management space for about a year. I'm actually not from real estate. I come from a technology background.
I started building companies in San Francisco about 10 years ago. One of the first ones was in the commercial insurance space, which topic for another time. [00:02:00] Is very similar actually in some ways to property management and actually has a lot of acquisitions very similar to the property management industry.
And about a year ago, we effectively moved to Sacramento. Mm-hmm. We worked alongside a few property management companies with. Thousand or so doors and we worked outta their offices to figure out how could we build AI agents to meaningfully improve the quality of operations and the profitability of these management companies.
And the rest was history and we've been building this space ever since.
Stacey Salyer: Awesome. Well, cool. So to kind of preface for my listeners today, we are gonna be talking about AI and Sure. Maintenance. So maintenance related ai and anyone that's in property management knows that maintenance is one of the biggest headaches.
I know I've been in the business for over 20 years and maintenance has always been one of the most challenging pieces. So it's always really fun to talk to somebody who has kind of cracked the code on the AI and like the agentic AI to help out property management companies. And then we're gonna dive into how that can kind of.
[00:03:00] Also tie into if you're looking at buying a property management company, really of course, if you're gonna be selling maybe a little bit too. We have not talked about this, but I'm curious, how did you come up with a name Mason? Like how did you guys name your business?
Why is it.
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. So, the original inception of the business was a business called May. May was actually named after my virtual assistant in the Philippines. And her name is May and we still work together. And one of the things that May did for me was she managed my email inbox. So the very first product that we ever.
May was an AI email inbox, and this is actually how we landed into the property management space, which is we were selling this AI email tool to folks in the real estate space and we actually learned that property managers, you know, lo and behold, get a lot of email. Yes. The value of AI actually comes from doing a workflow end-to-end.
So we pretty quickly realized that, hey, we shouldn't just be generically selling an email, AI product. What we should do is find a workflow that is extremely painful, extremely high [00:04:00] volume, and probably shouldn't be done by people, and build an end-to-end workflow for that system. And when we discover maintenance, we're asking the question of like, what should may become, should.
Our maintenance system be named May. But you know, there's a building in maintenance, there's construction maintenance. So we like the word mason because it, you know, invoked imagery of construction, of bricks mm-hmm. Of stones. It was an evolution of the word May. And we decided on the name Mason about nine months ago.
And turns out it sticks. You know, we now have. 12,000, maybe 18,000 tenants who are actively talking to Mason on a daily basis. And you know, they've gotten to know him really well.
Stacey Salyer: I love that. That's really cool. That's cool evolutionary. Yeah. Story, so you built originally the email inbox May, and then you thought, wow, I would love to really challenge my life and myself dive in, dive into the world of property management maintenance.
So I mean, you kind of hit on that a little bit, but what did you first think when you looked at [00:05:00] maintenance workflows? What was your first kind of thought around that?
Nitin Gupta: my first thought was that it actually wasn't something where the administration of maintenance should be done by a person.
This all started actually when we were sitting alongside a property manager who also managed her own maintenance. And her phone kept ringing. Mm-hmm. Her phone kept ringing, her phone kept buzzing 'cause she was getting emails and we were having lunch and. We kind kind of asking her, we're like, Hey, do you need to take that?
Do you need to respond to that email? Do you need to respond to that call? And she was like, no, I'm having lunch. I do not need to respond to this. I'll get to it later. Well, it turns out these were tenants submitting work orders. These were vendors needing onsite approvals, owners maybe who had questions about maintenance spend.
And they were all funneling through to her the problem. And she even expressly said this, was she couldn't be in two places at once. And you know, for us as technologists we're like, oh wow, that's kind of interesting. Like she can't be in two places at once, but Mason can. So, we got really interested in the coordination elements of [00:06:00] maintenance because we realized that, you know, when it comes to troubleshooting and dispatch and approvals and invoicing.
All of these administrative functions actually could be done by, by ai. By the way, this does not mean that we believe that the entire maintenance function is gonna be run by ai. We actually are very invested in the future of people First maintenance. What we just think is that the administrative components of maintenance can be well managed by an AI system.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, and that's fair. So, and again, those that are listening who have been in property management, or maybe you're listening and you're thinking about buying a property management company, the initial like work order requests, I mean, that's all very admin. I mean the, the phone calls, you know, then sending out a work order to maybe three vendors and then waiting for one vendor to pick it up and, you know, whatever that workflow is for that particular company.
So as far as like kind of your mason. How does that work for a company like, so let's say I own a property management company and let's say I manage 500 doors. What does like [00:07:00] my onboarding look like? do I need to have like really good processes documented? What does that look like?
Nitin Gupta: So,
Mason will work where your company works. So we'll get onto your phone tree, we'll get into your email system. We'll work within your PMS wherever your work order is submitted. This is one of the nice things about ai. AI can read an email, AI can talk on the phone, AI can read an incoming work order request.
And the process change is that Mason ends up taking over your intake, your troubleshooting, and your dispatch. The system is built around approvals, so, instead of Mason making autonomous decisions, we believe that AI should ask teams for approvals. So suddenly your team that previously did all of the coordination, all the follow ups, they're actually more about like exception handling and approval management.
You know, when Mason has made the decision, you know, I need to do this, the team is actually gonna approve or deny what he's requesting to do so they don't have to worry about falling. For invoices and all those things. They just need to approve the invoice, approve the amount of money that Mason has figured out needs to [00:08:00] be spent on an issue.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. So I wouldn't have to fire my maintenance coordinator. I could basically elevate my maintenance coordinator to kind of a little bit more thought provoking work, I suppose.
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. I mean, really what we observe is our customers are trying to get their maintenance coordinators and their teams into the field.
They observe that, you know, some of the best and highest use of time for their team is those maintenance coordinators they should be doing inspections, right? They should be, you know, managing the inspections, managing the owner relationships around annual inspections, around reactive maintenance.
That is very relationship driven. That's customer driven, that's in-person work. And that's actually what, like the owner. Is paying you for you know, I talk to management companies all the time who tell me, well, maintenance is like kind of our core differentiator. We don't wanna give that up to ai.
Mm-hmm. And what I remind them is that your owners are paying you to take care of homes, not to answer emails. So your maintenance coordinator can shift into a [00:09:00] role, which is more about taking care of the home and less about answering emails.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, no, that's fair. Yeah, I think I wish I would've had that around when I owned my property management company.
So, that would've been very handy. so I think, again, for people listening you know, a lot of times when people think of ai, they hear ai, they think like chat, GBT, or maybe they think Claude, maybe notebook lm. how does Mason differ from that? I mean, it's not like a Claude, right?
Nitin Gupta: So the way to think about Mason is Mason is executing a workflow, right? The maintenance orchestration. The maintenance system requires intake, troubleshooting, approvals, dispatch, collecting estimates, scheduling time, maybe dispatching your in-house team, communicating when your techs are in the field, creating materials lists for Home Depot.
Closing out work orders, gathering reviews, getting invoices, billing owners, those are all actions that need to be taken in the maintenance workflow, and [00:10:00] that is what Mason is doing. Of course, on the tenant side, it's almost like sometimes they're talking to an intelligent chat bt, where you know, they call and they ask questions about, Hey, you know, why is this thing leaking?
What do I do about this situation? And Mason's gonna troubleshoot with them. Almost as if they had asked chat GBT. Because turns out, actually a lot of the maintenance coordinators we've met are doing that behind the scenes. When we went to Sacramento and we met this company we actually saw maintenance coordinators who were on the phone with a tenant.
You know, maybe there was a clogged toilet. And on the side they're typing, should I put draino, should I recommend to this tenant that we put Draino down this toilet? Right. No, do not do that. And so you can actually cut out one step of the process by just having Mason do it.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. And so does Mason have access to the outside world or does Mason only have access to the inside of the property management company?
Nitin Gupta: Mason definitely has access to the outside world.
so Mason can query the AI models. Mason learns based off of all the work orders [00:11:00] Mason has ever handled. Mason can gather information, gather appliance details, you know, if we get a picture of a stove or of a water heater, Mason will go look up that serial number, will look up the model number, will look up the manufacturing date to make a decision about repair versus replace.
So it has access to a lot of information and I think that's what people are paying us for.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, no, that sounds cool. So let's kind of segue into the own buying and selling property management companies and why, you believe AI actually can help somebody, especially if they're a buyer. 'Cause you and I have talked a little bit about that in the past.
I know, and I think you have some clients who had recently purchased some property management companies. And do you wanna kinda share like what, like what's the differentiator for you?
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. we have a bunch of customers who are new brand new owners or recent owners of management companies.
Mm-hmm. one of the owners ran a brokerage business and then bought a property management business in their local area. Another is kind of more of your. Traditional [00:12:00] entrepreneur through acquisition, found a property management company, bought that business and has bought a couple since then. And one of the commonalities amongst most of our customers is that when they buy a business oftentimes there's key man risk.
There's someone at the company who know. Everything about their properties, everything about their owners, everything about their tenants. And if they only have 500 or so doors, maybe there's just one person who has that. And none of the information lives in AppFolio. None of the information lives in their property management system.
It all lives in the head of one person. Mm-hmm. And what a system like Mason can do or really any other system is, can start to institutionalize the knowledge that is necessary to run your business. Maybe this owner over here wants to do all their own work. Maybe this owner over here never wants to get an approval request for maintenance under a thousand dollars.
A lot of these small nuances. This tenant speaks Spanish. This tenant prefers email. This tenant prefers phone calls. All of these [00:13:00] preferences are often kind of like stored in the head of one individual. And for a new owner you know, institutionalizing that knowledge is, is extremely important.
And they've actually worked with Mason to do exactly.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, no, that's cool. And I do talk a lot about that, like the key man risk. You know, when you're evaluating a property management company, again, I always say a red flag doesn't mean it's a no-go, but a red flag does mean that you need to, you know, stop for a moment and then figure out a good strategy for that.
For example, like the company that I bought in 2020 was very much like that. It was 370 doors. One property manager was the owner, was the property manager, and he had a bookkeeper. So you can guess where all the information lived. Yeah. In his head. You know, and at the time obviously we didn't have the AI capabilities, but you know, we've been able to evolve, that would be so wonderful to be able to say, okay, well let's at least document some of this.
And then now. It's a much easier and also [00:14:00] less expensive. That's something that I talk a lot about, like when you're evaluating a company you know, they may not be making as much money per door, but if you know how much money you are making per door and then you also can leverage ai and not pay as much for an employee, you know, you're kind of a win-win.
Right.
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. And you know, on the topic of, you know, let's say your business makes X dollars per door and acquiring business you're bringing in makes a little bit less than that. One of the commonalities that we've heard is, let's say your business maybe has an in-house maintenance function and the business you're buying doesn't have an in-house maintenance function yet.
Well. You might have a couple of options if you're gonna spin up that in-house function. Mm-hmm. You could, you know, hire a head of maintenance, hire someone to do the dispatching work. And that just kind of increases the total cost of headcount in your business. Or you can work with a system that can actually do that in-house.
Dispatch can do that, scheduling, can do that route planning such that, you know, your total admin cost, your total payroll cost in the new business is, you know, at, at a certain [00:15:00] level. And you can increase the revenue per door with functions like in-house maintenance.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, no, very cool. Yeah, I think that's really important, especially when you're looking at acquiring and being pretty strategic about what.
Is available to you and able to kind of implement that into something you're buying. So have you seen on the flip side, maybe somebody who's selling their business and maybe already has a Mason already in their business? And I, you know, may still be kind of early for that, but
Nitin Gupta: yeah.
Stacey Salyer: Have you seen that at all?
Nitin Gupta: Honestly, not really. most of the reason for why is because, you know anyone who tells you they were building ai. More than a year ago is probably lying to you. So I don't think we've gone through enough implementation and, you know, execution cycles to actually know what it looks like to sell a business with an AI system.
I will say, you know, one of the things that. Is core to our contracts and our agreements is that our customers own their data. And so if you're ever [00:16:00] thinking about your selling your business, something that you need to look really closely into when it comes to procuring and working with an AI service is like, who owns the data?
Will you maintain control of the data And are there people behind the service or is it like a true AI system? Because if there's people behind the service, what ends up happening is you're actually leaking institutional knowledge. If there's, you know, there are some after hours lines, for example, that will maybe do 80% of it with AI and 20% of it with their own team.
Well, the problem with that is that that 20% of knowledge that's being handled by humans who are not on your team. It's not owned by you, it's institutional knowledge that's leaking outta your organization. So maybe the only thing that I would think about if I was someone who would ever consider selling my business mm-hmm.
Is hey, who owns the data? Do I maintain control of my data such that, you know, an acquirer doesn't feel like there's massive risk and buying this business? If the AI system were to go away.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And so, again, I'm a [00:17:00] huge proponent of building your business to sell it because you should be building it as an asset.
'Cause you never know, maybe one day you wanna sell it, maybe one day you get a great offer. Maybe one day you, I don't know, win the lottery and. Wanna sell your business and go live on the beach? I don't know. But yeah, owning your own data I think is really important. That's kind of been a pretty hot topic in property management.
So can you tell me a little bit more about that and maybe why that differentiates you from somebody else
Nitin Gupta: I hope most AI companies and vendors are, are allowing for this and doing this, but like the, the clearest example of helping a customer own their data is, are you writing back to the property management system?
You know,
here's an example. Mason collects appliance information. Okay. Mason collects, you know, the age, the serial number, the model number of the HVAC system or when the microwave was installed, what type of fridge was installed. And we'll write that back to the fixed assets on the property details.
Within the property management system, [00:18:00] we do that, we do that record keeping because it means that the property manager. We'll maintain ownership and records of what's actually happening within their properties. You know, some companies might not be willing to do that, or they might not have the capability of doing that.
So, you know, writing back details on fixed assets, writing back pictures, writing back conversation transcripts and writing back conversation notes, writing back memories and details of tenants. This tenant has pets. This tenant prefers English. This is the work schedule of this tenant. These are all things that.
We write back and we would recommend other people write back to the PMS to ensure that the customer has custody of their data. And the PMS is, you know, by the way, like is the source of truth for the property management system. we don't wanna interfere with that.
We wanna work really nicely with the property management systems in the world which is why we write everything back.
Stacey Salyer: Okay. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And it is really important, especially documentation. I mean, you know, you, you said you don't come from property management, but you know, those of us that do [00:19:00] know how litigious it is and if you're not documenting correctly.
Right. You know, you could have a tenant say, well, I called in and I told you my house was on fire. And, you know, if you're not documenting correctly, I think that's the one thing that I love about ai when it's set up to work correctly, is that. There isn't really that room for error. You know, when you're dealing with a human, and this is normal.
I mean, even if I was managing, you know, 500 doors and I was a maintenance coordinator, let's to say I, you know, I'm having a conversation and I. Fully mean well to document the conversation in my PMS, but then I got distracted because something else came up. So I think that's a really big safeguard that most people experience when they use ai.
Is that correct?
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. AI does not get lazy. AI does not get distracted. AI does not, you know. Does not choose to write their notes the next day. low cost for AI to write notes and maintain kind of a high quality of information. You know, like a silly example of [00:20:00] this is when Mason writes a picture to the property management system, Mason will title the picture.
I don't know how many of you have looked at, you know, your PMS recently, or work orders. My guess is you have a bunch of. Images, that's jpeg 1, 2, 3, 4. And you have to click into each picture to know what in the world is going on. Well, you know, an AI system can look at the image, describe the image come up with a short name, description of the image, and then write that image to the PMS with that short name.
So all of these things can not only be documented in the PMS, but also be documented in a way that makes retrieval meaningfully easier for you and your company, which kind of gets back to. What I was just describing when it, what describing previously when it comes to knowledge management.
Stacey Salyer: No, that's really cool.
Yeah, and so much better than the olden days. Way back in the day, we had to take cameras to properties and then, you know, take the little card out and download the photos. Yeah, I don't, yeah, probably more than half. Never even made it to download. I'm sure. [00:21:00] Yeah. Why? Just 'cause it's that, yeah. That, that time constraint.
yeah, again, kind of going back to like buying or selling, is there anything else especially in buying 'cause we talked about, you know, really taking a look at the I guess kind of like what, how they're running their maintenance system. But is there anything else that you guys offer within your your platform that could really help a buyer make it easier for them?
Nitin Gupta: Yeah. Maybe like speaking more, broadly, not only Mason, but other AI systems. I think looking at your turn time, looking at the turn times of a company that is getting bought, you know, media and turn times in the industry is still close to 30 days, right? That has meaningful impact on owner retention.
That is an area that a new buyer can meaningfully improve the operations of the existing business in a way that's like felt. By owners and by the folks that you're trying to retain within the business. And the thing that we observe all the time is that the reason that turn times are often [00:22:00] extremely long isn't necessarily because the vendor was late.
It was just, it's just a project management challenge. You don't actually know how to sequence. You have a hard time getting the right person out at the right time, closing the loop with different vendors. So. An AI system for maintenance, an orchestration system for maintenance can meaningfully affect your turn times, which for a buyer, helps you add a lot of value to, you know, an acquired entity.
Especially when you're in that moment of, you know, focusing on owner retention and focusing on, Hey, how do we do a better job?
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. No, that's cool. So if somebody's looking to buy a company and they're not using your service yet, is that something that you can go in and, can they sign up with you and then take, they can have you take a look at maybe the portfolio that they're looking to purchase.
Nitin Gupta: Yeah, so we do diagnostics for companies actually whether they're buying a business or they're a prospect customer of ours, where, you know, they can, you know, share some details with us. Share [00:23:00] access for Mason and Mason kind of can make some decisions about, Hey, how much opportunity is there to improve the operations of this maintenance system, the clearest example of this that I can share is, you know, when you send a vendor out for a job mm-hmm. Was caused by another vendor.
this is like a cardinal sin that we see happen all the time, which is. You replace a garbage disposal one day you pay, you know, the handyman X dollars to replace that garbage disposal.
Three or four days later, the tenant notices that there's a leak under the sink. Yeah, you send a plumber out the owner gets two bills for those two independent trips. And that can destroy a lot of trust with your owners. That can be, that's unnecessary spend. It's just waste in the system and. By the way, I don't fault anyone for this.
it's really hard to look back at every single work order that's ever been done on a property to make a determination. Is this a service or recall, or is this a true net new issue? So this is the type of thing [00:24:00] that we can help. Understand, like just how high quality is the operation here?
Like what is the state of the homes? Is there a lot of deferred maintenance? Because, you know, this is also something that, you know, if you're maybe buying a business that has a lot of open work orders, a lot of deferred maintenance, the annual inspections are showing that you know what, there was a lot of things that needed to be replaced in these homes.
And if you, as the new buyer come in and suddenly you have a certain standard of quality and care for the assets you're managing. And then you realize, wow, there's all this work that needs to be done. You're now having to have a really hard conversation with owners. You've just onboarded. You're just trying to build a relationship with.
And even if you're right, even if the prior owner was, you know, maybe not taking the best care of the house, ultimately that responsibility now falls on you. And going in eyes wide open about deferred maintenance, I think is a really, really important, part of the equation.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. 'cause I've been there, done that. Personally, and it is a very painful [00:25:00] conversation because when you do buy a portfolio where maybe, you know, they just kind of collected rent and they just didn't, you know, their turns were very basic. They did not communicate.
You know, deferred maintenance type items. It can be a, a shock when you talk to a client and you're like, yeah, it's actually gonna be like $15,000 just to get your house re-rented. And they freak out because they haven't put any money into their home and they just, and they haven't been educated on that.
Right? So again. But knowledge is power. That's what I always believe in, and that's what I teach people as well. So again, that red flag of deferred maintenance isn't a no-go, but now you have information and you can then determine again, too. So you could even go back to the, the seller of the company and say, Hey, you know, we scraped all this data and these homes are showing X, Y, Z.
I'm probably gonna have higher churn. Than I would normally anticipate, right? Because when I talk to a client, they're like, you know, all of a sudden I need 15 K. They're like, what do you mean I'm gonna leave or sell my home? Then you can maybe [00:26:00] negotiate the sale price as well. So there's, you know, so many strategies out there.
I think that people maybe are kind of just realizing that, where AI, I think takes a big piece of that.
Nitin Gupta: Yeah, and it's almost impossible to go through all those documents by hand. Oh, it's just it's just not possible.
Stacey Salyer: No, no, that's not possible. and that's the thing is you know, when you're buying companies back in the day before AI tools like this, you just kind of had to.
Make a decision and hope for the best, I guess, you know, I mean, some strategy of course, but using a tool like this would be great. So if somebody is looking to buy a portfolio well, it's like a realistic timeframe. So if I was like, oh, you know, I'm looking to buy these 300 doors I want Mason to kind of go into their system and check it out and kind of do some diagnostics, is that like a couple weeks, a couple months?
Nitin Gupta: the beauty of AI systems is that, that's more like a couple of days. Ooh. Um, Of course, you know, every management company runs differently, right? everyone has some, you know, shorthand in the property [00:27:00] name that tells you if it's a no fee property if the owner does their own maintenance.
So, you know, there's all of these little eccentricities to how everyone stores their data in, you know. A traditional PMS but I think we're talking about, you know, something on the order of days. Of course there are different PMSs out there. There are PMSs that are great to work with, you know, AppFolio, Redfin, et cetera.
There are PMSs that are not as great to work with who shall not be named. Right. And
Stacey Salyer: that's very our conversation at a conference.
Nitin Gupta: And um, and so, you know, that you are actually, a lot of this kind of comes down to how challenging is the underlying system to work with.
Stacey Salyer: Right? Right. But again, I think that goes into the strategy of the buyer too.
Right? So if you're buying something where maybe the, the property management software isn't that great, or you can't extract the data you need, well, you know, that's gonna give you a picture as well as what you're buying. So,
Nitin Gupta: yeah.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's cool. Well, I, yeah, this has been very enlightening and very, [00:28:00] you know, lots of great information.
Is there anything else you would like to share that maybe you guys are working on this year or that you have kind of going on?
Nitin Gupta: Well,
I guess what I'd say is that there's, there's a lot of flavors of AI right now. A lot of people are saying that they're building ai. Maybe if I could leave.
Leave folks with a couple of principles of making a great decision here.
One. The value of AI is, is end-to-end, right? There's a lot of flashy demos out there that'll show you, hey, we can do leasing, we can do maintenance, we can do rent collection, we can do, we can do everything. Right?
Yeah. And you know, maybe the AI system can. Take in some of those notes. But where a lot of the value of AI comes from is being able to execute on a workflow end to end, right? And so, especially when you start really thinking about the p and l of your business and like how much value is this thing actually creating?
I would urge buyers to think through. Hey, is this system actually doing something end to end in my [00:29:00] business? And how is that you know, how is that improving? How is that improving my company? The second thing that I would, I would definitely think through is how is this AI system helping me generate revenue?
Ah um, that is really, really critical because. The thing that you also know about buying businesses is that you're not gonna let go of anyone on the team in the, you don't wanna let go of, you know, the key team members in that first period of time. Right? that is a surefire way of destroying trust with the existing company.
So you have to believe that you are going to be able to generate additional revenue and generate additional profitability through means that are not just. Cutting costs in the business.
Stacey Salyer: Right, right. Yeah. So what I heard, so one thing I say about the first thing that you were saying is basically you're kind of niching down, right?
Like instead of having the all for one ai. So I call that the Cheesecake Factory. So I, so I always say, so for example, I niche down, I teach [00:30:00] people how to buy and sell property management companies. I'm an acquisition strategist and I niche down, so I'm not the Cheesecake Factory of consultants.
That's what what I like to say. So, so you're not the Cheesecake Factory of ai, so that's your new nickname? No, you can take it or leave it. But, and I think that is really important because when you are working with different vendors, I think it is really important to find those niche vendors especially when it comes to maintenance.
You know, even those of us that have ran businesses, you know, I didn't have a leasing coordinator who also did maintenance coordination. I mean, I had all separate people. You know, kind of the same with the AI assistance as well. And yeah, and then to your point, you know, how is it gonna generate additional revenue for you without, you know, of course destroying your team.
But yeah, so I love all that. That's really great. So anything else that you're working on this year that you wanna share? Anything big coming out that you can share?
Nitin Gupta: maybe a couple of things. I don't know. I don't know if we can include this stuff, but [00:31:00] I'll share here and then we can, we can cut it out if we have to.
So we'll be attending rent Fine's Be Heard conference in 2026 and which I believe is in late May. If you're a rent fine company we're actually gonna be offering an emergency line to all rent, find customers who also work with Mason for free. So we, we know the power of ai. We know how, how solid it can be, especially for those late night calls.
So, you know, if you are a fin customer, you should definitely reach out. And we'd be happy to set you up on that emergency line as part of a, a, a broader a broader part of working together. And similarly If you follow Stacey and if you follow this podcast, we'd be more than happy to do these sorts of diagnostics for your business or for one of your targets.
It does not take too much labor on our end to run these diagnostics, and we're more than happy to. So you should just reach out.
Stacey Salyer: Oh, awesome. Well, those are, yeah, both really valuable tools for sure. I mean, I know, you know, emergency lines number one is. Valuable for everybody's peace of mind. Very valuable [00:32:00] for the business owner of course, you know, just because they should not be working 24 7 and valuable and cost-wise as well.
So, yeah. And thank you for offering my followers. Yeah, the cool. additional tools and, and use of that. So, we'll make sure that we have all your contact information in the show notes and I know I'm gonna see you at a few different conferences this year. That's correct. And
Nitin Gupta: Yep.
Stacey Salyer: You know, conference season is starting, so those of us will be on the road and on stages, which I think.
I love doing. And it sounds like you're gonna be speaking at NPA and broker owner, is that correct?
Nitin Gupta: Yeah, we'll be, we'll be speaking at broker owner I think on Tuesday. We'll be talking about strategies to in-house your maintenance function. So we'll be joined by a broker owner themselves who runs, a, a business with a maintenance function talking about, you know, how do you generate additional margin for maintenance? What are the systems and the tools that you can use to actually scale a maintenance function within your property management business? So, anyone can feel free to reach out if they [00:33:00] have interesting ideas to contribute to that talk or come, come see us talk live.
Stacey Salyer: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining the show and all your knowledge and information and we'll talk to you soon.
Nitin Gupta: Thanks so much, Stacey.
Outro: Thanks for listening to the Stacey Salyer show. Here's the deal. You can read about acquisitions anywhere, but you can't learn acquisitions from someone who's done it the way I have as a buyer, a seller, and from the corporate side evaluating hundreds of companies. That's why I need you to subscribe and share this with someone in your network who needs to hear it.
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[00:34:00] Don't leave it on the table. See you on the next episode.
