Before you dive into the full conversation below, here’s a quick preview: in this episode I sit down with Cameron Tope, who owns more than 30 rental properties himself and manages over 300 more for investors in the greater Houston area, all run remotely from San Diego. Cameron walks through the breaking point that led him to build his own property management company, the systems he uses to turn a property in 10 days instead of 30, why vacancy costs investors far more than a management fee ever will, and how operating as both an owner and an operator shaped every decision along the way. If you want a real look at how systems, KPIs, and delegation work together in a scaling operation, this is worth the watch.
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Got it, here’s the full transcript in one continuous piece, start to finish:
I am Adrienne Green. We focus on how real estate entrepreneurs can break free of the grind and create the freedom they wanted at the start, and Cameron has a lot of wisdom to share on the subject. So can we start, Cameron, with giving our listeners a quick snapshot of your world in the sense of real estate. Properties you own, what you’re doing for others, what it looks like for you today.
Today I have just over thirty properties myself personally that I own. And we manage about three hundred for investors in the greater Houston area. And I do this all a hundred percent remotely from San Diego, California.
Amazing. Love that. And my understanding is that there was a breaking point with property management that made you decide to build your own company. Can you talk to us a little bit about the pain point you had and what prompted you and how you made that decision?
When I graduated, I was a petroleum engineer, and that pretty much meant I was going to Houston, Texas. I’m originally from Ohio. And when I got down there, oil was sitting somewhere around $120 a barrel. And within six months, it went way down to $30 or $40 a barrel. Everybody’s freaking out. I’m freaking out. I’ve got $30,040,000 in student loans. How am I going to pay that back? And there were some folks who were super cool, calm, collected, some old timers.
And I picked their brains and they said, I’ve got five, ten paid off rental properties. And that started everything. So once I started buying these properties, I had probably five to ten and I was still working as an engineer for British Petroleum. And I need somebody to manage these things. It’s starting to get a little overwhelming. And I could not find anybody. So the breaking point really was, I know the meeting specifically, because I had interviewed a handful of people all over
the spectrum, from the guy driving around in a truck that has no license, “I collect rent door to door and I’ll send you a check,” all the way up to some large multi-state multi-city companies who had thousands of doors. And I scheduled a meeting with this larger company and they frankly blew me off, and that’s when I was done. I’m gonna do it myself. So I got a handyman I had been working with who helped me out and really started looking at it as:
How do I build these systems and checklists? I’d done this before with the properties I built up, but instead of just, “hurry up, get the tenant moved in, make sure everything’s good,” think about this collectively, holistically as a process, and how do I replicate this to deliver the same great move-in experience, for example.
Right.
I love that, how sometimes good enough feels like perfect, we just do our little piece. And sometimes we need to really make a system that’s replicable, that is an actual process. So looking back, what did you get right in those first few months of building Emerson that you would tell another investor to replicate?
Firstly is just getting started. As an engineer, I probably spent a year trying to analyze properties and figure out exactly what I wanted to do. What market do I want to go? Short term? Long term? What’s the strategy? But a lot of it’s just getting started. You’re not going to have everything figured out. You’re going to scrape your knees, you’re going to have some issues. I remember thinking when I was managing my own properties very early on and just had a handful, I’m never
gonna go through an eviction. I’ll make sure I screen the tenants so well that I’ll never go through an eviction. Well, you cannot outsource or eliminate every single risk. So the first thing you got to do is have some reserves, have some stuff set aside and get started. And you’ll learn so much. But
Having that financial position to be able to make investments, that’s probably one of the first things to do outside of taking the initiative, because things will go wrong. As I mentioned, you cannot outsource or eliminate every single risk. So make sure you have a cushion and don’t go and max out credit cards like some of these gurus say, and stretch yourself thin, or look at all these low money-down strategies. That worked when we were at three and four percent interest rates.
Right.
With no money down strategy, I actually have a friend out here that had a VA loan, and they put no money down, rolled in closing costs, but now they’re looking to sell the property and they have no equity. So you’ve got to know everything’s a double-edged sword. And making sure you’re investing from a place of financial strength allowed me to scrape my knees, to make mistakes, and not get taken out of the game, because real estate is incredibly forgiving, but you have to be in it long enough to see that
Exactly.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
benefit. If you’re trying to flip, you’re really dependent upon the market. But if you’re buying for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, you can make a lot of mistakes. And I have made a lot of mistakes, but the rising tide lifts all ships and it smooths out your losses, smooths out your mistakes. So that was probably one of the biggest things I did: I kept my job. I didn’t quit and try to get a loan and start buying properties. I kept my job, I started buying, and I invested from a place of strength.
I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that answer that people need to hear. And it’s funny when you said, take action, do it. When I was an active real estate agent working with a lot of investors, I worked with a lot of engineers. And yes, analysis paralysis is a real thing, especially for engineers. So all the engineers listening, you definitely need to hear this piece about taking action. But then also, what you said about
making sure you’ve got a little bandwidth. If we’re gonna use these high leverage strategies, it’s high risk, high reward, and realizing that
there are things that can happen with that risk. And then also the time horizon. So often in our society in general, we expect things yesterday. Amazon can now deliver same day. And the truth is that’s not the way the natural world works. In a lot of cases, in real estate, we can get into a lot of trouble when we try to compress the time horizons for our returns. So I think you made a lot of really good points there.
I like to use an old Warren Buffett quote: you can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Things take time. There are certain things that take time, and I wanted it too. When I was in my twenties, I was ready to set the world on fire, trying to gobble up real estate. But those properties that made me a hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars a month now make five, six, seven hundred dollars a month. And it really is just inflation and letting real estate do its thing over time.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly. Now let’s take the flip side of that question. We asked what you got right and would recommend. Now let’s look at what did you get wrong early on that you learned from and shapes how you do business today?
A lot of that would go back to a parallel of the analysis paralysis. When I got into this as an engineer, I was trying to detail everything. Whether you’re buying properties for your portfolio and want to buy multiple, or you’re looking to systematize an agent business or management business, I detailed processes down to the last step: “we’ve got to do this, we’re gonna write this down, we got this checklist, and if this happens, then this,” and so on.
Adrienne, I’m embarrassed to say a lot of those processes we didn’t even use again. Because by the time you have another move out, three, four, five, six months down the road, you’ve learned so much. Maybe now you’ve implemented, now you’re at 50 doors and you implemented another software. So I was detailing all these things so I wouldn’t forget the next time I did it, but it was too detailed. So now a big change we make in the business is when we have a new process, we start super high level. We get a Google Doc and we just go: what’s the outcome? What’s the trigger? And we say, what are the main high-level steps? What are the basic steps? Not technology specific, not software specific, just what are the steps that need to happen? And then we go back and start filling stuff in. Because if you try to detail everything, it becomes a hodgepodge. You’ll go through, create a 20, 30 step process, and then you realize in the beginning you don’t do that piece, but it’s halfway through. You’ve tried to hire
Right.
your assistant or have somebody else do it and they’re like, well, hold on, this doesn’t even work anymore. Now you got to go back in. And it creates a big mess. So for somebody who’s starting out, when you’re trying to go into a new process or implement something new, start super basic. That will help. Then you can add stuff onto it, but start basic, start simple, kind of the KISS method.
No, I hear you, we’ve had those same issues with SOPs and processes, and I really have to say to my team now, what is the minimum we need to say for somebody to effectively do this? That is our standard. Because otherwise you get too detailed and then it gets too difficult to follow, or it becomes out of date.
Now what I appreciate about, sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say, when processes become too detailed, they’re incredibly hard to update as well, Adrienne. It’s exactly what you said. Well, I don’t even know what to update here. I’ve got to spend all this time looking through a twenty-seven page SOP to move a tenant in, and I don’t even know where to make a change. You’ve got to wait till you make a mistake, or somebody comes in and the software doesn’t even work anymore. We don’t do that anymore. With AI there’s a lot of different ways it can expedite looking through a process and expedite making changes, but still, if nobody’s gonna use it because it’s too detailed, start with the basic to get the effective result.
Now, Cameron, one of the things I love about what you’re doing is you operate both as an owner and investor and as an operator in the property management world. So often the challenge we have as investors is we have service providers who don’t think about it from an investment mindset or standpoint. So what systems or processes have you built within your property management world that only made sense because you see both sides of the table?
There are so many things, Adrienne. It’s just even how we build the processes. How do we make sure the owner is informed of what’s going on? How do we know when they need to take an action? It’s littered throughout the processes. There are little things here and there we do to make sure everybody’s marching to the same beat of the drum, and that we don’t forget we have a fiduciary responsibility to the owner clients. So there are so many things, but I think one of the
biggest decisions we made is to have a single point of contact for the owners. There are some large multi-city, multi-state companies with a McDonald’s model where one person does one thing and the next person does the next, almost like a conveyor belt or a manufacturing facility. So when an owner calls in, they need to talk to leasing to understand what’s going on with leasing, talk to maintenance to understand maintenance, talk to accounting to understand why their statements are messed up.
We don’t do that. We have one single point of contact for the owner, our asset manager. Our asset managers have several dozen years of experience. So you’re talking to somebody who has been there before, has walked that path, understands your goals and your investments, instead of calling in and getting routed all over the place and trying to talk to three different people to solve one problem. It’s always frustrating, right? You call in for a credit card and it’s, sorry, other department, transfer.
You have to explain again, sorry, another department, transfer. You have to say your name, your address, your date of birth all over again. Do you guys not have this in this system? It’s incredibly frustrating. So we’ve done that where each owner is assigned one asset manager and has one single point of contact.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I know it’s something we do in our business as well. Because
as you can see things from the client or owner perspective, and it’s funny, you hit on one of the most frustrating things ever for me, having to call a credit card company. I am nice and chill until I’m having to do that. It’s something about that process that drives me crazy. So I feel it. Great example. Now let’s talk about how a single maintenance issue moves through your systems today from tenant report to resolution. I’d love to get an insight into that process, because I’m sure there’s a
lot of takeaways for those of us who are operators in other investment businesses as well.
So the tenants have a twenty-four-seven maintenance portal. When I started, there were only a handful of options for property management software or maintenance systems, and some of them were incredibly expensive for the operator with four or five doors. Now they’ve democratized that quite a bit, so a tenant can have a twenty-four-seven maintenance portal. The tenant goes in, makes the request, and that goes directly to our maintenance coordinator.
Our maintenance coordinator looks at the request, and this isn’t AI, this is somebody experienced in maintenance, and goes, okay, that’s a garbage disposal. Here are the triage steps we’ve already laid out, because 99% of garbage disposal issues start with the same thing. Hit the reset button. Do you have a wrench to turn it? Is it plugged in? Do you hear a humming noise? Is there food in it? We’ll walk them through basic troubleshooting. We don’t want them doing electrical or plumbing work, but
if it’s something simple, we have those steps because it saves the owner money and gets the tenant’s problem solved more quickly. And if it’s not something simple, we dispatch our vendor. We work with about 50 different vendors, a lot of them specialized, and we make sure we get the tenant’s response very quickly. We use Property Meld as our maintenance system, so we’re measuring when that request came
in, how quickly it was responded to, how quickly the vendor accepted the request, and how quickly the vendor completes it. We’re watching all that, and our goal is to have it done in three days. If the tenant submits it on Monday, by Wednesday it’s been troubleshot, dispatched, the vendor has been out to the property, and we have a resolution. The vendor goes out, looks at the problem, and says, this is small, or it’s a piece of drywall work, or whatever.
They’ll handle it, take pictures, respond back to us that it’s completed, and then we get the invoice from the vendor and put that on the owner’s ledger. There are some other choke points that could happen, where we thought it was going to be just a faucet, but it’s old CPVC and it’s a huge repiping job, or it started cracking behind the wall and we have to remove siding. We stop right there, get an estimate, and go back to the owner and say,
it’s going to be fifteen hundred dollars to open this wall up and do these items, we need approval. So that whole time we’re keeping the tenant involved and having, for anybody listening, whether you have one door or a thousand, paper trails are incredibly important. Even if you’re just texting with your tenants, get stuff in writing. Because I don’t know how many times a tenant gives us a one star review and says, I submitted this two weeks ago and haven’t heard anything, when actually they submitted it yesterday, or
at midnight on Saturday and we responded Monday morning, or we responded on Sunday, and it took us a day or two to resolve, but it’s not as bad as they say. If we have that all timestamped and in writing, it makes the troubleshooting, to see if there’s a problem with the vendor or otherwise, much easier.
Yes. A couple of things there. I love what you’re saying about the paper trail. And it’s funny you used the garbage disposal example, because
with short term rentals, garbage disposal issues are my number one maintenance issue. So I think a lot of investors can relate to that. But the paper trail, and then the KPIs, and then the people: it’s a mix of systems, data, and the experienced person operating behind the scenes making sure it all works.
Yeah, and our maintenance coordinator has two main KPIs. One is resident satisfaction. After every maintenance request is complete, the resident gets an automated email asking, how did we do, one through five. I’m watching those every week. They get a quarterly bonus based on resident satisfaction. The second is speed. How quickly did we respond, are we hitting our three day KPI. And those two are very
interlinked. I could get somebody out there tomorrow, but if they do a poor job resolving the issue, you get a one star. So you have to balance speed with quality. We also have KPIs for the vendors. All those stars tenants put in for vendors, we look at that quarterly and say, wow, ABC company has five one star reviews, what happened, and we diagnose those. And we have a yearly
vendor appreciation event where we recognize the guys with the best reviews and responses. We’re also rotating vendors, offboarding and onboarding based on resident satisfaction score, because keeping tenants happy matters. If they leave, owner revenue leaves, and turnover is high risk. The number one reason residents leave is lack of attention to maintenance.
Right. And what I love about this is that role can have just two KPIs. I feel like a lot of people, when they start setting up systems and KPIs, think a role needs ten KPIs, and when everything’s important, nothing’s important. So I love that you nailed down the two that matter for that role.
Well, we used to do it just on speed of repair, but then it was, wow, they’re resolving it really quickly, because once you have a KPI, people try to game it. So we added a second KPI. You just start, and like you said, if everything’s important, nothing’s important. That’s such a true statement. Just start with something, and you might have to add one or two, but don’t overcomplicate it. I look at about a dozen KPIs every week across the entire company. Each role,
especially as you grow, should really have one, two, maybe three KPIs.
Now we’ve talked a lot about leverage, building a team, handing things off. I’m curious, what is one process or responsibility inside Emerson that you were the last one handling, and what did it take to hand that off?
There are still a lot of tasks I’ll do. Let’s say we go through a process and it’s 80, 90% done, but there are a couple little tasks in there. I’ll take the task, assign it to me, and when that process runs, I’ll get that task and it’ll say, update instructions. So once I do that, record a Loom video for the next person, or write the instructions out, I go into the back end of our process system and assign it to our maintenance coordinator or a
resident experience associate, or leasing, whatever it might be. So I still have several tasks throughout the processes, but that allows me the freedom to complete the process, outsource 80-90% of it, and just have those couple tasks I still need to do. I’ve got a thousand things on my plate firing at me at all times, so it’s nice to just have it: only when it happens, I don’t have to think about it. Okay, this is the actual scenario, let me go to the ledger and look at everything in real time. So that’s one
thing. You can also push those things, you don’t have to have the full process delegated to delegate it. Delegate what you can, and you’ll see, once you delegate it, the person you delegated to will be able to tell you what doesn’t make sense. That’s always a huge thing. When you do something for five or ten years and then try to delegate it, you realize there are other pieces in here that were just tribal knowledge that I
did. But to answer your question, the main process I was still in until recently was the make ready process. From the time a tenant moves out until we have the new tenant in place, making sure the whole turn is a seamless experience, because when there’s no revenue, that’s when the owner is paying very close attention. That’s when owners offboard. It’s the highest risk of losing an owner. And frankly, a lot of folks
might be sitting on their hands or not taking that as seriously. So it goes back to what we look at closely: how quickly we can get properties turned. Our KPI is 10 days. If the tenant moves out at the end of the month, we want that property ready and listed on the market. We rekey the property, look for property code, get estimates, get those funds, dispatch the vendor, make sure the work was done properly and meets our rent ready requirements, take photos, put the
sign and lockbox out, and that property is listed. All done in 10 days.
That’s fast. I love that. That’s very much an investor mindset. Now another aspect of delegation and team is hiring. When you’re hiring for a role within your property management business, what are you looking for that most investors or property managers wouldn’t see?
This is such a timely question, because we just had to let somebody go, she had only been with us for about a month. I realized that with trying to come up with questions about culture and can you do your job, and looking through resumes, we’ve made this mistake, so we’ve implemented, we changed this in our process. Asking the basic questions. How’s your internet speed?
Are you working other jobs? Some people, especially remote, might be working different time zones. Do you have a quiet place to work? Are you okay with this time zone? Very basic. We have a lot of ambitious goals, trying to get to several thousand doors in the greater Houston area. So we’re very clear this isn’t a position where you can have multiple jobs, or think you’re just gonna be sitting there doing nothing most of the time and then have to
jump in. We have daily meetings, KPIs, we’re very ambitious. The final meeting I have with every single hire is I’m almost trying to dissuade them from joining. Before I was, yeah, this is what we’re doing, this is where we’re going, trying to not
be too positive, sell the dream, sell the vision. But now I’m a little more negative. Not in a bad way, just, hey, we’re kind of a startup. We don’t have an HR department, we don’t have a benefits department, we don’t have all these things ironed out. Every process isn’t done. We don’t have people that only handle one thing, you’re gonna be wearing multiple hats. Sometimes you’re going into the unknown, and we need to be ambitious and ready to jump in,
even if it’s not your job, which is one of the phrases I think I hate the most. But it’s one of those things where you’re able and willing to jump in and want to be part of this. So I dissuade them a little on that last interview, and that has seemed to make some people go, you know what, they’re right, I was looking for more of a cushy job that I don’t have to work this hard. And I get that. That’s fine. A part-time person, or somebody later in their career who doesn’t want to grow or learn,
wants to do what they’ve been doing and do it the same way, that’s not a fit. So the big things have been very basic questions up front about quiet workspace and situation, since we’re 100% remote. And then the final interview with me is telling them all the downsides of working with Emerson, making sure they don’t feel bait and switched. Those have been the big things.
That makes sense. I love that insight, and I agree, sometimes you don’t want to oversell it, because then you get people who won’t like the reality. So let’s talk about, what intrigued me is you said you’re pretty much remote and virtual for the business, you’ve got people all over.
We have people in five different countries.
I love it. And there’s a lot of value to that, and it also means you have to be really intentional with how you manage and lead them. Let’s talk about accountability. How do you handle accountability on your team, since people are remote, you can’t just see whether they’re at their desk. How do you know something is off before it becomes a bigger problem?
Adrienne, I think we hit it earlier. It’s the KPIs. How do you have an objective measure for success for that role? When we’re posting a job, we’re talking about the leasing person, they need to have days on market, that’s the biggest KPI for that role. If it’s a turn coordinator, it’s move out to make ready, 10 days. We put that in the job description, make it as clear as possible, so they know that every week we’re looking at all the
make readies, all the properties with maintenance requests, all the moveouts, everything we’re looking at, but objectively. Instead of, yeah, I feel like we’ve had a lot of evictions lately, or I feel like these things are taking a while, it’s, actually everything looks good, or it doesn’t. And what I like to call taps, hey, we’re starting to see move out to make ready days creep up, we’re starting to see days on market creep up. That’s a tap we look at weekly to say, let’s look into that. What is it?
Maybe it’s this one property we knew was gonna take longer, a ranch house way outside of town, no big deal. But hey, if it’s four or five different properties, and we notice feedback from agents that the property’s not clean, or doesn’t look well done, the paint’s not touched up, those KPIs, especially broken out by role, that person is accountable for it, and we look at it every single week. I had a meeting this morning with the entire team and we went through
the KPIs, is there any issue, is it on track or off track, if off track, what’s the issue, why is this KPI not in range, and we talk about it together, and try to do a deep dive. Sometimes there’s no deep dive needed, an appliance part took two weeks, nothing we could do, outside of our control. But sometimes, wow, we realize this vendor is being very late, getting one star reviews,
we need to do something. So let the KPIs drive the accountability, and it prevents it from being an attack, like, you’re not meeting up to this. It’s just, why is the number the way it is, and let’s dive in collectively as a team, use all our brain power to figure out how we can get this number back in the normal range.
I love that, and I love that use of KPIs, because it changes the conversation and gives you hard data. So as we wrap up, one final question. Sometimes investors think they want a certain thing from a property management company, and it’s not really what actually matters. What’s the misalignment you see between what investors think they want and what actually protects their returns?
I think it’s cost, and I don’t blame them for this, I did this in the beginning too. How much is a management company, they’re $100 a month, $200 a month, whatever, fifty dollars a month. We can see that cost very easily, because on your PL you see your rent coming in, your mortgage, and a management fee. That’s a cost. But
what you don’t see, and what I really had to learn, is vacancy. I’ve done so much data and analysis on this for our owners regarding vacancy killing cash flow. There are property management companies, we’ve hired people from them, where 30 days is their turnover time from move out to listing. That’s one eighth or one twelfth of your rent for the year, which is eight point three percent,
already off the top. If it’s a $2,000 a month rental, you’ve lost two grand already, which is a little over $150 a month. If you could get that down within a week, you could almost pay somebody’s management fee in that first month. So it’s really looking at how much money you’re potentially losing at the end of the year. If you’re looking at your 1099s or PL and wondering why,
you didn’t make any money this year, well, if the turnover took 30 days, or 60 days to lease, and you keep stacking these things up, the property wasn’t really able to make money during that time period. If you’re out of commission 20, 30% of the year, that’s a lot of money to make up. If it’s two or three months at $2,000 a month, that’s six grand, or $500 a month for the year lost. So that’s one of the big shifts,
making sure you get that property in service as quickly as possible, not just looking at cost. We believe in one point of contact to help expedite decisions and have somebody experienced lead you through the process. But if you go out and hire a $50 property manager, sometimes the most expensive thing you can do is hire a cheap property manager. That person might be outsourced, like your credit card company, where you have trouble talking to somebody experienced. I just don’t want to hand over three to five hundred
dollars a month in rent to somebody who doesn’t have the experience to protect it.
That makes a good point. Well, Cameron, thank you, you’ve shared a lot of wisdom as an investor and as somebody running a property management business, that will be very helpful for our listeners. If a listener would like to get in contact with you, and you also do long term property management in Houston, tell me more about that, is that your market?
Yeah, just Greater Houston area. Long term rentals, Greater Houston area. If somebody wants to get in contact with us, just Google Emerson Property Management, or go to EmersonPropertyManagement.com, or search my name. You’ll find us there. We have free rent analyses, all sorts of guides, and an accidental landlord toolkit if you’re having trouble selling a property. We give away a bunch of stuff for free on there, so you can get in there and get educated.
I love that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cameron, and thank you to our listeners for joining me for another episode. If this was helpful, please make sure to thumbs up and subscribe wherever you’re listening, and join me again next week for another amazing guest.