STATE OF THE RENTAL INDUSTRY: AAOA INTERVIEWS DANIEL CUNNINGHAM, CEO OF LEONARDO 247 AND APARTMENT ACADEMY PODCAST HOST Growing your rental property portfolio as a landlord or rental operator inevitably adds complexity. How can you know what is happening at every property and whether your employees at every property are sticking to the right policies and procedures?
After running his own property management company in Los Angeles for 10 years, Daniel Cunningham looked to tech to provide the solution. He’s now the founder of Leonardo 247, an operations and maintenance platform for automating policies, tasks, and workflows in apartment operations. He also hosts the Apartment Academy Podcast where he interviews rental industry professionals on how they handle their management challenges. Below is our interview with Daniel and his take on the state of the rental industry today.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background? I was Director of Asset Management for Aimco, one of the largest multi-family REITS in the country. Then I started a property management company in California, so that’s where I got in-the-trenches experience on the management side. And what became clear from both of those experiences? There’s a huge reliance on
local community managers and service managers to be experts in all things. At Aimco, we had these binders we would send out, and we’d say, “Hey, here’s your operating binder, do everything that’s in this binder.” And then every month, we would send out paper updates to the binder that nobody would read or follow. That was really an ineffective process and Aimco was one
of the largest management operators in the country. There was this kind of last mile gap on the operation side that was not really handled by property management software (PMS) systems, which led me to start Leonardo 247. The PMS platforms are often accounting based. They handle everything that’s surrounding the resident life cycle and they
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