📞 August: Our Phone Bill Was 58% Taxes. So We Built a Better One.

FEvery month I share what's actually on our plate — not the polished version, the real one. If something we're doing helps you run a tighter operation, steal it. That's the point.

Back in June I told you about the phone bill audit that saved us $542 a month. We switched carriers, banked the ~$6,500 a year, and I thought that chapter was closed. Then I looked harder at what was left on the invoice. Total service charges: $377.39. A $112.00 "Compliance & Administrative Cost Recovery Fee." $30.35 in Federal USF. $39.65 in state taxes. A $28.00 e911 fee. Add it up and for every $1.00 of actual phone service, we were still paying about $0.58 in taxes, regulatory fees, and surcharges — and here's the part that changed everything: switching carriers doesn't fix that. The fee structure follows you. Every carrier plays the same game.

So this month we stopped switching carriers and did something different. That's the big announcement below. First, the operational stuff.

☀️ What August Looks Like on Our Properties

Yes, it's 85 degrees out. Yes, we're collecting snow removal bids this month. That's not a typo — it's the whole trick.

Every August we send out snow removal bid requests to every plow contractor in our markets while they're bored, hungry for winter commitments, and not yet booked solid. Contractors quote differently in August than they do in October when their route is 80% full and you're the desperate one calling. We've locked in rates 10–20% below the October panic price just by being the first RFP in their inbox. I've never once regretted asking early. I've regretted asking late plenty.

The other August task on our list: we set a recurring Appfolio activity that tells maintenance to flip the heating breaker back on at one of our student buildings and fire up the sprinkler-room heaters at two others the moment overnight temps dip below 60. Sounds trivial in August. Feels like genius the first cold snap in late September when you're not the company explaining a frozen sprinkler line to an insurance adjuster.

✅ Other Stuff on Our List

• 🧾 Final pass on peak-season punch lists — every turn from the June rush should be fully closed out.
• 📝 Start pulling renewal data for student rentals so September renewals go out on time, not "on time-ish"

What does your August list look like? Do you bid snow in August, or do you wait? If you wait, I genuinely want to know why — hit reply. Somebody out there has a reason I haven't thought of, and I'd rather steal your idea than defend mine.

📞 The Big One: PM Advisor Phone Service — $28/Line, Taxes Included

Here's the thing the $542 audit taught us that I didn't fully appreciate in June: you can out-negotiate a carrier on the service charges, but you can't out-negotiate the fee stack. The "Compliance & Administrative Cost Recovery Fee" — nearly 30% of our service charges, for a fee whose apparent job is recovering the cost of charging us fees — shows up in some form on every carrier's invoice. Based on our actual RingCentral bill, a single line on their current RingEX Advanced plan runs $35/month before the meter starts — and after taxes, telecom fees, and surcharges, many users end up paying roughly $55/month per line.

So we did something about it. Starting this month:

PM Advisor Phone Service: $28 per line per month. Flat. All taxes and fees included.

Available to anyone with an active virtual assistant service through us, or anyone on the $199/month PM Advisor consulting service. No surcharge scavenger hunt at the bottom of the invoice. The number on the quote is the number on the bill.

Here's what that looks like at typical PM company sizes, compared against the ~$55/line all-in figure from our own invoice:

That's roughly 49% savings. Run the math on your own shop: at 6 lines, the phone savings alone covers the entire PM Advisor consulting fee. You're effectively getting the consulting for free and pocketing the difference.

This is the second deal to come out of the vetting pipeline — the first was the delinquency fix we rolled out in July. Same playbook both times: we run the vendor gauntlet on our own portfolio first, negotiate on real volume, and pass the pricing through to clients.

One honest caveat, because this newsletter doesn't do vapor claims: the ~$55/line figure is based on our specific invoice and fee structure. Telecom taxes vary by state and plan. Pull your own bill, find your own "cost recovery fee," and do your own math. If your number comes back under $28 all-in, keep what you have and tell me who your carrier is.

Want your quote? Reply to this email with your line count and we'll send back the exact comparison against your current bill.

🔧 Problem Solved: The Self-Showing Experiment We Just Killed

We ran self-showing lockbox tech on a portion of our portfolio this leasing season. The pitch is seductive: prospects tour on their own schedule, your leasing team gets their evenings back, everybody wins.

Here's what our data actually showed: booked appointments went down on the self-show units. Not the shows — the bookings. When we dug into per-unit performance (leads in, tours scheduled, tours completed, applications submitted), the friction of identity verification plus the vague unease of walking into an empty unit alone was filtering out real prospects before they ever set foot inside. The units with a human showing them converted better at every stage of the funnel.

So we cancelled the subscription. Lesson logged: convenience tech that removes a salesperson from a sales process isn't automation, it's amputation. This is exactly the kind of thing three weeks of drowning in vendor meetings exists to catch — the demo never shows you the funnel data. We're compiling the full numbers into a research report on self-showing tech later this year — if you've run your own experiment, reply with your data and I'll include it (anonymized) in the analysis.

💰 Growth Tactic of the Month: Buy Every Season in Its Off-Season

The snow bid move above isn't a snow thing — it's a pricing thing, and it works on almost every seasonal service you buy. Contractors price by how full their calendar is. Ask when it's empty.

So flip your whole procurement calendar six months: bid snow removal and furnace work in August, bid lawn care and paving in January, book your spring make-ready painters in November. This pairs directly with the vendor bench you built back in June — a bench full of vetted A/B/C vendors is exactly who you send the off-season RFPs to. Then take it one step further — this is the growth part — package the savings for your owners. "We bid your snow contract in August and saved you 15% versus market" is a line on an owner statement that no competitor sending October RFPs can match. Bulk purchasing power across a portfolio, timed against the contractor's slow season, is a differentiator you can actually put a number on.

📰 What Happened Last Month in PM

💳 The opt-out lawsuit everyone should be watching — A proposed class action in Colorado federal court alleges a major PM software company paid kickbacks to property managers who auto-enrolled residents into monthly credit-reporting fees. If your resident benefit package is opt-out, the disclosure timing — not the fee itself — is where the legal exposure lives. Re-read how and when your fees appear in your lease flow. Law360's coverage.

🤖 AI fraud detection goes mainstream — Announced at Apartmentalize: Snappt's document-fraud engine, trained on 19+ million documents, is now embedded directly into AppFolio's FolioScreen applicant screening. AI-manipulated pay stubs and IDs are the reason. If your screening process hasn't been updated since 2024, applicants' tools have outpaced yours. The announcement.

📊 The AI stack NPS gap — A new industry report covering verified operators and 1,100+ client surveys found that in the 300–1,000 door band — exactly where service quality historically breaks — operators running AI agents posted client NPS nearly 30 points higher than those without. The gap between AI-native shops and everyone else is no longer theoretical; it's showing up in retention numbers. The category reports.

⚖️ The federal fee rule is moving — The FTC's proposed rule on unfair and deceptive rental housing fee practices is past its comment period and in motion. Every mandatory charge — benefit packages included — is headed toward all-in advertised pricing. Build the revenue, show the number. The proposed rule.

🔖 Must-Reads From This Month

🤝 I’m Drowning in Vendor Meetings. That’s the Job Now.

You may have noticed I skipped a beat. No post in a while, no clever excuse. Here’s the honest one: three straight weeks of demos, pricing calls, and contract reviews. Every vendor I smiled at in New Orleans—and several I’m certain I didn’t—has followed up,

PM Monthly ForecastPM Monthly Forecast

💳 Your Delinquency Problem Has a Fix. We Already Did the Vetting.

Here’s a scenario you know well. A resident pays on the 11th instead of the 1st, most months. You post the notice, send the text, your team eats the hours. And the frustrating part is that it usually isn’t about money or character — there’s just nothing linking

PM Monthly ForecastPM Monthly Forecast

📅 Events Worth Your Time

🎤 PM Systems Conference — This one sells out months in advance, so if you're planning to go: tickets now, not later. The live debate format this year (pods vs. departmental, promoting from within vs. hiring outside) is exactly the kind of argument this industry needs to have in public.

🏢 NARPM Chapter Meetings — Check your local chapter's August calendar — the late-summer sessions are where renewal-season intel gets traded before everyone disappears into Q4.

🎓 Straight From Our Virtual Assistant Training Department

Last month's practitioner guide from our VA team: Application Process During Peak Season — the actual workflow our team runs when applications are coming in faster than one person can process them, including the triage order that keeps fair housing compliance intact when you're moving fast. No fluff, just the process doc.

This month our training department is building out the next guide in the series — watch for it in September's issue.

And the standing pitch, because it's the engine behind everything above: every process in this newsletter runs on a trained property management virtual assistant. If your team is drowning in the season and you're the bottleneck, that's fixable.

See how the VA model works →