🌻 June Playbook: Hunting Every Margin Before Summer Hits — And What We've Already Found

Every 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.

Move-out is seven days away. You probably remember me writing about it last month — the ten-day window between May 21 and June 1, every unit inspected, cleaned, fixed, and handed off to a new tenant. We’re ready. Pre-inspections done. Cleaners scheduled. Yard cleanup notices out. Repair list staged.

What I actually want to talk about this month is the work we’ve been doing underneath the move-out prep — the operational changes that are going to define our June. A new hire in Eau Claire. Our annual phone bill audit. Energy audits we actually acted on. The insurance gap most PM companies don’t know they have. And the software call we finally made.

Here’s what’s new.

🤝 New Field Agent In Eau Claire

We’re bringing on a new field agent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin this month.

She's starting with showings — getting in front of prospects, walking units, learning what tenants actually ask in real time. From there, she'll move into an internship-in-training role at our headquarters, working across every facet of the operation: leasing, maintenance coordination, owner relations, accounting, marketing, vendor management. The long game is bigger than one role. We're building toward growing our portfolio into Minnesota, and the operators who can run a new market for us aren't hired — they're trained.

I'm flagging it because hiring this kind of role is easy to overlook. It's not a big strategic move. It's not a tech rollout. It's just a person who lives in the market, knows the area, and gives us more hands during the busiest stretch of the year. But honestly, that's most of what running a tight operation actually is — the right people in the right markets, trained well, integrated properly. The strategic moves get the headlines. The local hires keep the lights on.

She starts during the student move-out/move-in stretch. Trial by fire is one way to learn.

📞 The Phone Switch That Saved Us $542 A Month

We audited our phone bill line by line this month. We do this annually — most telecoms run on two-year contracts, and the only way you get a fair rate is by making the conscious effort to audit, ask, and switch when the numbers don't justify staying. They're not going to volunteer better pricing.

This year's audit caught $542 a month in services we'd outgrown, lines assigned to people who hadn't worked here in months, and a plan we should have renegotiated long ago. We switched carriers. That's about $6,500 a year back on something most operators autopay and never look at.

The lesson isn't about phones. It's that the line items you stopped questioning are exactly the ones quietly bleeding margin. Phone. Internet. Software subscriptions. Insurance. Set a recurring annual audit on each one and make the vendors compete for your business. If you haven't done it in twelve months, the savings are probably bigger than you think.

⚡ Energy Audits — From Report To Work Orders

Last month we walked through why we ran energy audits on three of our own properties — buildings clocking 8.8 and 18.6 air changes per hour when a tight envelope should be 3-5. Translation: we were paying to heat the outside.

This month we moved from report to action. Contractor estimates collected on every recommended item: air sealing top plates and penetrations, blown cellulose to R-50 in attic spaces, mastic and insulation wrap on exposed ductwork, weatherstripping on identified doors and access points.

Wisconsin's Focus on Energy is engaged for pre-approval — anything over $10K needs sign-off before you start work. Worth noting: their rebates went up 20-30% for 2026, and Wisconsin received $149M in IRA-funded HOMES and HEAR rebates administered through the same program. Multifamily property owners qualify. Most operators don't know that yet.

This is where margin hides. An audit report sitting in a folder isn't an improvement — it's a list. We see it every year: owners get the report, file it, tell themselves they'll get to it when things slow down. Things don't slow down. They never have.

If your state runs a utility-funded efficiency rebate program — and most do — engaging it before you spend a dollar on improvements is one of the highest-leverage phone calls you'll make this quarter. DSIRE tracks every program in every state. Start there.

📝 What Happens When Your Employee Crashes A Personal Car On Company Time

This one is going to make some of you uncomfortable. Good.

Most PM companies have employees driving personal vehicles for property visits, owner meetings, supply runs, vendor coordination. Almost no one has audited what their commercial auto policy actually covers when one of those employees crashes a personal car on company business.

We didn't either, until we sat down and built a proper Personal Vehicle Use Agreement covering primary insurance requirements, mileage reimbursement scope, accident reporting obligations, indemnification language, and — the one most operators miss — the gap between personal coverage and a company non-owned auto policy.

This is the kind of document that does nothing until the day something goes wrong, and then it does everything. Six-figure lawsuit kind of everything.

I'm pulling apart the why and how in next week's deep-dive post. In the meantime, the free template is here — make a copy, swap in your company name, and have your attorney review before you roll it out. If you've been running on "we'll figure it out if it happens," next week's post is for you.

🖥️ One More Thing: We Made The Software Call

Eleven years on AppFolio. After two months of active demos, sandbox testing, and reference calls — we made a call.

I said in May Matters that we were actively searching. We are no longer searching. We've picked our target platform.

I'm not going to publish the name until we're 30 days into the pilot. Not because I'm hiding it — because the only thing worse than recommending software you love is recommending software you loved for the first two weeks. So we're waiting until we have real operational data before we tell you what we picked and why.

What I will tell you is how we're rolling it out:

June 15 — Quiet data crossover. Eleven years of tenant files, lease history, payment records, owner statements, and trust accounting data crosses over. Nobody outside our team knows. We spend two weeks validating every record.

July — 50-unit pilot. Real rent collection, real tenants, real workflows. Contained slice of the portfolio. We catch problems while they're small.

October — Full portfolio. If the pilot proves the platform, we migrate everything.

We're doing this in slow motion on purpose. Most operators do a hard cutover and pray. We're documenting every friction point in real time. The full breakdown of how we're testing it is here.

Talk To Us

We're actively documenting friction points and would love your intel:

• 🔄 Already migrated? What surprised you that the demos never showed?
• 🧪 Mid-pilot like us? What's your timeline and rollout structure?
• 🤔 Still evaluating? What's holding you up?

Fifteen years in this business taught us the best advice never comes from a sales rep. Drop yours in the comments or reply to this email.

💡 Growth Tactic: Build A Vendor Bench Before June Forces You To

For every trade you use monthly, run three vendors. Not two. Three.

Vendor A is your go-to. Vendor B is your real backup — vetted, used at least once, ready to step up the day Vendor A stops answering. Vendor C is your warm lead — fully vetted, insurance on file, W-9 collected, ready to activate. You add a new C every quarter.

It feels like overkill until June, when Vendor A is booked solid for three weeks, B is suddenly your only contractor on a trade you didn't realize was that exposed, and you have three emergencies on the same day. That's how operators end up paying emergency rates for routine work all summer. We wrote about how vendor coordination quietly drains a PM operation — the bench is half the answer.

The honest part: most operators don't do this because building a bench is slow, unglamorous, and never feels urgent until it's too late. It's also the kind of work that doesn't need an operations manager doing it. Vetting, insurance verification, reference checks, trial scheduling — all handled by a trained VA who already understands property management workflows. Our team handles two new vendors per trade per quarter. Boring. Effective.

See how the VA model works →

📰 Industry Pulse

📲 Listing platforms restructuring how they charge PMs — Pay-per-lead and pay-to-feature are spreading. If you haven't audited your lead-source mix in 12 months, you're flying blind. Peter Lohmann's take.

🔍 NMHC's 2026 conference agenda has one theme — operational efficiency under margin pressure. Software migration isn't a tech story anymore. It's a survival story. Conference details.

🤖 NARPM is reporting a clear split — Operators investing in trained VAs and tighter systems are growing margins. Operators stacking more software on top of the same old workflows are not. More from NARPM.

📚 Must-Reads From This Month

🤔 Is The Grass Really Greener? Our 90-Day PM Software Test

We’re about to spend ninety days inside a new property management platform, testing every inch of it before we commit. Here’s the thing though: most migration conversations skip the part that actually matters — what it feels like to live through the chaos of moving from one system to another, and

PM Monthly ForecastRegine Collins

📞 Your Vendor Wants to “Hop on a Quick Call” — Again

You sent the work order through the portal. Photos attached, scope written out, unit access spelled out. Then your phone buzzes. “Hey, can you call me about the job at 1108?” No. The answer is no. It’s 2026. The tools exist, they’re cheap, and they sync to everything you already

PM Monthly ForecastRegine Collins

❓The $542 Question We Should Have Asked Sooner

When was the last time you actually looked at your phone bill? Not glanced. Not approved on autopay. Looked at it — line by line, who has what, what’s still active, what you’re paying for, what you’re getting. We did. We found enough to switch carriers, kill three lines we didn’t

PM Monthly ForecastRegine Collins

💡 How Energy Audits Reduce Operating Costs for Property Owners (And Why We’re Doing It on Our Own Properties)

Most property owners never think about an energy audit until a utility bill forces the conversation. We decided to be proactive — and what we found surprised us. We recently had energy audits completed on several of our own properties in Wisconsin. Not because something was broken. Not because a tenant

PM Monthly ForecastRegine Collins

PMA Clients: Your pre-inspection process is in the portal — built specifically for this stretch of the year.

📅 June Events Worth Your Time

🏢 INW NARPM Chapter Meeting — May 28 📍 Spokane, WA — Closing out the month strong with peers before June chaos hits.

🌎 NARPM Southern States Conference — June 17–19 — Worth the trip if you can swing it. Strong programming on operations and growth.

🤖 NMHC Research Forum — Mid-June — Best margin and operations data of the season. Watch for the post-event recap if you can't attend.