Ep031: Protecting Rental Profitability in 2026 – What Smart Landlords Are Doing Right Now (Pillar #2)

Chris McAllister: Welcome to the Landlord Profitability Playbook podcast. I’m Chris McAllister, and it’s my job to create and coach business opportunities and strategies that support and add value to real estate investors. And I’m here today, as always, with my partner in all things marketing, Laci LeBlanc. Good morning, Laci.

Laci LeBlanc: Good morning, Chris. 

Chris McAllister: So today, we’re gonna jump into part two of our three-part series, What Smart Landlords Are Doing Right Now. And in our last episode, we discussed margin compression and talked about why profitability is harder to protect for landlords in 2026 than it’s been in recent years. And today, our topic is about operational precision and why small mistakes continue to get more and more expensive these days.

So maybe not the sexiest topic we’ve ever had, uh, Laci since we’ve been doing this podcast, but I do think it’s, it’s, it’s critical that we talk about this and sort of get it out in the open and precipitate some, uh, discussion because it is the reality of, of the situation here in June of 2026. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, I think we talked last time that these are things that everybody is feeling and we’re just trying to kind of put words, uh, to the feelings.

So talk to me a little bit about operational precision. Define it for me. What do you mean when you say, when you talk about operational precision? 

Chris McAllister: Operational precision means running rental property with a tighter execution. It means understanding that in 2026, small mistakes, you know, or, or what used to be small mistakes are getting more and more expensive.

So things like a delayed turn, right, where you lose another month of potential income, uh, a repair that isn’t done for a tenant in a timely fashion that down, down the line is going to affect whether or not they wanna stay in the property after their lease is up. You know, weak leasing follow through, you know, not doing everything that, that, uh, you can possibly do to, to get that property once it is rehabbed, get a tenant in there as fast as, as possible.

Poor vendor coordination. You know, if you’re working with a property management, management company and, you know, they don’t have great vendor relationships or great systems in place like, you know, using property mill to coordinate you know, tenant occupied home maintenance or turns, all those little things, they add up.

And then even when you’re talking about, you know, going deeper into the, not just the timeliness of getting work done in a property, but getting work done properly it’s critical too, because when times are tight or tough, it’s easy to kind of, uh, gravitate toward a cheap fix, right? And sometimes those cheap fixes, you know, they just don’t last and, and, uh, you know, they fail sooner rather than later, right?

So- So 

Laci LeBlanc: that goes for, I guess, um, like tenants too, right? Like, you could get a tenant in there quickly, but if it’s not the right tenant, or you could fix something, but if it’s not fixed well, – 

Chris McAllister: Yeah. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah. 

Chris McAllister: And that, you know, that goes back to, statistics in, uh, property mill, not just for our portfolio property mill, but for the entire company, basically point to the fact that, if your new tenant has a great experience over the first three months that they’re in the property, that the chances of them renewing, into the next year and staying longer, just based on that initial first three months are, I don’t, I don’t know exactly what the percentage is, but it’s almost double, you know, what it is if they have a poor experience with the condition of the property or, or how things work when they move in.

So all these little things, right? All the little mistakes that, you know, maybe when times were a little bit, when we were a little bit more flush and everything was going in our favor, you know, any one or two of those any given month isn’t a big deal. But, you know, when you start to put all those things together and you’ve got to watch where every penny where is, is going, it, it, it add, they add up, right?

And it, it, it can become a drag on your, on your return. So that’s what this episode is really about, you know? There’s a lot of landlords out there that aren’t losing money because of one bad month or one bad thing that happens with a turn or one bad tenant. They’re losing money through smaller mistakes or just looseness in the execution that just keep compounding o- over time.

Laci LeBlanc: Like it’s, it’s about where the money just leaks out, like slow leaks, right? 

Chris McAllister: Yeah, that’s, that’s really the heart of it. Uh, you know, a lot of owners are always looking for one big problem. They think in terms of major repairs, bad tenants, long vacancies, and those things matter, don’t get me wrong. But in a tighter market like we’re in now, when profitability is harder to come by, the money often leaks out through smaller operational failures.

And again, it could be as simple as a turn takes too long, a repair gets delayed, you know, uh, a proposal, you know, sits with the owner too long for approval, right? It’s, it’s not always just the property manager. Sometimes it’s the owner that does the delays and not necessarily for, you know, bad reasons. It may just be that, you know, cash is tight and they need to wait another month or two before they, go forward on a, on a project, even a smaller project these days.

Or let’s say a property misses the first of the month move-in window, you know, today it’s, uh, June 9th, you know, we still have a chance that we can put tenants, in properties that we have listed today for July 1st, but every day that goes by, you know, that window is sh – is shrinking fast. And yes, sometimes tenants do move in middle of the month and rent is prorated, but the fact is we’ve always gotta be shooting for that first of the month window.

And then the other thing is, as we discussed a few minutes ago is, you know, a cheap repair sometimes turned in, turns into repeat work. And I’ll tell you, I I just did this at the, at the, uh, Airbnb that we have in Florida. We’ve had that house for 10 years and we put new washer and dryers in it, new appliances.

But when we were there in J – in, uh, January, the washer failed. And I, I swore years ago I would never do this, but instead of going to Lowe’s you know, to get a new one, I went to a used appliance repair store. They seem legit, nice people, you know, but I think I spent, I think with delivery and all that, it was close to $400 for what looked like a, a nearly new used washer.

And lo and behold, we, we get down to the house there a couple of weeks ago when we were visiting and the washer’s out again. And of course, we didn’t buy the extended warranty from the used appliance guy, which I, I did, which is a whole nother conversations. I just, I just hate those warranties.

But, you know, I, I though I could get away with, 400 bucks and put a washer in, and it failed. You know, I went to Lowe’s, I, I, I got a new washer. I, it had to take the old one away, have it installed. So I spent, you know, I should have spent $750, right, on the new washer in January, but instead, you know, I though I’ll try to cut this corner.

I saved 300 bucks and it cost me, 450 bucks. So anyway, it happens to all of us, but so many times a shortcut or a cheap repair turns into repeat work down the road. And all those things, you know, they add up, and that’s where a lot of damage occurs and, and where, you know, s – you end up at the end of the year and there wasn’t one catastrophe that, destroyed your, your business for the year.

It’s just at the end of the year, the return’s not there where it could be. And I just wanna talk about what we can do right now to help tighten things up before, halfway through the year. 

Laci LeBlanc: I mean, this is the landlord profitability playbook after all, right? It all really comes back. There are a lot of points that we make and a lot of things we talk about, but it all comes back to the bottom line and making sure that you’re profitable in the end.

And one of those points for this pillar is about vacancy, an extra month of vacancy in this economy – 

Chris McAllister: Yeah. 

Laci LeBlanc: Uh, matters more than it has in years past. So talk to me a little bit about that. 

Chris McAllister: Well, a lot of owners think, you know, a short delay only costs a few days of rent, but in reality, you know, like we just said, it, it costs the whole month, nine times out of 10.

There are times when, you know, people do move in in the middle of the month or throughout the month that you can get some prorated rent, but most people wanna move in at the beginning of the month, right? They wanna get all the use they can out of their previous lease and, you know, they wanna, they wanna basically move on the last day of the month, uh, and, and be in on the first day of the month in your property.

Nobody wants to move on the 13th or the 21st if, if they can avoid it. So when it drags out, the problem isn’t just that you lost a week, you lost the month and, and, and you really lost the window. So again, small delay, something maybe we didn’t think enough about, you know, a year or two ago, but we’ve gotta start thinking about that now.

And that’s why I keep saying, you know, turn time, time to turn a property isn’t, isn’t just an operational detail. It’s not a metric to track. It is truly a profitability event. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, I think that’s an important point. What kinds of things cause owners to miss the month and how do they, you know, address that?

How do you kind of proactively fix that? 

Chris McAllister: You know, usually it’s not any one single dramatic thing, but oftentimes in our experience, and again, this isn’t pointing fingers at owners, you know, we work for owners, owners are in charge, but, you know, delayed approval on work that needs to be done by an owner, you know, that, that’s a small thing that adds up.

If your property manager doesn’t get you, you know, the, the scope of work and the bids in a timely fashion that’s an issue also. You know, once a, a, a turn gets going or work gets started, if there’s not solid follow-up, you know, systems in place to make sure that the, the work that was approved and contracted for was done and done well, that becomes a leak, you know, waiting too long to start to work, poor coordination between, you know, getting the turn done, getting it cleaned, getting photos done in leasing.

There’s just so many little places where time and money can sort of leak out of the system that when you really dig into it there’s just, there’s opportunities and that’s how, you know, I guess lost profit happens. Uh, the frustrating part is a lot of owners focus on the visible cost, you know, like the paint bill or the flooring bill, but they don’t always focus enough on the cost of delays in this market.

And same with the property managers, again, this is a partnership, but in this market, any delay, even a day or two can turn out to be very expensive. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, I think that the, the process between move out of one tenant and move into another tenant or acquisition, you know, of a new client, it really has to be like a well-oiled machine.

And a big part of that machine, whether we’re talking about turning in tenants or we’re talking about, tenant satisfaction is the maintenance, right? We’ve talked about that in every piece of this conversation so far. And you make the point in this pillar that slow maintenance is really more expensive than landlords think.

Why is that? 

Chris McAllister: Well, the true cost of maintenance isn’t just the, the actual invoice for whatever went wrong any given month, right? It’s also the side effects that, that occur when, you know, you wait too long. A leaks, a leak, let’s say it’s a, a leaky faucet that sits too long can, can damage, we’ve seen what started as a leaky faucet destroy the whole bathroom vanity, right?

You know, a small over time, a small HVAC issue can turn into a bigger failure, you know, if, if the, uh, furnace filters are changed out, every three to six months, you know, that can over time, not too much time either, 18, 24 months of not changing a filter can turn into a big problem and repair bill for the air conditioning and heating system.

You know, a slow response also frustrates the resident. And as we said, that will make a renewal harder when the lease is up. So that’s money down the road, whether because you’ve got to clean up after the tenant again or you have to pay for another lease fee or what have you, maintenance and renewals, there’s a, a direct correlation there.

And we’ve really learned, uh, in our company, how close that is. And we’ve also, to pat ourselves on the back a little bit, we’ve also learned how to keep residents in properties longer by making sure that our maintenance systems and process and, and people, quite frankly, are, are the, are the best that we can possibly find.

You know, and it’s, and a recurring issue. Let’s say you’re a tenant and the same thing keeps going wrong and wrong, right? So there’s recurring issues, it just makes the property and the management look sloppy, makes the owner look sloppy and the tenant, whether they articulate it consciously or not, just, they just think that nobody cares.

And, you know, when the time comes to move on, they’re gonna be far more likely to move on. So if an owner is only asking, you know, Laci, how much does the repair cost, you know, that, that, that question is just a little bit narrow in scope, right? We wanna know how much it costs. I’m not trying to minimize that fact, but the better questions are, how fast are we responding?

How fast can we get this done? If we pay it a little extra, could we get it done faster? Is this really the right thing to do to protect the asset? I- it’s hard to say this when you’re talking about, spending as little as possible, but, you know, sometimes, uh, an extra 10% to do it that much better is gonna protect your overall asset being the home, uh, that much longer and that much better.

You know, are we preventing the issue from getting worse? Are we solving the problem the right way the first time? Those are the questions that all of us as property managers and as owners need to be asking ours- ourselves, right? Yes, we need to know how much the repair costs, but we also need to know in the greater scheme of things, is this going, is this the right thing to be doing to the right extent to protect the profitability of this property over time?

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, maintenance is an investment, not an expense, right? That’s how we think about things in, in marketing. We think about marketing and lead generation, and it’s an investment, not an expense. And when you change how you look at it, you know, it changes the kind of scope of it. And I think that’s the same for maintenance.

Chris McAllister: Yes. Yep, no question. 

Laci LeBlanc: So you also talk about, in this pillar, that good enough, and I’m using finger quotes there, but good enough property management is, is more costly in 2026. What does good enough mean? What does that look like? 

Chris McAllister: Well, good enough means, you know, nothing is really fully broken, but nothing is especially tight either, right?

So how does, what does that look like in real life? I mean, maybe turns take a little too long, maybe vacancies last a little too long, maybe repairs move a little too slowly. The communication you get from your property management, property manager or property management team is a little too vague.

Vendor coordination and follow-up is a little too loose, right? Everything sort of happens, but everything’s sort of like 65%, right? It’s just, you know, at a minimum, we need to see 80%. You know, our company strives to operate at, 95, 99%, right? But y- you know, there’s so many situations out there for landlords where, the, everything’s working, it’s just not working especially well.

And the sad fact is, Laci, you know, sometimes you, you kinda get what you pay for. I mean, there are, you know, property management companies out there that, you know, will basically take any portfolio that comes through their door at any price, you know, just to keep the, the lights on. And I just.

And I like to believe that we are very, very competitive, but there is, we are certainly not the chees – cheapest option any place where we do business. But I can tell you that we strive to provide the best value, meaning what you’re paying your property manager and the performance you’re getting is a heck of a lot tighter, you know, than.

I’ll sit here today and say I absolutely believe that our property management offering, the systems and so forth that we provide, we’re running a much tighter shift than we ever have before. And I have to tell you, based on what I’m seeing in the market, it’s clearly a tighter shift than some of what our competition is.

So I really wanna go down that road, but I am super proud of the team, you know, but that, it just often feels like that in property management. Things are going, nothing’s on fire, but, profits aren’t going up. I don’t feel all that secure, right? Sometimes it’s hard to sort of articulate what we’re trying to say you know, when it comes to these feelings, but, you know, a lot of times those gut feelings, uh, they translate to real life dollars and cents.

So maybe in an easier market, you know, where rents are going up, where, where values are going up, average management sort of can hide behind that, but in a tighter market, you know, average and, and surely below average management gets exposed and the owner starts feeling like everything’s just a little bit slower, a little more expensive, and they don’t really feel like that they’ve got a partner with a strategy to get past this and, and move into the future.

And that’s really the cost of good enough. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to articulate. It is one of the more difficult things to put words to, I think, as a, an investor. But basically, the manager doesn’t have to be terrible to cost you money as an owner. 

Chris McAllister: Honestly, a manager only has to be. You know, what was, what was really, really good, two, three years ago, honestly, Laci, it’s less than average now, you know?

Uh, the, the tools that property managers have at their disposal now, if they employ them, will absolutely impact their execution positively. The, the overall industry is clearly getting better, right? Collectively, property managers are doing a much, much better job even than we did two to three years ago.

But what was, what was acceptable, what was average, a few months ago, definitely two or three years ago that’s not where the floor is now, if that makes sense. So th- this is just really one of the biggest things that I wanna point out. Not that I want everybody listening to go fire their property manager, but I do want everybody listening to schedule some time one-on-one with their property manager, go through your property or go through your portfolio one-on-one and really see if you’ve got a partner there and if together you can come up with a strategy to tighten things up before, things get out of hand and you wake up a few months from now and, and, you know, you feel like it is a crisis, even though it just happened a little bit at a time.

You know, a property manager doesn’t have to be failing to com- completely to hurt returns. It just kinda have to be average in a market that punishes average execution, and that’s why I’m kinda going on about this, uh, ad os – ad nauseum. But when margins were fatter, there was a lot more room to absorb sloppy follow-through, and there’s just less room for that now.

I mean, it really wasn’t that long ago that rents were going up month after month after month, and the values were, you know, screaming through the roof after COVID, but those days are gone, and if we don’t adapt, we’re gonna we’re gonna wake up and find ourselves, uh, not making the return on our investment that we should.

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a level of service question there, right? What level of service do you feel compelled to provide, right? These are people who are in homes, and this is where they live, this is their space for their families, but I also think that there’s, there’s been a shift as rents went up in expectations from renters as well.

If you’re paying, $1,000, $1,500, $2,500 a month for a property, you have an expectation that aligns with what you’re paying. And, you know, the expectation is that your renter will take good care of the property and vice versa. So I think that’s, that expectation management and rising to the expectations of renters has shifted over the past few years as well to add kind of another layer.

Chris McAllister: Yeah, because rents have gone up, I guarantee you, tenant expectations have gone through the roof as well. And I can’t blame them for that. I mean, rental prices have gone up and up and up, and I don’t care if it’s a class D, C, B, A property, every tenant is expecting more because they’re paying more.

Laci LeBlanc: We’re getting to a time and there are lots of articles out there talking about how people are intentionally renting for life, right? They don’t have any plans maybe to own a home because that’s the best financial decision for them, or that’s, you know, that’s what fits their lifestyle or so yeah, I think it’s, it’s just, it’s.

There’s been a lot of big shifts, I think, in the housing market in general, and you have to really keep an eye on those trends and those shifts, and you have to be, be ready to address them. And I think, I think ROOST does a very good job, um, with the tenant side of things and acknowledging that you have.

We have two clients, right? The owner and the tenant. It’s not just the owner and, and the property that we’re servicing, it’s the person that lives there as well. And that just hasn’t always been the case, and it’s not always the case everywhere. So, um – Well, I, 

Chris McAllister: I, I guess just to toot our own horn a little bit, you know, if you go and, and you look up ROOST and, you know, Florida, Columbus, Springfield, Dayton, et cetera, all of our Google reviews, and I think we’re still running like a 4.8 everywhere, you know, maybe it’s a little higher even in Florida right now, but there’s fewer reviews there because we look after fewer properties.

But if you look at them, the vast majority of, of them are five-star reviews that tenants have given our individual maintenance guys. And, you know, I haven’t really sat down to, to do the numbers or try to graphic, graph it, but ever since we, we kind of got our maintenance game together and, you know, started really focusing on, the expectation for everybody in the company, which is have I earned a five-star review today, you know, we turned around our entire, Google review situation scores, et cetera, and I really do wanna sit down and at the end of this year, if not before, and sort of graph out how that has affected renewals and, uh, the tenants, uh, actually paying a premium to go month-in-month, because ever since we started to hit those 4.8 average Google review scores our tenants have been staying in the properties much, much longer beyond their, uh, their first year lease.

Laci LeBlanc: And almost all of those reviews go back to, repairs. Some minor, some a little more major, but you talk about how the cheapest repair is often the most expensive decision and it’s probably sounds backwards to people who don’t, you know, own a home or own rental properties, but can you explain that to us?

Chris McAllister: Well, I, I feel like we’ve kinda hit this throughout the, uh, episode here, but I just can’t express how maintenance will make or break profitability. And we’ve been saying that for years, Laci, since we’ve been doing these podcasts, but it truly is now more than ever. Again, the cheapest repair is, is often the most expensive decision.

It sounds backward until you’ve lived it. You know, it, it’s just like the story I just told about the washer in Florida. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, your washer story is maybe the most perfect example of this point that I could possibly think of, yeah. 

Chris McAllister: And after all these years, you know, I’ve had rental properties for 20, 25, 26 years now, and I’m still making – 

Laci LeBlanc: Not a rookie mistake.

Chris McAllister: Mistakes, not. So, but a lot of landlords see repair come up, and the first instinct is to ask, “How little can I spend?” And I, I get it, nobody wants to be taken advantage of, but there’s a big difference between being disciplined and being cheap. Cheap decisions often create repeat problems, i.e. My washer situation, you know, a patch job delays the real fixed instead of solving it, a low quality repair fails again, you know, a poor vendor choice creates more delay, more labor, more resident frustration.

So, yes, the cheaper, cheaper choice can absolutely end up costing more over the next six, 12 months and beyond when you start to think about the terms of tenant leases. So, again, I feel like we’ve really beat this horse, but that’s why smart landlords don’t just look for the lowest price, they look for the very best business decision.

Laci LeBlanc: I mean, I do feel like we’ve made the same point over and over again, but it’s a point worth belaboring. So if you pull it all together, if you can take operational precision and give us kind of the one bigger lesson, what is the bigger lesson for landlords here? 

Chris McAllister: The bigger lesson is that small mistakes are now profit problems, and I guess that’s really the headline of this entire, you know, part two, pillar two of this three-part series.

A delayed turn can cost a full month of rent. A slow repair can become a bigger repair and effect, or the likelihood of that tenant renewing at the end of the lease term. A cheap fix easily becomes two fixes, right? An average management can quietly drag down returns month after month, and that’s why operational precision matters, not because owners need perfection, be- because all of us as owners need fewer leaks, fewer delays, and fewer avoidable losses.

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, so what are smart landlords doing differently right now to address this? 

Chris McAllister: Well, they’re just paying closer attention to execution. You know, they’re watching their turn times. They’re asking whether, they missed another month, and if they can get something done within this month.

They’re paying attention to maintenance response and completion times as much as they’re paying attention to how much, you know, a, a, a task cost. They’re looking at repair quality, not just price. They’re asking whether vendor coordination is tight enough. You know, you’re using a third-party vendor. Who’s going to make sure that that work was done and done the way it needed to be done before that bill gets paid, right?

And then, of course, from the owner perspective, they’re asking great questions, but they’re also moving faster on getting repo – approvals for repairs back to their property managers. They’re also asking, better questions. Why did this turn take so long? Are we solving repairs right the first time?

Are slow re- responses hurting retention? Are we saving money or just delaying inevitable greater costs down the road? That’s, that’s how smart landlords are thinking right now. 

Laci LeBlanc: What if they only have just a couple of rental properties? They’re like a one to two rental property landlord. You know, I think, I think some people might hear this conversation and think, “This only matters at scale.

This only matters to larger portfolios.” 

Chris McAllister: I mean, if you. If somebody only has one or two rental properties, all the more reason to make sure that those properties, you know, which make up a, a, you know, in general, a, a huge part of your net worth and, and, but, you know, potentially, you know, God forbid your estate down the road it matters to everybody, but it might even matter more to, the people with one or two.

If, you know, if you own one rental house or a small handful, it hurts worse, right? One missed month, one major repair, one sloppy turn, it’s gonna hit your returns a lot harder than if you can spread that mistake across multiple properties. A, a larger portfolio may have room to absorb a few more mistakes.

A smaller portfolio often doesn’t. So, y- you know, it’s, it’s perverse, but, somebody who owns a, a one or two property portfolio, maybe they’re just getting started, maybe that’s all they want, they have the, the they literally have the same involvement or time of involvement and focus as a, as a larger portfolio owner does, but maybe, you know, what they’re looking at, what they’re worried about is a little more narrow focused, if that makes sense.

I was listening to something the other day that somebody was talking about micromanagement, and I, I think I agree with this. Micromanagement is not always a bad thing. So, you know, I, I, you know, the reason anybody hires a property manager is to free up their time, and get on with their lives.

But there is a time and there’s a place where I think every owner needs to be a little more focused, a little more intentional, a little more, I don’t wanna say interested, but you probably do need to be, you know, looking at your numbers every month and, and putting a micromanager hat on right now. And sometimes the smaller owners don’t do that until something big happens, and I just want everybody to do it.

So whether you’re a s – uh, you know, a single unit owner or a 50 unit owner, this is no time to be casual about execution. 

Laci LeBlanc: I think that, you know, we, we pride ourselves on sending kind of those numbers on a monthly basis and being very transparent about the cost from the time that we put the, you know, work order in for approval.

But I think that there are some probably property management companies that don’t, that aren’t so transparent about those costs. Um, and I think it’s makes it harder probably for owners to, or even if you’re doing it yourself, you know, I don’t know that Nana knows exactly what is co – things are costing her on any given month.

It might take a little more effort for her to go back and see it. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point to make and probably a great next step for folks. So if you’re a landlord listening to this is my favorite part of every episode, what, Chris, do you think that they should do next?

What’s the next step for investors who are hearing this conversation? 

Chris McAllister: Yeah, I wanna wrap up with that. But the other thing I wanna bring up, this is, this wasn’t on our, our notes for today, but, we I’m very, very proud of how far we’ve come with rehab and maintenance and the team that we’ve put in place is just absolutely second to none.

But we’re not stopping, right? So it was, it was interesting. We just met with an, a vendor called Z Inspector, um, last week. And, you know, this is a cost, it’s gonna cost us a, you know, at least a dollar a door. You know, it’s, it’s gonna probably cost us as a company probably $1,000 a month in additional overhead to employ this, uh, app and system called ZInspector.

But what the system does is it allows us to do in a, uh, inspection and scope on a property probably 10, 15 times better than, than the quality of the, of the inspections and scopes we, we do now. Everybody talks about the AI capability, but the AI capability in this particular app actually makes the process of, of doing a, a, a turn inspection way, way, way better in quality and it should take our guys much, much less time to do.

So we’re absolutely investing in, in everything we can find that, that makes sense to tighten things up and to make things go faster. The other cool thing about the Z Inspector thing is that it actually has an app for tenants and we can ask tenants to do self-inspections going forward, which I think is going to be interesting and we’ve got to figure out really how to employ that properly.

But, you know, I can see situations where we make, quarterly or biannual self-inspections, you know, a lease requirement all in an effort to do a better job of surfacing problems be – potential problems before they come, before they become bigger problems. So again, that goes back to, yeah, it’s a tough time for owners right now.

It’s a tough time for property managers too, but you really wanna be challenge your property managers and asking them, “What are you going to be doing to tighten things up in your shop so that I can have a better shot at maintaining profitability in my shop?” But as far as what to do next I just want to t- take a harder look at where delay is costing money, right?

So not just think about the price as we said, but think about how long it’s gonna take and the quality of the work. So delay costs. Are my turns moving fast enough? Are repairs being handled quickly enough? Am I missing move-in windows? Am I focusing too much on saving money upfront and not enough on the total outcome?

Is my property manager helping me to protect my timing and execution or are they just keeping the machine, chugging along business as usual? Just because in this market that, that’s just where the profitability is won or lost. 

Laci LeBlanc: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that’s a great place to end this one.

Anything we missed? Any 

Chris McAllister: final thoughts? A- again, a lot of landlords, they’re not being crushed by one major mistake, right? Or, or one major event. They’re just being worn down little by little month after month by smaller ones. And I feel it too, you know, in my portfolio. And we’ve said this a thousand times, but, you know, I’m a ROOST customer too.

My 20 houses, you know, we, you know, ROOST looks after them. I, I, I pay the fees. I, I pay the turns. I, you know, I, I, I treat my portfolio just like all of our owners do. And, and that’s why I always say I’m the canary in the coal mine. And, you know, I’m feeling a little worn down this year as well. But again, the realis – the, the real lesson of Operation Precision is it’s not about one mistake, it’s a little leaks that happen, you know, in multiple areas over time.

So just to wrap this up and put a bow on it, in 2026, small mistakes are getting more expensive and the landlords who do well will usually be the ones who protect timing, move faster, make better decisions, and expect tighter performance from the people managing their property. So again, execution matters more than it ever has before.

Laci, anything else before, uh, we say goodbye today? 

Laci LeBlanc: Nope. I think this was another, um, valuable lesson and I’m looking forward to the next part. 

Chris McAllister: Well, the next time it’s, next time we get together, we’re gonna do, uh, part three of the three-part series. And part three is titled Control Versus Chaos: Why Smart Landlords Need Better Visibility, Better Systems, and Better Decisions in 2026.

So we’re gonna go forward and, and, and tie up this whole series next time we get together about what Smart Landlords are doing right now. 

Laci LeBlanc: All right. I’ll see you then. 

Chris McAllister: All right. Thank you.