Optimizing Property Management in Measurable & Historic Ways
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
When asked about the future of property management, Ray Hespen, co-founder and CEO of the cloud-based, property-maintenance-operations platform Property Meld, has an unusual answer: optimization. Furthermore, he has very clear ideas about how to achieve this lofty goal.
“Historically, property management has been a service business, whether you operate in multifamily or single-family residences,” Hespen said. “It used to be that a property manager would essentially say to the owner, ‘You tell me what to do, and I will run the playbook.’ The future of property management is going to involve optimizing the playbook, not just following a set of instructions.”
Hespen, who conceived of Property Meld in 2014 with co-founder and CTO David Kingman after Kingman, who was deeply frustrated with maintenance issues in his own rental, fired off an email questioning the “typicality” of his problems.
Kingman found it difficult to accept the complications associated with coordinating with his property manager to get a basic repair completed. Hespen responded he simply handled his own maintenance because it was “not worth the headache” to involve a property manager at all in most cases, and the two ultimately decided to tackle “the problem of improving communication, visibility, and oversight for everyone,” Hespen said.
He continued, “We have grown significantly since then, but that is how we started.”
“Significant growth” is an understatement. Since its inception in 2014, Property Meld has expanded to include more than 70 employees and, today, the company serves property-management clients collectively managing more than 800,000 doors in the United States and Canada.
“We facilitate about 3 million service issues every year,” Hespen said.
The Science & Study of Maintenance
Every one of those service issues is treated not just as an important element of success for both Property Meld and its clients; these services are also treated as invaluable data points for further optimization of Property Meld processes.
“We have an incredible amount of data capturing what happens in the life cycle of every repair, beginning with a miniscule level and expanding outward,” Hespen said. “We are known as the national leader in maintenance operations. Because of automation in the field, we are also the national leader in maintenance data that we surface to help our customers.”
The most recent publication of this data is a white paper titled “The Maintenance-Renewal Connection” [see sidebar]. “The world we live in on a day-to-day basis is directly affected by maintenance,” said vice president of Atlas Home Services, Roberto Martinez. Atlas Home Services implemented the paper in its entirety to drive its 2026 strategic initiatives.
“Churn rate [the rate at which residents elect not to renew their leases] is extremely correlated to maintenance, and Property Meld has the dedication to attack all the pieces of this at once,” Hespen said.
Martinez noted his company’s 2026 campaign is to “implement the white paper in its entirety so we are actively reducing resident churn rate.”
Hespen said Property Meld’s emphasis on data and analytics played a key role in really understanding the interconnected nature of maintenance and driving net operating income (NOI). Traditionally, when a resident notifies a property management company about a maintenance issue, that notification creates a “ticket” that travels through the system, ultimately being assigned a priority, a technician to enact the repair, a “completed” label, an invoice, and, lastly, a “paid” marker.
“That process requires property managers to understand a lot of things about a resident and about the maintenance request,” Hespen continued. “Operators need help making statistically correct decisions about which vendors to use, how to communicate with the resident about the repair, and where the maintenance service is currently in the system.”
He noted when Property Meld got started, most experts encouraged the co-founders to “build toward how people operate today [using the ticket system].”
However, Hespen and Kingman believed a new, comprehensive system would be essential to their company’s success, reasoning that if their system optimized residents’ experiences with maintenance, it would follow that it would optimize their client’s revenues as well. They were right, and on a grander scale than they originally anticipated.
“Our bread-and-butter is long-term rentals in both the single-family and multi-family sectors, but we also provide services to student-housing operators and homeowners associations (HOAs),” Hespen said. “Our goal is to find ways to make decisions to alter renewal rates statistically by around four points and cut 20% of maintenance waste and spend. Just doing this for any client returns nearly $1,800 per unit per year to the investor while reducing management fees substantially. When a property manager does this, they have handled owner headaches while optimizing returns, and that property manager is going to be in demand for that service.”
Resident Retention Relies on Communication More Than Speed
When it comes to the future of property management, Hespen firmly believes communication will play as critical a role as more traditionally valued and measured elements like speed-to-repair. As Property Meld continued to study its burgeoning data on all elements of property management and maintenance, Hespen said a trend clearly and quickly emerged: Residents do value speed when it comes to maintenance, but they value transparency and consistency even more.
Hespen compared the list of repairs and maintenance services that are needed in a property to an email inbox, observing, “It would be foolish for any operator to treat every single email as having the same level of importance and just go top-to-bottom.” He said some repairs, such as HVAC issues, have a very short window of resident tolerance, while others have windows of nearly a week before residents consider the experience a negative one. For example, when it comes to HVAC issues, almost no one will rate an experience positively if the repair takes more than three days to complete. On the other hand, electrical issues have a five-day window with appropriate communication.
Hespen continued, “It is a misuse of resources to invest in making sure everything is done in 24 hours or less [a common key performance indicator (KPI) for many property management companies] because you cannot provide good services in some of these areas if you are focused primarily on speed,” Hespen said. “Speed-to-repair is important, but it is an oversimplification to track only that element, and that indicator does not necessarily move the needle as much as other things.”
“The white paper essentially connected the dots on this issue for us,” Martinez said. For Atlas Home Services, move-in work orders play an outsized role in resident satisfaction, which led Martinez’s team to prioritize these work orders as emergencies that must be completed in 24 hours.
“It is challenging, but we have been able to reduce our churn rate by having a really urgent approach to dealing with residents who have recently moved in,” Martinez said.
Residents who have been with the company longer and trust the reliability and consistency of the maintenance system can be prioritized differently because they have experience with the reliability and transparency Atlas offers.
“Our churn rate is also tied directly to communication, so our property managers are responsible for multiple touch points in the resident experience,” Martinez said. “We live in a world of immediate gratification, and we want answers when we want them. We meet that expectation with a heartfelt, transparent approach.” Providing “instant gratification” when it comes to the progress of a service request often meets the needs of the resident when an instantaneous “fix” is not possible.
“We approached this white paper and our churn rate campaign as an opportunity to be very transparent with our maintenance community and property management,” Martinez said. “We want to uplift the community, make lives better, and have other property management companies take note as well so that property management is better for everyone living in rental homes.”
Setting the Standard for the Industry
Hespen also believes good property management has far-reaching effects in communities. “One of the greatest things we have done with Property Meld is force the industry to look at maintenance more aggressively and basically level up the property management product,” he said. “We want to elevate the property manager to driving NOI, and they need the right technology in order to make the correct statistical decisions at every point, on every repair.”
Hespen noted the turnover rate among property management employees typically hovers around 34% (for context, Hubstaff.com considers 10% “healthy” and “anything above 15%-20%” to be high).
“This industry has some of the hardest-working people, and it is interesting that historically real estate has been a laggard adopter of technology,” Hespen said. “We need technologies to really professionalize the property manager’s role and enable them to have incredible experiences in their roles so that they can help residents have incredible experiences renting, leasing, and staying in place. To make that happen, we have to keep property management professionals in position long enough to learn how to do that, and it is hard to do when a job feels inherently negative. Property Meld is about helping property managers make the best decisions, be part of positive conversations, and take control of optimizing and improving returns.”
Hespen concluded, “The pressure on property managers has never been higher than it is today. We are in the longest downturn of rent compression we have ever had. Property managers who are operating to drive net operating income (NOI) change will see the fastest growth in their businesses, and we predict it will be very, very rapid movement.”
SIDEBAR 1
By the Numbers
942 // Property Meld serves more than 942 customers in the United States and Canada
3 million // Each year, Property Meld’s platform processes 3 million service issues
34% // Technicians on the Property Meld platform see a 34% increase in jobs completed per day
75% // Property Meld systems reduce property managers’ time spent on the phone by 75%
20% // Examination of data from first-year residents indicates residents with “optimal maintenance experiences” have churn rates as low as 20%
68% // Residents who experience service delivery gaps in maintenance are 68% more likely to not renew their leases
18.4% // Customers using Property Meld see an 18.4% decrease in average invoice costs
SIDEBAR 2
Optimization Means Prioritizing Data Analysis & Application
Property Meld’s white paper, “The Maintenance-Renewal Connection,” analyzes more than 366,000 data points derived from first-year residents and associated “Melds” (what Property Meld calls maintenance requests and associated services and always writes with a capital “M”) to draw conclusions about the relationship between maintenance experience quality and lease renewals. Ultimately, the research team determined, “Measurable service delivery differences between residents who churn [fail to renew their lease] and those who renew driving 8-12 percentage point retention gaps across major repair categories.”
“The biggest thing we want people to know is you can actually statistically alter renewal rates by operating maintenance in certain ways,” said Property Meld co-founder and CEO Ray Hespen. “It is a math game now, so every CFO should care how their maintenance operations are running.”
Roberto Martinez, vice president of Atlas Home Services, agreed. Atlas Home Services implemented the paper in its entirety to drive its 2026 strategic initiatives. “This white paper will lead to operational savings and produce real results at the end of the line,” he said. “You will have happier residents immediately, better resident KPIs, better maintenance operational KPIs, and better resident satisfaction, and then, when leases come up for renewal, that is when the real savings will come in.”
“Each resident departure triggers a cascade of direct and indirect costs that extend far beyond simple vacancy calculations,” Martinez explained. “Our analysis revealed that a single lease churn costs property operators an average of $4,200-$6,800 per unit, with maintenance-related departures showing costs at the higher end of this range.”
Martinez also noted streamlining and optimizing operations will likely be one of the most distinguishing factors among property managers in the years ahead, particularly when economic conditions are poor. “Labor and supplies are not going to get cheaper,” he explained, adding, “If we do not want to pay more for maintenance, we need residents to stay in homes and we need to improve our maintenance operations. Property Meld was spot on by identifying what operational savings have to do with churn rate.”
The white paper revealed residents evaluate maintenance services as inferior based on three main factors:
» Slow response times
» Higher communication burdens
» Lower satisfaction with outcomes
Residents who routinely experience these issues are more likely to churn compared to residents who renew their leases, and these issues compound over time. “The analysis demonstrates maintenance experience quality acts as both a leading indicator and a driving force of retention outcomes, with service disparities evident across every major repair category without exception,” the team wrote.
Hespen warned, “Current market dynamics will amplify these findings as properties with superior maintenance experiences command renewal premiums while those with service deficiencies face rent compression during resident replacement.” He concluded, “The maintenance experience has evolved from an operational necessity to a strategic, competitive advantage with quantifiable revenue impact.”
Access the entire white paper at Property Meld.com.
