REAL TALK RENTALS

Ben Bailey: [00:00:03] Welcome to Real Talk Rentals, a brand new podcast from on cue, Property Management. The goal of this podcast is to share with you all the tips, tricks, secrets and everything that goes into owning a successful rental property. I'm Ben and I'm with my co host, Eric Dixon, the go to expert on all things rental and real estate. So Eric, do you think you could give us a quick rundown of on QS history and your personal history with the market?

Eric Dixon: [00:00:33] Absolutely. Thanks, Ben. It's a pleasure to be here. We're excited about this new podcast. Our history goes back over a decade now and we're you know, Ben, you've been a part of the last half decade or so. So I'll jump all the way back to it was 2010. So that's back when Taylor, the founder and CEO, currently him and his wife actually kind of just jumping right into it. They've been doing property management for five plus years back in Show Low, Arizona, small town. And they wanted to come down here to the valley where her family was from and so forth. And so they they made the leap and started this this property management company. Before I was involved. Before you were involved. And they went back to to the basics. You know, they lived in their in-laws attic. Taylor is over six feet tall and they lived like a five foot tall, you know, attic space here. And, you know, they three or four kids at the time and started I think it was it was March 2010. And the reason I remember that it was the same month that my wife and I got married and I married his first cousin. So Taylor and I didn't know each other at the time. But, you know, my my current business partner is my wife's cousin, so it kind of just worked out. So, yeah, he started with zero doors, zero contracts, zero clients, and knowing property management, he just said, Hey, do you know what? I want to revolutionize the property management space and how owners and residents and applicants and so forth are impacted in the industry. So jump. Let's see.

Eric Dixon: [00:02:13] That was in March 2010, 2010. It was December 2010 is when I met Taylor. So we met at a family reunion. My wife and I, we were there. He was there with his wife and we were doing something and he said, Hey, man, I just I do property management at the time, jumping back to me now, you know, I was selling real estate since 2008. I was kind of just a buyer's agent, did short sales, tons of foreclosures, selling houses for 50, 60, 70,000 a house. You know, the you know, it's 2008, nine, ten, 11 is crazy. So I loved it. You know, I was I was selling homes. I'd just gotten married. No kids yet, just trying to make grinding and making money and doing my thing. Well, a few months after that, I get a call from Taylor. He's like, Hey, man, I want to take you to lunch. I have this opportunity. And I'm sitting there going like, Dude, I finally, like, made it in real estate. The last thing I want to do is, is do property management. Back then, when I'd sell houses, you know, I would just refer them to a local guy to refer these houses to a property manager. And I was just like, Man, get me out of here. Like, I sold the house. It closed here. The keys. I did not look back and I specifically remember dropping keys off a couple of times and the property manager had a trailer load with a washer and dryer trash. You know, he's all grungy and he's just like, Oh, man, another four plex, dude, I guess. Thank you. I guess. You know.

Ben Bailey: [00:03:45] Not the life you wanted to.

Eric Dixon: [00:03:46] Live. Yeah, man. I mean, property managers are the redheaded stepchild is what? What it was kind of like in the industry. And so I wanted nothing to do with property management, you know, I wanted to talk to Taylor about, hey, maybe I can sell your clients houses, maybe you do the management, that sort of thing. So he actually took me to lunch. We're in Gilbert right now, and he took me to lunch at this Panda Express about a half a mile from here.

Ben Bailey: [00:04:12] I go there all the time. Had lunch. Yeah.

Eric Dixon: [00:04:13] So, you know, real fancy. Taylor's killing it, you know, Property manager. It's got big, big budget and takes me to Panda Express. And I remember he's like, Hey, dude, here's the thing. I need somebody to sign my owners, I'm building this business, this brand, blah, blah, blah. You can still sell real estate, but you could do kind of some side hustle money and sign owners for me. And I knew nothing about property management, but all I saw was you could make whatever, a couple of hundred bucks a door commission. I can still sell houses, I can still list houses, I can still do my thing. And he kind of wrote it on a napkin. And in my head I was like, okay, I'll make what I'm making now. Plus a supplemental. 500 bucks, 1000 bucks, 2000 bucks, you know, And I was just like, Dude, this is cool. I kind of almost decided that day that I wanted to do it, but I was scared to leave my brokerage because, you know, I had awesome manager, awesome broker. They had taught me tons. I owed all my success to them and I was about to jump ship to do property management, you know, And I knew that my broker, even when I quit, was like, Dude, you're an idiot.

Eric Dixon: [00:05:23] Like, why are you doing property management? So so yeah, that was he took me to lunch, you know, in March, and it was I looked in preparation for this. I was looking back at history the last week, and it was April 1st is when I switched over my license. So, you know, he started on Q in March 2010. In April 2011, exactly one year later, I came on board. And that's kind of for me, we're on cue started, you know, he had maybe 60 doors, maybe 70, something like that. And I remember when he's teaching me the pitch, he'd be like, Hey, people are going to ask you, you know, how many doors do you manage? How big is your team? And he's like, you know, always just round up. You know, we have almost 100. We have almost 200, you know, just getting the numbers. Yeah, just pat the numbers a little bit, you know, So so that's kind of how it started, you know. And I was I was so green. But what set us apart at the time that I feel like we still do good at is I just answered the phone.

Eric Dixon: [00:06:27] I followed up and I showed up, you know, and and man, looking back, it's just like all the crazy stuff I did was, you know, all the houses I'd clean at midnight and paint without AC and just crazy stuff that that we just don't need to do anymore. But just looking back in preparation for this, it's just it's crazy where we are just, you know, what we're doing right now. So yeah, that brings me to where I started, you know, So that was a decade ago and it feels like yesterday. So since then we've moved two times. We've doubled, tripled and quadrupled the size of the office. And we started at that time there was three or four of us at the office and now we've got a combined team with our maintenance company, maybe 60, 70 employees, you know. And so that in a nutshell, is kind of how it started. Now the what sets on Q apart that we're so excited to, to share with the world and share with, you know, Ben and I could talk all day about just what's happened since Ben started. How long have you been here again?

Ben Bailey: [00:07:32] Ben About four.

Eric Dixon: [00:07:33] Years. Four years. So I mean, just what we've done in four years has been crazy. I mean, we're celebrating different milestones four years ago that we're just like, Oh, man, that's that's an everyday occurrence now. Yeah, how many leads we do and so forth. So you guys will learn over time. Ben is kind of the marketing master behind the scenes, behind the curtain, producing the leads, the image, the branding, the promoting, all the wonderful things we're able to accomplish. So, you know, we're super excited to kind of share the story, but also share what, you know, some what some of the what am I trying to say, kind of the accidental landlords or the self managing landlords or even some of our current clients the struggles they have and show you that you don't necessarily have to hire us for us to provide a solution for you. Like we want to be a wealth of knowledge. We'd love to earn your business, but at the same point we're here to help. There is so much business to go around, so much opportunity, you know, and we attract such awesome people and awesome clients that we want to share with you. And so kind of segue into kind of the bigger picture of what's happened in the last ten years. You know, that summary was what happened in the first 12 months, but what's happened since then has been just short of incredible.

Eric Dixon: [00:08:54] You know, the I went from signing, I don't know, eight I think I did eight, then 16 and 24 hours in a month. And Taylor and I thought it was just insane, right? It's like 20 owners a month. Then you jump a decade, you know, it's 20, 22 and you get 130 clients, 140 clients in a month. And it's it's just crazy how it's kind of compounded. And now that's the new normal, you know, And it's it's really the growth has been insane and not just with number of doors, but a number of services offered reviews, you know, wonderful employees, their families, their successes. It brings joy to us to see families succeed and and achieve their dreams as employees just as much as it does to help our clients achieve their dreams and so forth. So some big milestones. I kind of took a couple mental notes here, but, you know, we hit I think it was so in 2012, we started our maintenance company. So it's Mammoth maintenance now, it's Mammoth Services, It's kind of a sister company to where we have a little bit more control to make sure this. Work is done correctly. We went through two, almost two full years of just, you know, trouble with maintenance. So that's been ten years strong. Like I said, we moved from our first office was maybe 1000 square feet in the back of a vacant title company.

Eric Dixon: [00:10:18] And so when people would come pay rent, they'd knock on the door thinking we're like an abandoned warehouse, and they'd slip rent under the door, you know? So went from there to kind of a medium size office. And now we came to the office right now, in just a month or two ago, we committed a seven year commitment to growth, you know, to double the size of our office here. You know, we hit a thousand doors four or five years ago. 2000 doors three years ago and then 3000 doors last week. So we're just kind of just kind of growing like crazy, but with amazing support and some some really cool things we'd like to share with you. One really cool thing that I'm missing, oh, in 2020. So two months into the pandemic, we opened a Tucson office. So, you know, it's March COVID hits and two months later we're like, you know, it'd be a great idea to start a new business in Tucson, 2 hours away from our from our home base. But it's been it's been great, you know, And we have amazing, talented, wonderful employees down there holding it down. And we are growing just hand over fist over there, just crazy. And I'm just trying to think the. Just one of the milestones even. Have we? Have we had since you've been here, Ben?

Ben Bailey: [00:11:36] When I started was 1800 about doors and then yeah, we hit the 3000 and yeah, I've seen the team go from 2022 people that I knew pretty well to like. I walk in and I'm like, Holy crap, we've got 65 people here that I know. Well, you know, it's been crazy. And I think with that growth is the reason why we wanted to do this, because we see those same questions over and over again. We see the struggles that, like you said, accidental landlords have that we feel like we can offer those solutions for.

Eric Dixon: [00:12:09] Yeah, no. And you know, as we're brainstorming ideas and topics and guests and so forth for this podcast, it was incredible. I think we typed out 100 things that we're like, We want to share this. We could spend an hour and a half talking about how to price your rental, or why is it important to to clean it this way or upgrade it this way? Or, hey, what's cool is I've I've been an investor, I've been a landlord, I've been a tenant, I've been a homeowner, I've been everything personally myself, I've been a real estate broker, you know, for seven years and been licensed since 2008 to where I've got got all these cool ideas and things that I just want to share with everybody. That's what makes that's what gets me excited to talk about. So we're super stoked about that. One thing that we would love is we've kind of checked with our employees, our team members and so forth about ideas, but we'd love to know what what our clients and what our listeners want to want to hear. And we, we just have this wealth of knowledge that we just want to get out there, you know? And so absolutely, that's what I'm stoked about.

Ben Bailey: [00:13:15] All right. So we're going to be coming to you bi weekly. We actually drop in the next two episodes right now, so you'll be able to listen to those as soon as you're done listening to this. And then immediately you should subscribe like the podcast. Let us know what you want to hear more about and it'll be great, informative and a lot of fun.