Company Name
21st Century Property Management
Door Count
~500
Portfolio Type
Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2013
Company Name
21st Century Property Management
Door Count
~500
Portfolio Type
Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2013
Troy Dodgion, founder of 21st Century Property Management, is a self-described “tech guy.”
“I’ve just always been very comfortable with tech and love getting into it,” he says. “Especially now in the [property management] business, seeing how it can help us improve all of our processes.”
Dodgion and his partner come from institutional management backgrounds, working for some of the biggest multifamily management companies in the country. He had worked extensively with tech stacks that handled multifamily management.
When he and his partner launched 21st Century in 2023, however, they decided to focus on single-family rentals, a more challenging market to manage with tech, noting that units at sites in various locations present different management challenges than multifamily properties, where units are clustered together.
“Until recently, I don’t think the technology has been there for property managers to be able to deliver those kinds of institutional operational processes in the single-family market. It’s something that’s really come about in the last five years,” he says.
Now that property management technology is there, Dodgion and his team are integrating it into the process to help their business grow and scale. Buildium and All Property Management, in particular, have helped Dodgion replicate the automation and scaling capabilities he was used to in multifamily.
With the help of those platforms, plus mergers and acquisitions, the company brought on 150 doors in 7 months. And his team is confident they can meet their ambitious five-year plan of 5,000 doors.
In this case study, we’ll walk through the Buidium’s Open API; Marketplace; and portals, as well as All Property Management’s networking capabilities that help landlords find property managers.
“The next benchmarks are 1,000 to 2,500, and then 5,000,” says Dodgion. “That’s the five-year plan. The long-term goal is 20,000 doors. We want to be a major player and take this at least regionally—and nationally.”
And that is the challenge: How do you scale your property management business and offer efficient and professional services to owners if you don’t have the right tech stack to support exponential growth?
“Right now, that is the mission, to grow the company and the challenge with doing it is going to be to maintain this 4.6- to 5-star rating on our ratings platforms, while we do that,” Dodgion says.
To set themselves on the right path toward their growth goals, Dodgion has built out a tech stack that includes Buildium and All Property Management.
Dodgion and his team brought on Buildium not only to automate time-consuming tasks, but to build better relationships with owners and find other streams of revenue.
Below, Dodgion explains how key features work for his company.
Buildium’s Open API: “We’ve leveraged Buildium’s API on some of the self-showings and some of the owner benefits that we’re offering now.”
Buildium’s Owner Portal: “You’ve got the mailbox money people that don’t ever want to talk to you and then you’ve got the data people. They want all the data and they want it right now. The really cool thing about Buildium is the owner portal. It really helps us with our investment-minded owners that own multiple properties and generally have a CPA working with them. You can give the CPA access to that owner portal, so they’ve got all of the financial data. It really takes a lot off of our plate. They can log in and get real time data any time.”
Buildium Marketplace: “Our goal is to be paperless and keyless, and that keyless portion is very elusive in single-family because of the cost. What I’ve seen with some of the Marketplace providers at this conference is that I think there are viable solutions there to get us to that keyless solution.”
“Where the Marketplace has been really beneficial is we’re seeing more Marketplace partners offering a revenue share or another ancillary revenue solution. We’re always looking for those.”
As far as just growing the business, we’re using All Property Management, which is very helpful,” says Dodgion. “We love that platform.”
All Property Management matches property managers with owners who are looking for their services. More recently, Dodgion counted on mergers and acquisitions to grow their door count.
“None of us are naive enough to think that M&A is a long term growth strategy,” Dodgion notes. “We have to build a pipeline if we’re going to get as big as we want to get.”
He and his team are using All Property Management, along with their agent referrals, to build a lead pipeline that runs alongside their M&A strategy.
When Dodgion and his partner started 21st Century Management, they didn’t really know what kind of growth to expect. Their conservative estimate was 10 new doors a month. With APM, however, they found they could meet and even exceed that goal.
Buildium and All Property Management have been instrumental in helping 21st Century Property Management move toward its goals to automate, scale, and expand their revenue opportunities.
“We’re able to do at least 10 and more with the All Property Management integration so far,” he says. “That combined with our agent referrals should put us far beyond that ten a month as we really gear up that pipeline.”
With All Property Management, Dodgion says, they get as many leads as they can handle. And with Buildium, they can provide top-notch customer service for their single-family owners.
“If you had talked to me 10 years ago and said you can start a company and in six or seven months have 150 doors with two people, I would not have believed that,” he says. “The fact that we can do it now is just a testament to how much the technology has evolved and the support that it gives you to quickly scale a business like this.”
To learn more about Buildium and All Property Management, check out the links below:
