Company Name
RL Property Management
Door Count
~650
Portfolio Type
Mixed Portfolio Multifamily Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2013
Company Name
RL Property Management
Door Count
~650
Portfolio Type
Mixed Portfolio Multifamily Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2013
Peter Lohmann is the co-founder, Principal Broker, and CEO of RL Property Management, which manages about 650 single- and multifamily properties in the Columbus, OH area. He and his business partner started out managing just a handful of their own single-family properties, learning the ins and outs of property management as they went.
After a few years, they expanded their portfolio by bringing on and managing other investors’ properties, and in 2013, they launched RL Property Management. By then, they had a good grasp on the basics of property management—collecting rent, handling security deposits, managing leases, among other things.
But what they really needed, as their portfolio grew larger and they scaled out their business, was software that helped them automate tasks. This was particularly true of accounting and payment workflows.
Lohmann and his partner started out with Buildium even before they launched their property management business—when they were managing the properties they had invested in and hadn’t yet brought on other owners’ units. In the 11 years since they began, Lohmann estimates that the software has saved them over $100,000 costs and countless hours tracking bill payments, handling trust accounts, and processing 1099s.
When Lohmann and his partner first started out, they were doing all of their payment processing by hand. That included rent payments, security deposits, and vendor payments. There were, of course, several big problems that came from their DIY accounting approach. Two of the biggest were bookkeeping and reconciliation.
“When we would get a bill from a vendor, we would just write a check and mail it back,” Lohmann says. “There was very little record-keeping or accounting of any kind.”
He recalls trying to figure out which bills had been paid and which hadn’t. “You’re digging through bank statements and stuff. So it was very rudimentary when we started.”
A third major challenge was trust accounting—reconciling the books for all of their owners.
“It takes it to a whole other level of regulatory compliance and liability,” he explains. “It’s one thing if you’re behind on your accounting for your own small business. But when you’re behind on your accounting in third-party management, that’s not your money. You have to do triple tie-out trust accounting every month. It’s got to be accurate to the penny. You’ve got to report it.”
Soon after bringing on Buildium, Lohmann discovered its accounting and payment flow tools.
Through Buildium, Lohmann’s team can scan bills and set up automatic payments. They can also send a check with a copy of the original invoice to vendors through Buildium’s check-printing partner.
“You can either do remote check printing, you can pay them by ACH. It’s all great,” he says.
Both his team and his owners—through the owner portal—can track payment histories, as well.
“To me that’s just so easy and straightforward,” says Lohmann. “It makes everything trackable and you can see exactly when the bill was entered and when it was paid.”
Lohmann is also a fan of Buildium’s 1099 feature. His team can enter W-9 information for all of their vendors into Buildium and Buildium does the rest.
Buildium calculates 1099 tax totals based on the accounting data for your vendors entered throughout the tax year. If you haven’t been recording in Buildium all year, you can edit those amounts. Then, it will eFile and send them out to vendors.
“It knows who we’ve paid more than $600 to. So when 1099 season comes, it’s very straightforward. It literally takes me 10 minutes to issue all of our 1099s,” he says.
Lohmann estimates that running all of RL Property Management’s payments and taxes through Buildium has saved him at least $100,000 since they started.
“I’m quite sure that I’ve saved over $100,000 in labor cost from using that versus manually stuffing envelopes and writing checks and things like that. And that’s not even accounting for the extra transparency that our owners get and the strong records that are available because everything is within that one system.”
Overall, Buildium has been a valuable asset for Lohmann and his team. As they have grown from just a few self-managed doors, to a mixed portfolio of hundreds, the software has grown with them.
“There’s almost no area of the software that we don’t use,” says Lohmann.
To learn more about Buildium’s accounting and payments, click here. Or you can schedule a demo or sign up for a 14-day free trial.
