We recently connected with Nathan Miller and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Nathan, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
From a young age—probably as young as 12—I knew that I was interested in technology. Back then, this was before the internet was widely used and the World Wide Web (www) did not yet exist. I knew the moment a friend let me use his computer for the first time that my future involved technology. As soon as I could afford it, working odds and ends jobs as a teenager, I purchased my first computer and my real technology adventure began. In my youth, it was all about the games and entertainment, but as I grew up, I learned that the true value of technology is to save people valuable time.
As I progressed through my first couple of jobs, barely scraping by as a young adult, I was finally fortunate enough to buy an old, beat-up condominium to call my own. This modest purchase not only reduced my living costs (as my mortgage payment was less than typical rent at the time) but also sparked my interest in real estate. Several years later, I was able to purchase a couple of foreclosed properties and continue to expand my real estate portfolio.
I quickly learned that being a landlord took up a lot of time between my full-time job and a growing family. I didn’t have the time to perform at a full-time job and also be a full-time landlord. This is where my love for technology and new interest in real estate investing merged and planted the seed for Rentec Direct, my property management software company. As a landlord by choice and a software developer by trade, I knew there were many components of property management that could be automated, so I pushed forward and automated everything I could with the first version of the Rentec Direct software platform. At this time, I didn’t envision Rentec would turn into a company or ever make any money, so my objectives were laser-focused on saving myself and other landlords like me time when managing their rental properties.
Rentec Direct grew quickly because the need was great, and to my surprise, it has turned into a thriving, award-winning organization that I’m extremely proud of. Through this journey, I have never forgotten my original purpose of saving landlords time. We embrace that philosophy, and our vision at Rentec Direct remains focused on saving our clients time and money so they can continue to expand their businesses while our software automates and simplifies everything that we can.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I officially founded Rentec Direct in 2007 and have spent the last two decades building the business into what it is today, where I proudly serve as President. Rentec Direct is a property management software company that provides time-saving solutions for real estate professionals. In the simplest of terms, we help our clients save time and money! Our clients are landlords and property managers across the country managing anywhere from one to thousands of rental properties, which requires a huge time investment. I created Rentec Direct to first save myself time, but then to help other property managers be more efficient and free up time to grow their rental businesses.
An excellent example of this is a new feature we just rolled out this month which we affectionately refer to as the Mailing Wizard. Property managers have a lot of legal obligations, and one of those is to send out first-class (sometimes certified) letters to tenants and owners. Writing a letter, inserting names, dates, amounts, stuffing, stamping, and mailing takes a lot of time. We have now fully automated this process for our clients with the new Mailing Wizard. Our clients can set up one template, enter data fields for those names and amounts, and with just a couple of clicks, automatically send letters to everybody who needs them for a month. The process takes less than a minute and costs about the same as a stamp.
Features like this are our bread and butter, where we can make a one-time development effort that saves our clients time over and over again. I like to think about how our development efforts are multiplied. If someone on our software development team spends six weeks developing a feature that saves every one of our 18,000 clients 30 minutes a month, we’ve saved an aggregate of 9,000 hours per month (or 108,000 hours per year) of time for our clients, all from our investment of 240 hours. That’s what I call a real win! I’m always on the lookout for opportunities like this.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Honesty and Integrity. I know it sounds simple, but I like to mention it because it’s so rare to find it in today’s business environment. I treat my employees, customers, and vendors with the same respect and honesty that I want to be treated with. I push my organization to take it one step further and go out of our way to ensure we do the right thing for our customers, whether we are recognized for it or not. I believe this is a core reason that our employees have an average tenure approaching eight years, and we’ve maintained the same high-quality vendors for years. It’s also why our customer turnover rate is extremely low. When a customer knows that their software provider runs with such high integrity, they don’t consider turning anywhere else for service because they know they won’t find that level of integrity elsewhere.
2. Jack of all trades. I was fortunate to have a basic understanding of accounting, business practices, and programming when I started Rentec Direct. Where most entrepreneurs need to have a partner or employee from the start to fill in the gaps, I was lucky enough to have learned through experience in my past career, along with self-taught personal development, how to start an organization, run that organization, and create the software for that organization with no outside help or funding. It wasn’t until I needed somebody to help me answer the phones in real time that I hired my first employee. This allowed me to get the business started and keep my company entirely self-funded.
Today, having these diverse skill sets continues to help me. While we have almost 20 employees now, I no longer do everything by myself, however, since I have experience in development, I can sit in on a development meeting and understand what they are discussing and realize when projections are realistic or not. I understand accounting and taxes well enough to have a complete grasp of our financial picture and tax liabilities. These skills keep me well informed on our business and also help keep costs down, which we are in turn able to invest back into our employees or the business.
3. The ability to find (or negotiate) a win-win solution. I’ve always sought out win-win relationships because it felt right. It has never made sense to me to enter into a business relationship (or any relationship for that matter) if both parties aren’t better for it. In my opinion, we’ve had excellent luck in that department over the years, but I didn’t know why until just two weeks ago when I completed the MIT Sloan School of Management Negotiation Course. Professor Jared Curhan is a master in the art of win-win, and in his class, I was honored to receive the award for Best Subjective Value. I scored a perfect 7 out of 7. Side note: My wife and I are pretty competitive, and she also took the class. She got a 6.8.
What does subjective value mean? Well, there are two outcomes in any negotiation—the objective value (or material outcome) and the subjective value. I’ve learned that subjective value, or how the parties feel about the negotiation, is often far more important than the material outcome of the negotiation. I want long-term relationships with my employees, vendors, and customers, so I lean far more on the subjective outcome of any negotiation than the material value.
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
Our ideal clients are the landlords and property managers who have been in the business for a couple of years. They’ve learned the basics and are looking to become more efficient. There are several reasons I feel this way:
1. This small to mid-size market is largely ignored. Our competitors want to work exclusively with customers who manage thousands of rental units. They provide poor support and little attention to any of what they call the “small guys”. We got our start by providing a product designed for startup landlords, and we’ve grown a long way since then. We easily support clients with tens of thousands of units, but we hold true to our roots and provide the same excellent service to the startup landlords and property managers who have one, ten, or a hundred units.
2. They still love what they do. We largely deal with owner-operators who manage their own rental businesses. Like our company, which operates on just 18 employees, many of these property managers have less than 10 employees who all know each other and (usually) like each other. Most importantly, they are all passionate about what they do. Our competitors focus on the whales in the industry who have tens of thousands of units, and those companies, while lucrative, often don’t enjoy their work—which makes them less fun to work with. I enjoy coming to work every day, and I want to work with clients who feel the same way, so we focus on that market. Yes, we’ll still service a large customer, and we have many, however, it’s not who we actively market to.
3. We can have the biggest impact. It’s vital in property management to pick a software platform and stick to it. It is extremely difficult to migrate to another platform once you have thousands of properties. Where I find we can have the biggest impact is on landlords with anywhere from 10-100 properties, and property managers in the 250-1000 range. Within those ranges, it’s still practical to switch to a system like Rentec Direct, and we know our software will have a huge impact on their bottom line (either time or money—likely both). The investment in moving to Rentec Direct pays off in less than a year in most cases, and we know from hundreds of customer testimonials, that once they move to us they will probably be here forever. Our clients attribute this to the product saving them so much time, but even more so to the support they receive from us that is not possible to get anywhere else.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://rentecdirect.com
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/rentecdirect
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-miller-9087458
- Twitter: https://x.com/rentec
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/rentecdirect
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