A Podcast | Lior Abramovich

Pete Neubig: Welcome back, everybody, to the NARPM Radio podcast. And as promised, I have Lior, let me see if I got, Abramovich. Did I say that right?

Lior Abramovich: You got it. You got it, man.

Pete Neubig: I've known you for two years, and I don't think I've ever tried to say your last name. So we appreciate it. Lior obviously is the co-founder CEO of Blanket. Lior, thanks so much for being here brother.

Lior Abramovich: And likewise man, super happy to be here man.

Pete Neubig: So Blanket is, over the last couple of years you guys have made an incredible splash, in the industry, but particularly at NARPM as well. One of the vendors that, you know, you guys, Second Nature and PetShare, probably the guys that people know, like most people know you have just a huge footprint. Tell the people listening, what exactly is Blanket and how does it help property managers.

Lior Abramovich: Sure. So I guess everybody that's listening is experiencing to some extent, the problem of churn, of owner churn. Losing doors, whether it's because they're selling, whether it's because they have a bad experience or whether it's to any other reason. And we are really trying to solve that problem. Try to help you stop losing doors, but also help you on the other end of it, help you grow your portfolio, help you generate more revenue. Because what we see in our industry is that, you know, the sort of like the metaphor that I always use is the leaky bucket, right? You have two ways to stop a leaky bucket. You can either close the leak or you can just, you know, keep pouring more water all the time. So what we're trying to do with Blanket is do both. We're trying to stop the leak for you, but also to help you keep pouring more water so you can grow your portfolio to the wildest dreams that you have we do it by providing two packages that we call retain and grow. Not that creative, but very simple and straightforward. Forward. One package gives you all the tools that you need, and your owners need to really make sure that you are creating happy clients, clients that appreciate you more and really see you as their trusted partner when it comes to their investments. And this is what we always try to, you know, mention we're not talking about properties, we're talking about investments at the end of the day and on the grow package, we're really trying to help you grow, to be able to add more doors, to generate more money from real estate commissions and from other aspects that can, bring you more revenue in your business.

Pete Neubig: It sounds a little bit it sounds like a panacea. It sounds awesome. But how do we do it? So, how does that happen?

Lior Abramovich: Okay, so let's break it down. So each one of the packages has owner facing tools and team facing tools. So tools that your team will be using. So let's break it down. Let's break down the retained package. So the retained package has an investor dashboard, a white labeled investor dashboard that's owner facing. So this is where your owners can see in real time the performance of all their properties, whether it's how much cash flow they're generating, what's the value of their properties, how much equity they have in their homes, and everything they need in one place. Because one of the problems that we have today with the owner statements and the owner portal, is that it's just showing half of the picture, right? They don't see their mortgage payments there, their property taxes there, their HOA payments and things like that. So the investor dashboard gives them the exact number, the exact amount of money that they're generating. So they can really see the full picture. Right. So so every conversation.

Pete Neubig: I love I love this, by the way, because I've been looking for this for years when I, when I owned Empire. To get how much they owe and the mortgage, does the owner actually have to put in information into the portal? They have to kind of do some homework here. Or do you guys are you guys grabbing that from some database somewhere?

Lior Abramovich: Yes. There is no manual data entry. This is one.

Pete Neubig: No manual data entry. Okay.

Lior Abramovich: Nor from your end as the property manager, nor from the owner. So what we do? Yeah. We pull data from public county records, from national data providers, from your property management software, if you have anything in there as well, because we have some clients that pay for certain clients, their property taxes. So like if the transaction is there, we'll just pull it. But everything is populated there. And the only thing that they will need to manually enter is their insurance, their landlord insurance premium, because that's the only thing that is not available anywhere. It's a data point that you can't get anywhere.

Pete Neubig: Unless the property management firm is paying it for me, right?

Lior Abramovich: Correct.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Because I think on one of my... Because I own a bunch of properties and one of them, a shout out to my buddy Tracy strike over at Renters Place, they actually have a, what do you call that, like a Blanket, huh? Like a Blanket insurance.

Lior Abramovich: No pun intended.

Pete Neubig: No pun intended. And they they pay my insurance. So yes, in that case, that would be there as well.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly. So if anything that you have already in your property management software will be pulled. We will just make sure that, you know, we clean the GL account. So things that are not relevant for the owners wouldn't be shown. This is something we do in the implementation, but technically everything is done for them. They don't update it in real time by the way. So property value is updated in real time, their mortgage payments and all of that. So no matter when they log in, they don't have to look at it. This is the basis.

Pete Neubig: This is so brilliant. Because how many times do you, if you listen out here that you have a plumbing issue at somebody's house and it's $3,000 and they're like, oh man, my cash flow is gone for the next two months or whatever. And they're all bent out of shape, and now they're talking about selling the property.

Lior Abramovich: Yes.

Pete Neubig: You redirect them to Blanket which is white label. So I'm not even redirecting a Blanket. I'm redirecting to Empire Property Management Investor tool. They go on there and you can literally talk to them, because there's not just one pillar of real estate cash flow. There's multiple pillars. And so you're saying that you have an easy, easy access, easy way, no data that needs to be added where they can actually see the performance of their home over time. And if the if the property is not performing, then maybe we sell that, we 1031 it, and now you're now you're graduating from property manager to asset manager.

Lior Abramovich: Amen to that. Exactly as you said it. And I'd like to stress one point here is that a lot of times we see these different conflicts with owners or like situations that we might look as negative or as bad or challenging. But at the end of the day, this is what we always try to tell all of our clients is that you can turn every situation into a positive one. Because, as you said, for example, let's say we're dealing with an owner that has a bad performing property that's not doing well and is super frustrated. And maybe there's literally nothing we can do right to to sort of like fix the situation, not renovating the property, not anything. So instead of trying to fix some symptom, let's fix the problem. Because now we see the full picture together with the owner and we can tell him, you know what, Pete? Like. Yes. This property is not doing well. We've done everything. This is a very old property. My recommendation will be, let's maybe 1031 exchange this property and then both of us win. Why you, as the owner, you'll get a property with better cash flow, better appreciation potential. No more headaches, that's probably this property is causing you. And I will get also a property that will generate more revenue per unit for me. But also I'll get the commission, maybe from both sides, even on that 1031 exchange. So like every situation can be transformed into a positive one.

Pete Neubig: And and you become a trusted source.

Lior Abramovich: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Neubig: I love this. So I'm going to tell a story. So years ago, I mean, I wish I had Blanket when I, when I had Empire, I had an owner that he owned a townhome here in Houston in a pretty, pretty affluent area.   and he was an investor. He was a you know, one of those people that had moved out. So he was kind of like a, what do you call those? You know, like, uh.

Lior Abramovich: Accidental landlord.

Pete Neubig: Accidental landlord. Thank you. Man. English language so difficult for me these days. So he's an accidental landlord, right? And he's not making cash flow. He's losing a couple hundred bucks because the rent just didn't cover. Because he didn't buy it for an investment. Right. And so he's all bent out of shape. And so he comes into the office. This is before 2020 obviously when people had offices. And I sit down with him and I said, do you know that in the three years that you've had this property, it's increased in value by about $300,000 and you've paid about $1,000 a month over three years, so it cost you 36 to make 300. Is that a good deal? And he's like, oh my God. And just the way he thought about it. But now I had to go do all that work. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I had to go do the CMAs and I had to go check out. I had to ask what his mortgage was like. I had to do all this work. And then I'm like, you know, you pay the mortgage down, you made this. This is all the equity you got. And so that was a and that you couldn't do that all the time. Like, it was just that was just. But I had a client who's ready to leave me. And then he ended up becoming a very happy client, all because of we were able to kind of switch his perspective.

Lior Abramovich: I love it. It's really all about, you know, showing the full picture because a lot of times in these situations, you get caught up in trying to sort of like solve the thing that the owner comes to you with. And a lot of cases, it's like, you know, it's like a therapy session, right? Like,   a person complains about something, but when you peel off the layers, you can find additional things that can really solve for the problem. And this is exactly it. And, you know, I can tell you the amount of spreadsheets and performance that I created in my life is really, I think, literally in the thousands and Blanket, with this even just specific tool because we'll cover a lot more, was literally a dream come true for me, because the amount of time and effort that goes into just keeping these things updated is insane. It's just insane.

Pete Neubig: All right, so you said that there was kind of two tools. That was the customer facing the investor tool. You said there's one for the team as well.

Lior Abramovich: Correct. So, one last thing that is also powering that owner facing tool, the investor dashboard, is actually we're also doing the owner communications for you technically when it relates to the product. So, what we're doing is, as the system is white labeled, the emails that are sent out from the system are also white labeled. It has your logo, your profile, your picture. And what it does, it sends the owner periodical emails, like for example, a monthly report that shows them how much your property appreciated in value this month, or other stuff that teach them exactly how to utilize the platform when. The purpose here is to really add more positive touch points that go beyond the, you know, here's an email and I need another contribution to fix this. I need your money and the owner statement that you get confused because you don't know how to read it. Like because you know, that's what forms the relationship. Like that's what characterizes the relationship today between a lot of owners and property managers. It's these two touch points owner statement. And I need your money. So what are we doing with this is.

Pete Neubig: I think you're going to go over this, but I'll ask it now anyway. So that lets me know about my property. As an investor, can I find other properties through Blanket as well? Can I kind of slice and dice and say, man, I'm really looking for a property in Houston for this amount at whatever, and and can it give me kind of like a proforma on that property?

Lior Abramovich: Yes. So this is already the second tool that we have that is owner facing in the grow package, which is the white labeled marketplace. So the marketplace is technically an off market marketplace. So what we do we source inventory on a national level. We work with all the wholesalers, turnkey providers, home builders, you name it. Anything that we can source and bring you off market inventory that is in your market. So because we're integrating with your property management software, we know which zip codes you're operating in. And then our system filters all the inventory that we have on the national level. And it shows in that marketplace to your clients. Only the properties in your area. And all those properties of course, have an underwriting on them so they can see exactly the cash flow estimate. They can see the projection for the next several years and how each property will perform. And the very exciting thing about it is we we also have an AI matching algorithm that creates sort of like a profile for every owner. It checks which properties this owner currently has, right? It checks also his buy box submission. There's sort of like a little form when they first sign up to the marketplace that asks them questions like, you know, how much would you like to invest if you want to, you know, buy more properties? Which properties you're looking for, you know. And what's the timeline based on that, and based on your properties, it creates a profile. And then every week, this owner will get the property that best matches their profile. So they can go into the marketplace, see that property, and maybe make an offer. So that way it could turn back to you as a lead. And you can take care of that acquisition for them, capture the commission, but also get another unit in your area. So all in all, it provides them that ability to also buy but also to sell their properties. And this is the exciting thing. You know, we have a lot of owners that sometimes want to test the waters, right? Or they don't want to wait necessarily for when the property is vacant. So now they can do it. Now even if the property is occupied, they can put the property for sale on your marketplace because it's your marketplace, and then you can push it. The system does it automatically for you. It can push it to all your other clients. So that way maybe you'll be able to help this client sell his property at his own timeline, but also retain that unit because the owner, the other client that will be buying it is is your client. So you retain the unit and you get the commission.

Pete Neubig: Wow. So the first solution is reducing of churn because I'm giving you I'm showing you other ways on how your house is producing. So you decide not to sell and you keep the house. It also makes you it makes you stickier as a property manager and makes you an asset manager versus a property manager, which we'll talk about because I hate the word term property manager. Um, then now end this the second one is the growth. So I can actually grow my portfolio as a property manager because now my current clients can utilize these resources at their fingertips and find other properties. And then we can make the offer. We can, be their realtor and their brokerage for them and buying that property. So it allows us to increase our average dollar, revenue per per client. Because now I'm getting them to buy to I'm getting the commission, and I'm getting to buy a property.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly, exactly. So these are the owner facing tools, the investor dashboard and the investor marketplace. Now the team facing tools on the retained package. We have two products that you can use. One is our portfolio manager and the other one is our retention manager. So the portfolio manager technically takes all the data that we have for all of your owner's properties their equity, their value, their cash flow, their net operating income, maintenance to income ratio, how much you're spending on maintenance versus the actual amount of money that they're generating. Right. And now you can see all your properties like a true asset manager. See exactly which properties are underperforming. For example, who has actually a property that is, you know, negative cash flow. You can also see which owners have a lot of equity that maybe they can tap into. You can see which owners have a lot of cash flow and also which owners, for example, have a high maintenance to income ratio that then if you have a maintenance division or if you charge markup on renovations, you can turn to these owners and say, hey, you've been spending 40% of your income on maintenance this year. Things that can be solved if we'll do a thorough renovation. Let's think about, you know, running that for you. We'll take care of everything for you. And, you know, to the owner, it's a great benefit because no more headaches, better cash flow and higher value for the property after the upgrade.

Pete Neubig: But this is proactive asset management as well. Versus like the owner calling you and saying I'm spending all this money on maintenance. You're calling up and you're like basically saying, hey, you're spending all this money on maintenance. Let's let's kind of fix that, right? We're in this together versus being like combatants.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly. And think of the like the long term vision here. Maybe it's not that long term, but with this tool, you can literally build the perfect portfolio, a portfolio that has only good cash flowing properties or just, you know, good performing properties and good owners because sometimes, you know, bad properties also correlate, maybe with an owner that is frustrated, that is struggling and gives your team a lot of headaches, right? So like with this tool, you can literally, slowly but surely, build you property portfolio.

Pete Neubig: Tell them to sell the property to one of your good owners, right? Kind of like when you have a resident that's a tough resident, then they finally move out and you put somebody else in the same house and they have no... Like the one guy had 50 work orders in a year, and the other guy has no work orders. Right? A bad owner. You're like, man, it's a good house. He's just a terrible owner. Sell it to a good owner. And then they don't have any. They don't have any issues with the house?

Lior Abramovich: Exactly. And this is what true asset managers are doing. The large institutions, the large, you know, institutional players and funds, their acquisition managers and their acquisitions department. This is what they're doing. They're looking at the portfolio, looking where they can maybe optimize, maybe increase the cash flow, which properties they should dispose of. This is literally what they're doing. And our system gives it to you. It it gives you the data. And it generates also the insights on what you should look at first. And this correlates to the last part of the retain package which is our AI retention manager. So this is a fully AI based product. This is something that we've been working on for probably two years now, training a lot of AI algorithms to come up with something that is literally, again, I know I'm biased, but like sci-fi stuff. So what it does, the AI asks you for several questions to understand what's your retention policy? It will ask you questions like, would you be willing to give a financial incentive to an owner that wants to leave, you know, like wave two months of management fees to keep them or something like that, or questions like what would you do with the disappointed owner that is bad for your business? Would you prefer to fire them in that situation, or maybe push them to sell their property, or maybe even increase their management fees until they eventually end up leaving? Like the AI understands what you're sort of like, what's your policy and what's your approach? And then what it does, it scans your entire portfolio and it tells you what's the risk score of every owner from churning, so you can know exactly who you should be paying attention to. And then it also calculates the revenue per unit or what we call the client value of every owner, because it takes in the revenue per unit of all of their properties for 12 months. And this is, you know, the annual value of a client that you have. And the combination of these two gives you also a priority high medium low. So then you can understand exactly who you should proactively reach out to. And then you must be asking yourself, okay, so let's say I see that. How do I know what to say or what's the problem? So the AI then will also when you click on the next you know button on a specific owner account, it will give you a recommendation on what you should do because it already understands what's your retention policy and what's your approach. So for example, one of the things that we've mentioned here, let's say you have an owner that has a good performing property, but he just started a renovation and he has a mortgage in place. So he's literally losing money right now, right? He's like, you know, he's taking money out of pocket and paying for the mortgage while not receiving any rent payments. So the AI can identify that and tell you, listen, Pete, you should offer this client two months of management fees that you're waving for them, which wouldn't cover for the loss, but it will show the owner how much you're committed to helping them in this situation, but also send them a link to their proforma, which is part of the features within the investor dashboard that shows them how much money they will make in the next 30 years. Because the property is good, but this is just a short term problem. So this is what the AI recommendation will tell you. And then what the AI can also do for you when you click on the next button, it will also generate an email or a phone call script for you with your tone of voice. Let's say you want to sound more professional or more friendly, and then you can take that and literally just read it as you call the owner, or just send them in an email with the relevant links to their proforma or to their investor dashboard. So this is really meant to help you get ahead of churn and not be surprised, you know, by owner who says they want to leave or they want to sell. And again, use that to also build towards your perfect portfolio.

Pete Neubig: I'm blown away man. I love it, I really do. It's an incredible tool that will take you from the past, which is rent collector, right? To and property manager to asset manager. I've told this numerous times I hate the word property manager because to me, in this industry it means gofer. Hey property manager, go for this, go for that. Go to my house. I want to talk about this $12 bill. And what I have found in my PM firm is that my property managers, who I was paying the most out of anybody in my company, was doing $10 an hour jobs. So the question I have for you is, and most property manager companies, the property manager is kind of the the one who stressed the most, who has the least amount of time. So how do we do? We have to free them up to do this. Do we hire a remote team member to do this? How do we how do we get this going so that we can become these asset managers?

Lior Abramovich: That's a really good question. And this is something that we thought a lot about when we built this because we know that, you know, our partners, our property managers, really don't have a lot of time, to say the least. So our approach was from the get go to build a product that is low touch, almost no touch. So as with the retention manager, as you saw, it literally tells you what to do. You don't need to think, well, you should, but you don't have to. Because if you trust the AI and after the AI after several weeks understands you way better because it also has this feedback loop which improves its accuracy, but it literally tells you what to do. And then technically, in terms of a time investment, the only thing you'll need to do is, I don't know, a five minute, ten minute call with an owner. That's pretty much it. And that's done. So what's a 5 to 10 minute call versus, you know, an owner lifetime value that you either win back when they want to leave or, you know, generating an additional door to manage because you're helping them buy another property. So the system is built in a way that you should be able to turn into this role with maybe a 10 to 20 minutes investment every week. If you're following, for example, the following workflow. So let's say, your team is going over the risk alerts, right? Every week they're seeing which owners are at high priority. They can save them in sort of like an in-progress status. And then in your weekly meeting with them as the company owner, you can see what the AI generated and recommended to do. And every week, focus on ten owners. You don't have to go. You know, all of them at once. So every week, go over ten owners that have a high risk and discuss them in your sort of like a team meeting. And then decide if you're wanting to send it as an email, whether you want to phone them, or any other sort of like approach. Maybe don't do nothing. So technically... It can go ahead.

Pete Neubig: I say I got another solution. So what I did and selfishly...I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and self promote here selfishly. But what I did is, I had property managers and I ended up utilizing remote team members to do other things. Lease renewals, collections onboarding, maintenance coordination, turn coordination, utility turn on turn offs. And I was stripping the property manager all their responsibilities. And then all they had to do was look at reporting and have team meetings daily and look for taps instead of, you know, waiting for two by fours and Mack trucks. Solving the challenge while it's a tap, saves you so much stress and time and then what we did is we elevated. We actually changed the name to... We were I lost a battle... We call them client relations specialists. I wanted to call them asset managers, and their job was to To proactively reach out and build relationships with our owners. Well, what's the number one way to reach out and build a relationship with the owner is to talk about their asset. Have data. We didn't have that at the time, so we were just trying to figure it all out. But if I had Blanket at that point, now when I call my my client, right? They always got, I call it agita, I'm Italian, so agita if you don't know, it's like a stomachache, right? When my sister calls me, I get agita, right? And that's what's happening, right? Every time you call is a problem. Manager. What are you calling on? You're calling on, like you said earlier. Bad news. I'm calling because you're, you know, like, I just got an email from one of my property managers today. Literally. Guess what? The city found a leak. And when's the last time I talked to my property manager? The HOA found a violation. When's the last time I talked to her before that the tenant didn't pay rent? She's not calling me and saying, hey, I got this property, or, hey, a let's do a portfolio review or hey, what's going on? And because product managers are so reactive, if you can use remote team to reduce the the workload of your property managers, now you're giving $10 an hour, people, $10 an hour jobs, you're $80,000. Person can become that asset manager that Lior is talking about that that growth. And so that's kind of my solution, but that's selfish of me.

Lior Abramovich: No, no. That was actually my second point. So, you know, we have folks that already have this very similar structure. So, you know, we have folks that, again, are offloading some of those repetitive tasks to remote team members and really putting a lot more high value and high touch activities to their property managers, which really turned them into more of an asset manager instead of a property manager. And we have folks that actually the property managers that are also licensed agents and are also doing the business development efforts. So they're bringing in the leads themselves and they're taking care of them afterwards. But maybe on a on a smaller scale of how many properties they have. So like under their ownership. So technically really depends on the structure of your company. But if you can do that, if you can hire a remote team member to take some effort from your property managers and have them focus on the high value activities, definitely do it. Or hire a remote team member, and this is something that we are going to hopefully do very soon, is to train and certify remote team members as relationship managers, as folks who who will be able to handle that for you. And you sort of like if you want to keep the routine tasks and the operational tasks within your in-house team, because there may be some operational efficiencies to that, but you'll be able to have someone that will be able to conduct these phone calls with your clients, go over the performance of their properties and sort of like, escalate any action items that are coming from those calls to your maybe to you if you want to take in those calls. Maybe you know you are the ones who are who is handling sales in your company. So if an owner wants to sell or to buy, that will be escalated to you. So there are three ways to look at it. Either you're doing it yourself and really trying to, you know, manage it in an efficient way. Either you're offloading some of the routine tasks to remote team members and making your property managers take care of this. Or on the opposite, you keep your property managers in charge of it and hiring a remote team member.

Pete Neubig: Hire a team.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly.

Pete Neubig: All right, a couple of questions. And we're getting up against it. So I got a couple questions here, though. How many properties am I managing before I bring on Blanket like, is 52 too little? Like, should I wait till I get to about a hundred? What's the sweet spot you think before you implement Blanket?

Lior Abramovich: As long as you have a property management software, you can start using Blanket. And I would say even better, start early. And we have a lot of folks that have less than 100 doors a lot. And the reason I'm saying that is because you differentiate yourself from the very get go. Right. Because one of the things you're thinking, as, you know, a startup company as, as a property management company that's just starting out is how do I compete? You know, with these companies in my market that are in the business for like 20 years. So this is one of the ways that you can actually differentiate yourself. Like if you'll be the only company in your market that's providing investors with this investor dashboard and the marketplace and the ability to buy more properties and to grow their portfolio. You immediately differentiate yourself with a very high value proposition to them beyond the actual property management. So I would say we have folks that literally didn't start their business yet. You know, started their property management software and are now already implementing Blanket to launch it together and do a lot of, you know, business development efforts with reaching out to agents and referrals by offering them, you know, this awesome tool that they will give to their clients. So I would say...

Pete Neubig: Next question. What does the onboarding look like?

Lior Abramovich: Very simple. We have a five minute onboarding meeting where we integrate with the property management software. Then we have a 20-minute implementation meeting where we go over the data. It's the day after. Normally 1 or 2 days after. We make sure that the data is clean and organized, GL accounts are all set. And then we go live after that a day after. So technically, you can go live with Blanket within 3 days. Technically if everything runs fast.

Pete Neubig: That is a wow. That is a wow experience. I love it, man. All right. Last thing is, I'll ask, even though I typically don't, but I'm really interested in this. How do you price it out? Is it a per property type deal or what's that? Is it a monthly fee plus per property? What's the pricing structure? You don't have to give me moneys. But what's the pricing structure?

Lior Abramovich: Yeah, it's a dollar per unit model as well. I know that some folks don't like it. I will say in our defense, by the way, that we're probably the only company out there software company that that's actually paying also per unit because we buy the data. Right? So all the data that we talked about in the beginning, the property value estimations, the rental value estimation.

Pete Neubig: There's a cost to you to do that.

Lior Abramovich: We are literally paying by unit as well. So to make it simple, both for us and both for our clients, we price it on a per unit model basis. And by the way, one important thing to mention here, you don't have to take two packages. Let's say you're not doing brokerage at all. You don't want to deal with sales at all. You don't want to offer your clients that marketplace. You can only use the retain package or vice versa. You can only use the grow package, so you don't have to commit to both. You can choose each one of them that really fits your current business goals.

Pete Neubig: I love it. All right, we're going to hit a commercial break. And then I'm going to put you in the lightning round. Are you ready?

Lior Abramovich: Let's go. Let's go.

Pete Neubig: We'll be right back, everybody.

Pete Neubig: All right, welcome back. We got Lior Ambro, Abro... I had it right, Lior.

Lior Abramovich: You had it. Got it the first time.

Pete Neubig: Abramovich.

Lior Abramovich: Yes.

Pete Neubig: Abramovich. All right. Man. When I see you at the next conference, I will make sure that I get your last name right. My apologies. Abramovich. All right. Are you ready?

Lior Abramovich: Yes, sir.

Pete Neubig: All right. First question. Does Blanket use virtual team members?

Lior Abramovich: Not yet. We're going to. We're literally working on it right now.

Pete Neubig: All right. What is one piece of advice you'd give someone just starting out in the PM business?

Lior Abramovich: Remember that there are no failures. There are only challenges. And every challenge is an opportunity for success.

Pete Neubig: Well said. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Lior Abramovich: I'm not a big pineapple guy. I'm a mushroom guy.

Pete Neubig: If you were up against it and you had to go to fast food, which one would you choose?

Lior Abramovich: Chick-fil-A.

Pete Neubig: Nice. Okay.

Lior Abramovich: Chick-fil-A. Yeah. I've been. I don't know if people know that, but I just moved to the States about a year ago, and I came to know this thing called the Lord's chicken. And I'm just a sucker for it. I'm like, my team is always joking that every time someone knocks on my door, they say, "Oh Chick-fil-A is coming."

Pete Neubig: What was your first job?

Lior Abramovich: Oh, such a bad story. A waiter and it was just one day and they fired me on the first day.

Pete Neubig: No way.

Lior Abramovich: Yes. Um, I came with sort of, like, elegant shoes because they said you need to come, you know, sort of like, elegant and black and, like, elegant shoes. And everybody knows, apparently, it's an unknown secret that you don't really come with elegant shoes. You just come with black sport shoes, because elegant shoes are very slippery. So I came in and I literally twice dropped this huge tray with all these dishes. So at the end of the day, the shift manager just came to me like, "Lior, here's your check for today. Please don't come here ever again."

Pete Neubig: Oh my it cost them more money to have you there.

Lior Abramovich: Yes.

Pete Neubig: Excuse me. What is your ideal vacation?

Lior Abramovich: Snowboarding.

Pete Neubig: Cool. What is something most people don't know about you?

Lior Abramovich: Mm. Um. I was very involved in sort of like, giving back to the community in my past. Before Blanket, I co-founded two non-profit organizations. One that renovated homes of senior citizens in need in Israel and Holocaust survivors. We've been fortunate, I don't know if fortunate is the right word, but we've been fortunate enough to help almost 400 senior citizens in need to renovate their homes and give them a better life. And the second nonprofit organization that I, that I founded together with a big infrastructure company was a Foundation that its goal was to provide clean drinking water solutions in very distressed areas across the world, in Latin America, Africa and things like that. And I actually helped create a partnership for this nonprofit organization with the Vatican. And on the week of when we raised our seed round for our company for Blanket, I was supposed to fly to the Vatican to meet the Pope. So because of Blanket, I missed the Pope.

Pete Neubig: Oh my goodness. That's, uh. You know, you're one of those folks. As I get to know, I'm like, man, what am I doing with my life? You're a very, very special person.

Lior Abramovich: We are just work hard, man. There's. I'm not that smart. Just. Just literally working my ass off.

Pete Neubig: You're better off. Yeah. If you could have dinner with anyone alive, who would it be?

Lior Abramovich: Winston Churchill.

Pete Neubig: It wouldn't be the Pope. I mean, you missed out already once!

Lior Abramovich: Winston Churchill...

Pete Neubig: He's dead. Somebody's alive. Brother.

Lior Abramovich: Ah. I thought if he was alive! Oh!

Pete Neubig: No.

Lior Abramovich: If if someone alive?

Pete Neubig: Someone's alive. Somebody alive today.

Lior Abramovich: Um, Elon Musk, I think.

Pete Neubig: I think that's a really good choice. He's a...he sounds, seems. I think I wouldn't even know what to ask him. He's so smart.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly. Yeah. It's like it's so, so much conflicting emotions and thoughts and perspectives and ideas. I think just talking with them will make your mind explode. You know.

Pete Neubig: Agreed.

Lior Abramovich: So. Yeah. Elon Musk.

Pete Neubig: What's a book that you could recommend? Book or podcast?

Lior Abramovich: Yes. The for the for the, uh. No. You know what? Seven habits of the Most Effective People. Uh.

Pete Neubig: Because the highly, highly successful people. Something like that.

Lior Abramovich: Exactly that one. That was the.

Pete Neubig: Book. Yeah.

Lior Abramovich: A very. Yeah, a very old one that, you know, that's a book that I literally highlighted. Probably the most that I've ever highlighted in a book in terms of practical advice.

Pete Neubig: What Disney character do you most associate with?

Lior Abramovich: Wow. I'm not watching TV almost like at all. But if I remember something, um, I would say Superman. Superman is not Disney, right?

Pete Neubig: No, he's decent, but you can use you can use a marvel character. What's the equivalent of Superman and Marvel? Is it like Thor or something we give you?

Lior Abramovich: Maybe anybody that flies.

Pete Neubig: I give you Thor because you're like. You're like a god with all the all the good that you're doing. So how about that.

Lior Abramovich: Oh, man. No, I'm. No, not even close. But don't jinx it. Don't jinx it.

Pete Neubig: See, I had hair before I got into property management.

Lior Abramovich: By the way. Seriously, don't jinx it. Because my father and my grandfather were wore bold at the age of 20 something. So I'm like, I'm. I'm hoping that this thing wouldn't go away.   so fingers crossed.

Pete Neubig: Fingers crossed.

Lior Abramovich: But definitely someone who flies.

Pete Neubig: Someone who flies. Okay. Yes. Thor flies, we'll give you Thor. What is the challenge that you're currently facing in your business?

Lior Abramovich: Um. I think it's a challenge we're preparing for one of the things that I'm most concerned about. And I think me and you spoke about it once is, especially in the world of remote like of remote team members. So in, in our team here in the States is fully remote. But we have an office in Israel, which is where our R&D team at is at. So like, how do we as a team, as we grow and become this like multi time zone team, how do we still keep this unique culture that we have this Blanket magic. Like what are the practical things that I should be doing, you know, in terms of meeting together with the team and things like that. That's one of the things that is most concerning to me right now as we grow, because I really am proud of like, the culture that we've built. And I think the more we'll grow, the more difficult it will be to keep it up. So that will be definitely my biggest concern.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Agreed. Dogs and cats. Which ones do you prefer?

Lior Abramovich: Dogs.

Pete Neubig: Dog guy. Okay. Alright, Lior, you are off the the lightning round seat. If somebody was interested in learning more about Blanket, where did they go and who they contact?

Lior Abramovich: So you can visit our website. It's blankethomes.com. If you want to go directly to schedule a demo, you can just click on the button there to book a demo or just read through the website. It's very informative. It's literally showing all the features and everything we're doing. Or you can just DM me on LinkedIn, you know, on social media everywhere, or Ben our partnerships manager. I'm normally responding very fast. So and even if you have a question about in general, you know, asset management, investment management, you want to brainstorm a little bit on what you can do even without Blanket like we have a lot of folks that are, you know, brainstorming with us on how to do a proforma. So I'm sending them my template, you know, that I use multiple years ago, um, or like different, you know, spreadsheets and decks. So like, really feel free to reach out to us, brainstorm a little bit. You don't have to be a Blanket client to talk with us. Like, that's that's what I always try to say.

Pete Neubig: Excellent. And, if you are listening to this and you're not a NARPM member yet, go to narpm.org or call them at (800) 782-3452. And if you are interested in remote team members to maybe become your asset manager or to take some of that burden off of your property managers, you can go to vpmsolutions.com or you can email me directly at pete@vpmsolutions. Lior, thank you so much for being here today. See everybody.

Lior Abramovich: Thank you.