Property Pros started in 2018 as an offshoot of Campus Rentals, which is another company I own that manages currently 650 Ball State properties. Obviously with 650 properties you need a maintenance division. I just started hiring really high quality good people over the years and these people had a lot of talent. One of the things I noticed was not only could they do maintenance work, but we could do more sophisticated work like bathroom remodels, kitchen remodels. I tested them out on my own property, had them build me a dock and a deck, and it was fantastic. I felt there was always a need in the Muncie community for a reasonably priced contractor because what you have is you have contractors that might charge you 40,000 for a bathroom, and then you got the guy with the sticker on his truck who can do it for five. We wanted to be that middle priced contractor that could offer those services that people could trust. We were insured, we were affordable, and we were more on a mass scale than your guy with the sticker on the truck. It really worked out. We branched out. We’re not just doing Delaware County now. We’ve Henry County, Madison County, like within an hour’s drive. We’re doing decks and pergolas and bathrooms remodels, kitchen remodels, home additions, whole house builds like this. I wouldn’t say that’s our forte, but we certainly can do about anything.

Mark Price, the owner and I we’re lifelong friends. We met as teenagers and we’ve stayed in contact and just been friends. He went on to college and became an accountant and I chose to go into the maintenance construction field. He needed someone to come in and help run Property Pros and I helped run it for about a year. The actual director at that time parted ways and I just took over the role. I’ve been with Property Pros about two and a half years as the VP and director.

The construction field is known for some rougher characters, some just different people. We don’t have any of those guys. I want to hire people that I would have in my own home. Every one of our guys I would have in our home, putting in your home, putting any home you can trust them all. They’re all really nice. Several pastors work for us; lots of church guys with us. Everybody’s just super nice. They care about their work. They want it to look good. They care what the customer thinks when they’re completed. We just really want to make everyone happy when we’re finished with their project.

I call these income based projects. There’s residential projects and there’s income based projects, rentals. You got to make sure the numbers make sense. From a client’s perspective, the first thing you’re going to want to do is have a drawing; what’s the drawing look like. Then we look at that drawing, we say, okay, what kind of rent are we going to be able to get based on that drawing? Now you’ve got your income number, you figure out what your total costs are going to be in the project, which is always a shocking number just based on material prices the way they are right now with clients. At the end of the day, what’s it really about? It’s about does the property cash flow, does it make you money consistently in the long run, and are you building an asset value there that 10 or 15 years down the road somebody else paid for really. The next step is typically, most people are going to take that to a bank. They’re going to get an appraisal done on it, and we’re going to see exactly how much that’s worth on an as completed basis. They’re going to give you an as completed number when the project is finished based on the rental values that campus rentals or another rental company might provide. At that point you see, okay, does my cost of this project make sense to my income? Now we can start tweaking some small differences like do we want to put in the fanciest cabinets or do we want to do a Stonewall based on where that estimate came in at and do the numbers make sense? Then from there we start the process. We put the shovel on the ground. We start building the foundation. This particular property, we did this in three and a half months. It was truly an incredible timed project because in our world we get a lease signed pre shovel on the ground. The tenants are leasing prospectively. They don’t even know what the property’s going to look like. We were under a tight timeline and I think our lease might’ve been signed in April or March or something like that. We had to get it done, and so that’s the other thing I think with us is we can knock a project out very, very quickly.

First thing in the morning, most of the guys come into the office to get their assignments. If we do start a new project we would go over that project in the office, then whomever sold the job would take them out, get with the homeowner and go over the entire project to make sure the homeowner is in agreement with everything that we went through, show our project managers everything that we spoke with the homeowner, and then they just start the project from there. Our service department comes in first thing in the morning, gets their assignments, and goes through all their assignments. They’re all small service jobs, so you don’t need to take them out on the job. If we have a kitchen remodel or a bathroom remodel we want to make sure that all the information’s passed over to the project manager so the client gets everything that they like.

Obviously we’re in Delaware County, so we serve the City of Muncie and that’s our primary focus. I think Madison County, Anderson, Alexandria, Henry County, New Castle, Randolph County, Jay County, Farmland, those communities, we like to be within a one county radius of where we’re located. I think that makes sense for us. Obviously we actually had an estimate we did. We’re going to be doing in Carmel. That was a referral. We will go anywhere if the numbers make sense, but our primary focus area is East Central Indiana.

Lots of people like to see our work before because if I would go out to see a homeowner, they’re buying me. They call property Pros, but they don’t know what work we do. I always refer them to our website and they go on and look at our projects. A lot of people just say, I want that, so then we have a good baseline. Lots of customers just want to pick their own product. Some of them have a good eye; some of them don’t. Some of them will just say, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for. Just do it.” You do get the concerned homeowners that ask if we’re insured, bonded, licensed, things like that, which is important too. I think everyone just wants to see your quality. Everyone does look up reviews and asks around about your reputation. That’s huge around here because there’s a lot of fly by night people that take the down payment and never come back. I see that at least once a week. Then that makes them hesitant to sign a contract with another builder.

With the construction culture, I think they’re surprised that, first of all, we do have good employees. We do care. We do offer insurance. We take care of our employees. We have vehicles and we do offer retirement after a certain amount of time. I think they’re impressed that we have a real construction company. It’s not pay under the table, pay cash to the guys, don’t file unemployment, taxes and all that. We do everything by the book, and I think they’re surprised that it’s a real business and we treat it like a real business. Then again, we just want to turn out a great product.

We do offer anything from kitchen compact, which is a baseline that we do in all of our rentals. That would be like a cabinet that you would do in a flip or something like that, maybe a starter home for a younger person, and then we can go all the way up to a diamond or Ciroc which is lots more expensive but it’s a lot better built cabinet. We do have a vendor here if they do want to see the difference between the cabinets because they have different areas that they show all their different products. They can see from good, better, best.

Some people do want bidets. A lot of people are just wanting the ones that do attach to the toilet. A lot of people are pulling their tubs and putting showers in. We have several people that want us to build tile shower pans, tile surrounds. Some people just want to get a regular preformed shower pan and a tile around it. Then we also use a product called Onyx that is a poured manmade product, like the old Corian countertops. It’s a wonderful product. It’s bulletproof. You can get any design, any color that you like, and it installs in about a half a day.

I am partial to granite. It’s just such a good product. We have a very good vendor that we can buy granite at a very affordable price. We rarely do for MICA or anything or any lower grade. When you start having for MICA built not an off the shelf product, the price goes up drastically. We’re able to get granite for just, I don’t know, probably 40% more and you would have a product that lasts forever. You can put hot things on it, cold things on it. You don’t have to worry about burning it, hot plates, things like that. It just looks better and you get your money’s worth. Quartz is nice too. It is a manmade product, but you can damage it. It can crack. You can’t put the heat to it. If you pick a color that you like with that you can consistently get that color. Granite is not manmade. The color they get out of the ground is the color that you get. Those are a couple things you need to keep in consideration when you’re looking at countertops.

I’ve been in the business for 15 years. What I have seen over the years is that if you make your property nice, it attracts better tenants; and better tenants mean less damages, they pay their bills. For me, a project like this means higher rents, it means less maintenance over 10 to 15 years, better tenant quality, a better experience for all of us, the landlord, the tenant. I think that’s a real different mindset than what the typical landlord might have. I mean, I think we should appeal to a lot of landlords out there who have always thought about doing a project like this, and we’ve built the roadmap for them to do so.

I was a CPA for 24 years, and one of my niche clients was contractors. I had a lot of contractor clients and I had the opportunity to see their financials. Many contractors will go out of business within two or three years because it’s a very difficult business to manage. What makes us unique is when you have a large part of your business being the repair and maintenance arm that is consistent like we have with campus rentals, it makes your cash flows better. When your cash flows are better, you can charge the client less for what a typical contractor might be able to charge because their work is a little bit more sporadic. Ours is very, very consistent. Typical bathroom for a contractor in this area, they might charge 18,000 to 20,000. With our consistent cash flows from campus rentals, we’re able to come in at 12.5, 13,000, $14,000 for that exact same bathroom. Price point I think is an issue for us, which is a positive. I know everybody says this, but with us I feel like it’s true. We hire people with outstanding references. We have a lot of ministers who are actually part of our company and they’re great people. They show up to work with a smile on their face. They’re clean cut. They represent the company well, and I feel like that is one of the major separating factors. The bottom line is you don’t want somebody in your home you don’t trust, and I feel like our people you can trust.

I’ve done several of these projects over the years, but this one I wanted to do something very unique to campus. There’s not a lot of two-story homes, certainly in this block, in this area. This is a very popular side of campus, and it’s right off of New York Avenue. You look over and you see this nice two-story. It’s very noticeable. Interestingly enough, my main project manager, the guy is absolutely brilliant. He’s 71 years old. He’s been doing this for close to 50 years, and I literally said I had about four requirements. I said, I want a modern home, modern look, lots of windows up front, a two-story with a balcony overlooking a living room and a beautiful modern-looking staircase. Within two days he had the sketch done. I looked at it and I was like, this is amazing. This is exactly what I’m looking for. I just feel like that’s such a rarity to have a guy with that kind of talent.

Then from there, it’s just picking out all the finer details. I love to do stone in our properties because it’s a separating factor. I think when students walk in, they see that. That’s not commonplace in a rental. I think lights matter. You’ll notice this home is full of different lighting. You have your fireplace that’s lit behind me. You have sconce lights that are unique and different. You have a chandelier up above that’s somewhat unique. You have the lights underneath the bar. You have your crown molding lights in the kitchen. There’s all sorts of different options for ambient lighting at night and students are into that too.

Again, to me, it’s all about separating factors; what’s going to catch that tenant’s eye when they walk into one of my properties, and lights are the thing. That’s what does it. This house is a four bedroom, four and a half bath up front. It has a movie room for the students, which I know they’re going to enjoy, and then it has a single unit in the back. It’s five total bedrooms, five and a half, but great location. The other thing I would say is when you’re talking about campus properties, location matters. When you go on a vacation, where you want to be? You want to be right on the beach, right? We’re on the beach. That’s the ocean. We’re right here on the beach.

Once we got all the paperwork finalized, got the permit pulled, we only had three months to build the house, which is unheard of. The last house that we did, this quality, similar size down the road much easier build, took seven months. I was really concerned that we were going to be able to get it completed in time. I have such good subs. We’re all families. I talk to all of them if not every day, every week for sure. I just got with everyone and said, we don’t have any time. We’ve got to go a hundred miles an hour from the day we start. They just did a great job. My guys came in at the end, did all the finish work, built the stairway, did the fireplace, and I let them know too, hey, guys, we don’t have any time. I appreciate and I really need you to work just a ton of hours because this is our deadline. Somehow we got done over a week early, which in the past we’ve literally worked 24 hours a day just to get done right on time. We did like a 20-foot wavy accent wall. This fireplace is I think 25 feet tall down the fireplace. It is not natural stone. It’s a manmade product. We’re able to use that product on a regular stick-built home without any extra foundation work because it is so light, but it looks real.

We used a very high-quality vinyl plank floor that doesn’t only look beautiful; it’s very durable. He loves different lights, so all the lights are modern. The front part actually has a movie theater. We have a high quality projector on the ceiling that projects a hundred-inch picture on the wall and it is wired for the kids to either put game systems or surround sound, whatever they may want to do in that room. We painted all the walls black. We have zero-light shades. When you shut everything, it’s pitch black. We did a beautiful Trex deck or composite deck around the front and the side. In the back unit, it’s a one bedroom, one bath, beautiful. It’s going to be great for that individual that doesn’t want to have roommates and it’s just as beautiful as the front.

We just built this two story, four and a half bath four bedroom; in the front, one bedroom, one bath in the back. It’s for Ball State college students. The owner wanted something very modern, something that would stick out over campus. He wanted the whole front windows real airy. Again, two story to stick out in the front; we have a composite Trex deck that is very, very nice. It should basically last about forever. It’s good with weather. Here in Indiana, we do have four seasons, so it does get cold, it does get hot, and it should wear really well.

The entry is the living room. We have approximately a 28-foot vaulted ceiling. We did use a wood shiplap car sighting for the ceiling. We did paint it black. Several can lights, LED chandelier, and then the beams are actually foam. Each one of them weighs maybe about 10 pounds. We do have a 20-foot stone fireplace. The electric fireplace does heat also. It does also work off of your phone. With that, we have a 65-inch TV that does stay with the property. The students basically just have to move their furniture in and all the TVs stay. Each bedroom has a TV. The thermostats are smart thermostats, so they can control all their HVAC with their phones, whether they’re here or several states away. The stairwell that we built is 3-inch oak treads. He wanted the floating look so you could see through, so you don’t have any risers. It does have black framework and we do not have spindles. We have a steel cable.

As we go into the kitchen we have a bar with a faux stone front. We do have under-bar lighting that can change color to whatever the students like, four LED pendant lights, black cabinets with granite countertops. We do also have all black stainless steel appliances. Any of our larger homes, four bedroom or above, we do provide two refrigerators. It’s just a nice touch so they don’t have to try to use one with so many people.

In here, we actually have a movie theater. We have a projector that will project onto the wall 100-inch picture. We have blackout blinds, modern LED lights, and then we also have movie lights. So if we were to shut the sconces off, we have ambient lighting down below. The owner actually sent me a picture of a set of stairs that he loved and asked that we build that. Along with the picture, it did have a wavy wall, so we did install a 20-foot wavy wall for an accent wall. We’re now at the landing. This could be a really nice spot for students to either sit and study or just relax. They love things like the Ball State sign and again, more beautiful LED sconces.

Each bedroom does come with its own 55-inch TV and its own bathroom. We chose to do black vanities with white sink, very modern. We do have mirrors that light up. The lighting changes. They also heat up to prevent steam. Each bathroom has a five-foot Onyx shower system. This product is a manmade product. It’s along the lines of Corian. It’s a very nice, durable product; it should last many years. Then each shower, we did go ahead and cut in and install a niche for anything they need.

The other bedroom across the hall is basically a mirror, so it’s the same shower, same everything. Now the back ones, if you did want to see the back ones, those showers are different. The bedrooms are the same, but the showers are different.

Almost all of our units have washers and dryers. It’s not standard by far. In the back unit, it’s a one-bedroom, one bath, beautiful. It’s going to be great for that individual that doesn’t want to have roommates and it’s just as beautiful at the front.