On behalf of the Clothier family and the entire team at REI Nation, as we close 2019 and welcome 2020, we wanted to share with our valued clients a few of the milestones we accomplished together this year.
To begin, effective January 1 as many of you know, we are changing our name to REI Nation. As we continue our growth into various investment markets, we believe our brand should more closely reflect our scope and size. Our new name reflects our commitment to assisting you, our clients, in diversifying your portfolios with the highest quality investment properties across multiple cities and markets.
Next in 2019, our company recorded our sixteenth straight year of growth in number of team members, number of properties managed, number of properties added to our clients’ portfolios, value of clients’ portfolios and dollars spent in renovation.
We added 13 new team members this year. As we shared previously, we opened our St. Louis and Tulsa markets late in 2018. Our teams and our activity in these markets continued to expand in 2019 along with our other markets of Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Houston, Dallas and Memphis. As these markets continue to expand, we will explore potential new markets for your investment purposes in the future. There is no intent to slow our growth now!
We ended the year with 5,948 properties under management with a combined value of $773 million. This represents a 16% increase in houses under management year-over-year as well as a 20% increase in the combined value of homes under management. This is not an exact number and is calculated with some experience-based factors built in; however, we are honored to be managing these portfolios as we know for many of you, our clients, the value of these portfolios is priceless. We take the responsibility of managing these portfolios very seriously.
We continue to be committed to reducing the level of deferred maintenance for our investors. We understand these efforts begin with our initial renovation specifications. We take pride in the fact that our level of renovation far exceeds that of other companies in the Turnkey investment industry. REI Nation renovates each property to the highest level which allows us to keep our properties occupied and maintenance and move out costs down for our investors. In 2019, we spent over $45 million with renovation companies, contractors, trade specialists and permitting authorities. We also invested in additional training for each member of our renovations team.
In addition, less than 19% of our properties under management had a move-out in 2019. This mirrors our 2018 performance at the lowest levels ever achieved by REI Nation. As you know, keeping residents happy in your houses lowers your deferred maintenance costs.
We know that each of you have many choices when it comes to your investments and we remain committed to providing you the most rewarding experience possible. As such, a total of $53 million in net rental payments were delivered to our 1,975 clients in 2019.
Year-over-year we strive to improve our processes and your experience. We are committed to continuing to get better. We realize that we separate ourselves and your experience from that of our competition through Client Service in all that we do. We are hard at work on ways to serve you better including for one, new software upgrades and developments that will allow you greater insight into your portfolio as well as ways for us to streamline our processes and procedures in 2020.
We look forward to 2020 and exceeding our current patterns of growth while continuing to deliver outstanding results for each of you.
Have a fantastic year,
Kent Clothier, Sr.
Founder/CEO
