Join Founder and CEO Kent Clothier, Sr. as he discusses client experience amid the COVID-19 crisis with the REI Nation team. We take a look at emerging trends and dive into the ways economic uncertainty is affecting decisions and returns on investment. From our residents to our WOW Group members, we believe the Experience Matters for everyone. Our guests dive into how we make the experience exceptional for all our contacts. Guests include Nat Gray from Premier Property Management, customer service specialist Cyndy McCrary, and Ashley Claunch, our Director of Portfolio Advisors.
Kent Sr.: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Our Experience Matters Live Facebook conversation this afternoon. Thank you for joining us. We'll take a couple of minutes and introduce everybody to you and probably take 30 or 45 minutes and talk about some things related to our company and business, and even take some questions along the way here as we go. I want to introduce you to people that are going to be on here with me first off. I don't know that I know everybody that's on the call. I do know that we have a lot of our current investors. We have some of our staff and we have new people that are on the new Facebook group page that may not be familiar with us and all of our peoples. My name is Kent Clothier Sr. I'm the CEO and founder of REI Nation and Memphis Invest and Premier Property Management owned by myself and my wife, Sherry and Chris, who you guys have met and Brett Clothier.
On the call with me today is Nate gray, head of our Premier Property management oversees 6,000 properties for us in seven cities. So he'll be joining us today and talking a little bit about the Premier Property Management side of our business. Ashley Claunch on here and again Ashley just waved to everybody knows which one you are there. So Ashley has been with us for almost 10 years in our sales departments. So literally, hundreds, probably thousands of houses for us, is going to be out here talking a little bit about what's going on out there in the community with our current people that are approaching the house, purchasing houses and future buyers. Cyndy McCrary is on the call. Cyndy, are you there yet? She's been with us almost 10 years in our Customer Service Department. We have seven ladies that work in that department and Cyndy's one of them. She handles our wild customers or most of our wild customers that people know wild customers are people that own five or more properties with us.
And there's about 350 of those today that are in our portfolio of 2,000 owners and 6,000 plus properties. And she'll be talking a little bit about that today. So, but I just wanted to take a minute and first off, thank everybody for joining us. And as we go through the conversation today and the questions you have be sure to hit the like button there, if you would and that helps us get out to other people and the love it button on there and helps that helps us get out there to even more people. So if you would hit those, we'd appreciate it. So let me just take a couple of minutes and introduce our company a little bit to those that are not on here and are new to us and don't know who we are, but I want to tell you that before or last year in 2019, we went out and we, I believe that we were live in Hawaii.
Several of our team members went to Hawaii and had a couple of day conference and maybe we were in Northern California in 2019 at some time. And so not being able to do that right now brings us to this live conversation today where we can talk a little bit about what we're doing, how we're doing the last nine weeks which I know everybody wants to hear about that. Let me tell you a little bit about the company and then we'll get into the conversation with everybody here. Our company's been in business as many of you know and maybe some of you on here don't know for 17 years. And we started here in Memphis as a small company and today have grown to right at 90 people that work for us. And we have people that work in the buying department where we buy houses, people that work in the sales department, the renovation department, the property management side of the business, the accounting side of the business, the IT side of the business and the customer service side of the business.
And I don't think I left anybody out there, but those are all really, really important part of our team, every one of those departments have people that work in them that contribute to what we've been able to do over the years. And our company is a little bit different as you'll see and those of you that know us already know that, that we're a much different company than pretty much any other real estate investment company out there in how we run our business. We have a much different culture than most of these companies we'll talk about or most of these other companies are out there. And maybe the folks on here, we'll talk about it in a second, a little bit about the culture here. The things that are most important to Chris and I, and Brett are our reputation, our credibility and integrity.
And we do everything we can to protect that and enhance it as each and every day that we're in business. The people that are on this call and the other 90 people, we wouldn't be here today without the great job that all of those people do each and every day. And if you've been to our website and you see in the front page of the website, there's a sign on there that says that average people can't work here. And we have a really different type of staff that work here that are very, very highly qualified to do what they do at a very, very high level. And it just takes a person that comes to work for us that's all in. That's going to give everything they got and as I said, many times over the 17 years, we're in business to serve four groups of people.
First off is our employees. Second is our investors. Third is our residents and the fourth is our vendors. So we have four groups of people that are the most important part of our job and if we take care and treat those people the way we want to be treated each and every day, then we're going to be successful. And we've been doing this now 17 years, as I said, now we're 6,000 properties in 2000 investors. But we learned a long time ago that one of the real important parts of our business is our customer service. And back before anybody was doing it we started with a couple people in our customer service department today and today Nate I think we have what seven people in customer service today? And our customer service department what they do is talk to every one of our investors every single month. Some more often in some, maybe not as often, but when a person purchased the property from us one of our customer service ladies is talking to them every week for the first four weeks as we walk them through the process of acclimating them with all of our company and the things that we do.
And then one of the ladies will be talking to them every month, updating them on their property telling them what condition and asking any questions about their investments and us managing that asset for them. And we do that and do it every single month and we've done it for just about every year that we've been in business and reaching out as a concierge service that talks to our investors every month to see what they need, how we're doing, keep them informed and we found that other companies over the years that it was hard to get a hold of anybody to work at the company that once you bought something from them or did business with them and so we do that.
We reach out to every one of our customers every month through our customer service ladies and talk to them and give them updates and they're available every day, all day to talk to any of our clients. And that's their sole job is a 100% client service. Our vendors who're out there. Working with our vendors they have expectations of what we expect on the quality of every single house, whether it's a move out a rehab. And so they pull up play an integral part of what we're doing, and they go through a process of being approved by us. And we have today 22 people that work in our rehab departments excuse me 28 people that work in our rehab department today in the seven cities that are out there overseeing all of our vendors and making sure that the qualities and the type of job that we want done on our houses are being up to the standards that we expect every day.
The residents that rent our houses are the utmost important to us. And we always said, and we've said it for years, and it's never changed the most important job in our company is renting houses. And we have to rent houses to make sure that our investors getting the return that they want. And today, as of this morning, let me look here this morning, 96 houses available to rent out of 6,000 houses. So you can see the type of jobs that are rental team and led by Nate and Premier do to only have 96 houses available out of 6,000 houses is pretty phenomenal and they do a great job. And as quick as they come online from our rehab or they come online from a move out they're all usually rented within 30, no later than 45 days and Nate and his team usually rent about 150 houses a month.
So they do a great job and then of course the last of the four is our staff. We have a tremendous team of people probably over 35 people who have been with us longer than five years. We probably have another 15, 20 people that have been with us maybe over 10 years, if I'm doing guessing. So we have a great staff of team players that we're lucky to have every one of them and they do a great job for us. And so with that that little introduction, little monologue things, let me, I'm going to give you some quick numbers and we're going to get into these folks. And as I said, it's 6,000 plus properties, 2000 investors, right? At 350 customers that are in the wild group, we're in seven cities today and those include, we started in Memphis originally went to Dallas, went to Houston and today we're in Little Rock, Tulsa St. Louis and Oklahoma City, Memphis, Dallas, and Houston.
And Memphis is by far the biggest we have about 3,500 properties in Memphis and another 1500 in Dallas and the rest of them are spread out over those five cities. So that's a little bit of the back-story about where we're at today. Whenever we did the live events before and I was at most up until about a year or so ago and the most recent ones Chris has taken some of our team out on the road and we talk and we answer your questions and we do things like this. And so it was important that we get back on here today and start talking to you guys and introducing part of our team. And I'll be coming back periodically, maybe weekly, maybe every other week, and bringing some members of our team on here for you guys out there to meet and talk to them and ask them some questions and put a name with a face on some of these great people. So let me just dive in here first to Cyndy who again, is one of our longtime customer service ladies, handles a large portion of our wow group. We actually have two customer service ladies that handle the 350 wow customers. Again, those are the people that own five or more properties with us. So Cyndy, let me just ask you, how's it going with our clients? I know we've come through this COVID thing, which we didn't really know how this was going to be, but it's been better than we thought with the rents and the collections. And our property management side has done a great job on collecting the rent. What's on the minds of our customers out there today, as you talk to several or many of them every single day? What's on the minds out there of customers that you're talking to every day?
Cyndy: Most of our investors are extremely happy with all the returns they're getting, especially during this virus. I know it was a shaky time and unusual time, but we've been able to collect a good portion of the rent. And folks are just really, really happy. I talk to them usually two to three or four times a month, keeping them updated on partial payments, payments, and everything that's going on with their property. It's a lot more communication than we usually do every month, but they've appreciated it and are extremely happy with our company and the way we've handled this whole situation.
Kent Sr.: Cyndy, how long have you been handling the wow customers? I know you started in customer service for those that have over five properties. How long have you been handling ... I know that that group started off with about 100 and now it's grown to 350. We're going to add another. I think we looked recently, we're going to add another 75 people, roughly 75 people into the wow group this year, that they come in and they keep moving their portfolios from one, two, three or four, all up for the five, and then come into the wow group. How long have you been working with our wow customers?
Cyndy: Ever since it initiated. When we first started and made up this group, we decided the Clothier family, of course you, developed this whole group that owns five or more houses. And so I've been the initiator since the very beginning. And I think it's been about five or six years now that this whole thing got started. So I've been from the very start.
Kent Sr.: Very good. Let me just jump off here. I've got a couple of questions that are coming in. Let me just, we'll see if somebody wants to answer this. This is from Cat. "What can owners do better? How can an owner be a better partner today, if anything?" I'm assuming that question is how can we be a better partner working with our clients and working with us. And I'll take this one. I just think that if owners ... We do what we do. And sometimes we say no to new owners that come in because they don't really understand how we operate. We're one of the few companies, we don't put any of our houses on a website. We don't do that. Today we have a large group of people waiting to buy houses from us. We have several properties available today and what our sales team does is match those up with people that are looking for certain properties in certain cities.
So, what can the owners do better? Have patience as we find the property for you and try to answer your needs. Let us do what we do in the property management business. From time to time, we get owners that want to get more involved in the property management side of it. And we have to just say, "Let us do what we do." Like I said, we only have 90 something vacancies today out of 6,000, and we're always working for the owner. Where can we plus up the rents at. We talked, we had a meeting this morning with our property management team, looking at the rates. We're seeing a lot of people interested in rental houses today. We're hearing a lot in the news about people that are wanting to get out of certain neighborhoods or certain apartments or certain high rises because of the COVID-19 and get into single family houses. So we're looking at our availability today and we're screening better than we've ever had before.
But the biggest thing for the owners, when you come into our group, just let us do our job. And our job is to get the return for you, to get the resident for you and to protect your income or to protect your asset. I spoke a long time ago in Hawaii, and it came up about, I think the comment went something like this. When you put your head down on the pillow at night, we got you covered here. We know what we're doing. In all seven cities, we've got great people that are going to take care of your investment. Are there going to be hiccups along the way? I think in the four or five years we've had, or the last four or five, seven years, we've had a couple of fires every once in a while. There's some maintenance things. So there's going to be stuff that happens, but we know how to handle just about everything.
And I'll say this on the COVID thing, that when it came up the middle of March, we gathered all of our people in the room and we hunkered down for the next four weeks and took a look at everything. The most important thing that we did, we put up a task force under Nate Gray's guidance here, that we took eight of our people that have been with us a long time. We cleared off some other people, some admin people just for a little while. And I wanted to put eight really strong people on talking to our residents that didn't pay. And we actually started back the last week, and I jumped ahead a little bit here and got a little bit of Nate's thunder. We actually jumped ahead a little bit. The last week of March, we were actually looking at people that had already paid April rent in the last week of March.
So we knew about March 25th that we had already a good percent of April rents in. And then when we got to April 5th and April 10th, Nate's taskforce of about eight to 10 people kicked in, calling the 200, 300 or 400 that had not paid and seeing what we needed to do. If they had lost their job, if they had got their stimulus, if they had gotten unemployment, if they'd been furloughed, what can we do to help them? So we got way out ahead of this very quickly. And then we ended up collecting just about all of the rent that we would normally collect in a month. And Nate will talk about how May rent is going so far. So back to the question. If people will just let us do the job. Back in '08 and '09, when all of this happened back then, we rode right through this. We came right through it.
And the best thing back then ... and there's a question on here. Let me look. A question from Jeremy about '08. And do you see this current pause in the real estate market? So what would you do different? Well, back in '08, the problem was money. And we didn't have a problem with money because we didn't have any banks. Back in those times, we had all private lenders, and pretty much all of our competition then had banks. And we were able to swoop in there and buy a bunch of properties because we didn't have banks. Now, as we came out of that, banks have been coming to us and we do do business with some banks now, but it's not all of our business with banks. We still have other private lenders. So it's a much different situation than it is today.
And somewhere around 2012 or '13, we had big floods here in Memphis. And a lot of our investors were concerned about the river. And we were in here on a weekend, looking at all of our properties and really recognize at that time, about 2000 Memphis properties, we only had four or five that were in the area where it was possible. So, we know how to go into crisis management mode and we know how to put the right people in the right spot to get the best result. Are we out of the clear with COVID-19? By no means are we. This is a long process. We're in maybe the second inning of a nine inning game. But we have it surrounded. We're on it. And Ashley's going to talk in a minute about, we didn't know if we would sell any houses in the month of April, and she'll talk to you in a minute about how we did that and how May is going so far.
So, we got a question on there, a couple. Let's see, there's some more that are coming in. I'll come back to those in a minute. Nate, let me go to you for a couple of minutes and talk about you overseeing 6,000 properties and a big team in Memphis and Dallas. And we've got a great property management team over in Dallas, led by Missy and Ryan over there. And why don't you speak for a minute about the property management side and on how we're doing, sir?
Nate: Sure. I think what Kent mentioned is the uncertainty of everything going into this. We didn't have a playbook. There is still no playbook. There's no rule book to go by. Our approach was really attacking two different things. And one is being proactive. What Kent said, we set up that task force. We set up a team to be able to handle and attack that early on. We started tracking calls coming in, again, I think it was mid March. And then, like you said, before April even got here, we were already looking at and planning and preparing for how April was going to work out. And then really on the customer service side, to echo what Cyndy was saying, is communication. It's as simple as that. We don't have all the answers. What we do have is a great team that's working very hard and over communicating with our owners.
One of the main things that we've been hearing for feedback from our owners is they appreciate the communication to them. Our goal was back in April to call every single owner by the 15th of the month. So we gave our customer service team a big challenge to make a lot of phone calls by the 15th of the month to proactively reach out to the owners, let them know what we were doing, let them know what our numbers were, about the team set in place, and like you said Kent, just let us do what we do best, which is manage the properties. That's exactly what they've hired us to do. And luckily, a fantastic job by our team. We turned out significantly better than we expected and heck the way that everybody expected. A lot of things were going the way that they were going to go. So proactive and over communication has been the name of the game for the past two months.
And like Kent said, we're not out of the woods yet. We're still doing the same things that we did back in April for May. We'll continue doing those things if and when, and for however long we need to and working with our residents to get an acceptable plan in place, being compassionate and having empathy with the situation at hand and working with them and treating them the way that we would want to be treated. It's really panned out for us so far, and that's the plan moving forward.
Kent Sr.: And just to add on there, Nate, and one of the things that we're doing in the underwriting, which is when we, the application process, and we knew some people had gotten furloughed and laid off in a different city. So as we approve a resident to move into a property, and let's say today on the 13th, that we approve a resident today, and we check their verification of where they were before, verification of employment, on and on and on. That 24 to 48 hours before they move in and close the lease, we may approve a lease today on the 13th, but it's not going to close, let's say, until the end of the month. Well, two days before they're due to close or really for 24 hours, we're going back and checking their employment again. We're checking their income again. And unfortunately, at the end of April as we did that, we ran across five or six people that between the time they were approved and the time that they closed, they had lost her job. And then we have to go back and regroup. And I think in those cases that we did not end up putting them in the houses because that's not a situation that's good for our owners.
So we jumped on that from the get go and realized that everybody that we approved, it really started in March, Nate, we started doing that in March and that we approved them and before we let them close at the end of March, we were looking at and verifying all this stuff again. And then of course, we're doing that now. And we've already talked about it again this week that we're doing it this month. And Nate's going to rent probably about 150 houses this month. He's already closed about 50 for this month, but we're going back before they close and before the resident signs the docs and that we exchange funds, that we're verifying their employment and verifying their income again, because that's what an owner would expect us to do. And that's all part of the process that we do, all part of the details that we take care of on the front end.
Let me go to Ashley. Ashley, so you're seeing some a little bit different times here over the years. And obviously, we're in one today. And we sit in here and we talk, Chris and I, and Brett, Jessica our CFO, about our sales team has managed to go out last month in the month of April. And how many houses did we contract last month, Ashley?
Ashley: Last month, we contracted 66 properties during the middle of the storm, so to speak.
Kent Sr.: I mean, just think about that for a minute, that with all the fear that was out there and everybody's shut down and locked in and our sales team managed to sell, Ashley, do you have to have a breakdown of how many existing customers that was? And how many new customers that was?
Ashley: Yeah. So out of that, 23 were brand new buyers. So close to 30% of those contracts written were brand new buyers. And of course, the remainder were existing. And so, that in itself was pretty amazing.
Kent Sr.: I've told you all many times and I've told you that was an unbelievable job, because when we went into April, we didn't know with everything that was on the news out there and how bad it was and all of that, but again, it goes back to, I think, what's most important to us, our reputation, credibility, and integrity. Typically every month, we sell about 80 or 90 houses, and we know that's going to go back a little bit now because of the COVID, but about every month, over 50% of our current clients of 2,000 investors buys another home. Buys their second, third, fourth, 12th, 13th, whatever it is.
Ashley, I know we've talked every day, and by the way, we meet with our sales team every morning, we have a nine o'clock meeting. And Chris and I and Brett, we know everything that's going on in the sales department, what is being said out there, what's going on with our houses, what are our customers looking for? Ashley, I know we've talked recently about the mood that's lightened up a little bit different with the clients. The first couple of weeks of April, it was really tough. Tell us how it's gone in the last two to three or four weeks in the sales department and talking to potential clients and current clients.
Ashley: Well, I think like everyone's experienced when it first happened, the unknowns, the uncertainty was kind of ruling our minds and our actions and what we were doing. But as things have kind of settled down some, and obviously, they weren't as bad as initially anticipated, and the economy is starting to slowly open again, investors are starting to move again. We knew in April that we were going to be relying on existing clients because they had been with us, they had experienced everything that Nate and Cindy talked about, the systems and everything we had in place that were protecting their assets.
But the new investors coming in, those were the ones that we really just continue to build the relationship and continue to just teach them, educate them on who we were and what we did. And this was no better time to shine than now, because the numbers and the data that Nate shared through property management was just, again, in normal times, that's great. But in times like this, it's phenomenal. It's off the charts. And so, that has helped really just, again, encourage investors that you're with the right team and you're with the right company, you're with the right people.
And as we built those relationships, now we're kind of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And we're starting to move forward with adding new investors in, and of course, just doing what we do and what we do best, like you guys said, we have it down to a science.
Kent Sr.: Yeah. Ashley, we have a question here from Jeff and I'm going to let you answer it. Okay? As best you can. The question is, Are you seeing investors use self-directed IRAs or traditional financing? That's the first question and the second one, Are they primarily bond for retirement or income? Can you answer that one?
Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, and how are you? A long time client. It's pretty much from what we're seeing, of course, there's benefits right now to leveraging because of the interest rates. And of course, everybody's noticed that right now for a non owner occupant loan, you can lock in from anywhere from three and three quarters to four and a half percent, which is great. It affects the numbers and increases the return. So we still do have a lot of investors that you have to realize what the stock market did through this kind of spooked some investors into moving some assets back over to more of the hard asset, real estate side that we're doing and that secure investment. And so, there's kind of perks to what's going on for both sides of the equation. We've seen the balance stay and maintain through this with the division between traditional financing and investors using their retirement accounts.
Kent Sr.: Thank you, Ashley. And Ashley, typical in a month, and I'm looking at some data here because I see the question. Somebody is asking, What percentage of the people pay cash and what percentage of people finance? And this is a question, let's see, who is this from? Jose on there, the question was, With COVID-19 having a negative impact, are there any bright spots on the horizon for real estate? He's on the sidelines and wanting to know if he should be aggressive or passive client, and ask how many of those buying in April use cash versus leverage?
I think that most of our clients, the highest percentage of our clients, are leveraged. Would you agree with that, Ashley?
Ashley: Yes.
Kent Sr.: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm all in on real estate as we have for many years. And I think our clients will tell you that. COVID-19 has had a negative impact on certain parts of real estate for certain commercial, for certain industrial. But there is a lot of news out there that the space that we're in has not been adversely effected. It's probably, and again, I'm not talking about me. Anybody on the call can go look this up because it's out there. I think there was a Wall Street Journal article about this is the time because of what people are fearing about spacing and looking to get out of certain, maybe cities and towns and high rises and get into single family homes. So we have seen an uptick already in the rentals of what we're doing. And so, this is, we feel like, is a very good time to be involved in passive real estate. Ashley, you want to jump on that with anything?
Ashley: Yeah. I mean, I just want to second you with all that. And I don't know if you wanted to bring this up, but we do list all of our properties, as well, on the MLS and our demand for even the owner occupants. So people looking to purchase and move in the single family residence and also the rental increase in what we've seen on that side. So if anything, and then of course, the interest rates, like I mentioned, coming down slightly for non-owner occupant loans. So if anything, I feel like what we've seen has been the demand has not dropped. If anything, it's increased. The demand and the rental has increased. And then of course, the numbers are slightly increasing just due to the ability to pay less for borrowing money.
Kent Sr.: I can tell you that every, and Cindy, I'll get you to jump on this, that every week, our customer service department, as I talk to people on the calls every week, they have investors that are saying, have Mark or have David or have Ashley Tinker or Ashley Claunch or Mark Cobb, call me that. I'm interested in talking about another house, even during this time. Cyndy, is that still going on during these times, as you talk to investors every day?
Cyndy: Very much so. People are still very interested in it. There's a lot of people that still are employed and able to afford and are taking advantage of these rates and the opportunity, especially with the houses that we have now. So yes, I definitely see it in a lot of our existing investors, definitely buying again.
Kent Sr.: I know we have Drew Clothier and Blake Clothier both talking to investors to this month as we went through this and they've brought a lot of people to the sales, people that are interested in talking about whether they want to buy another house today or the mid summer or the fall. So they've continued to bring those to them every single day. But Nate, I've got a question for you that's on here from Jonelle, Jonelle, I believe it's how you say it. Are we seeing an uptick in maintenance and repairs right now reported by residents? Good question. We've talked about it many times.
Nate: Hey Jonelle. And yes. So again, we were proactive with maintenance early on towards the end of March. We instructed our team for two reasons to follow CDC and WHO guidelines to try to only limit maintenance as best we could to emergency or only quality of life repairs within reason. And that's been pretty easy to do on the phone with our residents. On the flip side, we have seen an uptick in calls because more people are at home. So everybody's at home, everybody's using the restrooms, or plugging their phone chargers in, or doing this and doing that.
So sure, we've seen an uptick in the number of calls in, but again, we planned ahead. We knew that that was going to be occurring. We have a plan in place to discuss with residents when and if they call in, and if it's something that's not an emergency status and we're able to discuss with them for their protection, we want to try to limit additional exposure from having to send somebody into their property. So now on the flip side, we've had plenty of calls that have needed to be handled with quality of life for essential services. And we've had the proper precautions in place to be able to do that. So kind of a twofold answer there.
Kent Sr.: Yeah, really good Nate. Again, we're taking measures with our vendors in our houses when they go to a property with the proper guidelines, and this is a company. We've set up our offices, we've put up the plexiglass at where we're needed. We have all the guidelines, all the signs, all the things, all the social distancing, everything that we're supposed to be doing. Today, about probably a little over half of our team is slowly coming back in. We had a few more in today, but we still have some daycare center issues with some of our staff and we're working with everybody. Eventually as we slowly start back here and people coming back in, but our people have done a really good job remotely. Continual with that until we get everybody back in here, which eventually we will have everybody back in, but let me go back to for final thoughts and we'll wrap this up here in a couple of minutes.
Let me go first to Ashley. Ashley, any thoughts that are on the sales side, questions I didn't ask or comments that we may want to let the listeners know. And by the way, if you just jumped on the call here, we appreciate everybody being on. The Experience Matters Live Call today. And if you would hit the like button and the love button, it would help us attract future people down the road for the next call. We appreciate that. Ashley, go ahead, ma'am. Do you have anything else today that you want to talk about?
Ashley: Yeah. I would just say that if you're a current client or if you are just considering this type of investing with us to feel free if you've been connected to one of us on the sales side to reach out. A lot of what we do on the front end is, like I said earlier, is just educate you on how we do what we do, and just kind of dive a little deeper into the stuff that we've been talking about today. So feel free to reach out, I know some people have a little more time on their hands these days and we're available. We're flexible with scheduling and so forth so we'd love to hear from you. Any questions you have, send our way. And that's about it for me.
Kent Sr.: Thank you, ma'am. Cyndy, anything on the customer service side with our clients?
Cyndy: I want to reiterate pretty much what Ashley said. She's on the portfolio advising side, but while I'm on the customer service side, any of our current investors, we're here for you. We have been here for you the whole time, reach out to us if you need anything, but just know that we're going to be here for you throughout the month, throughout the coming months also, and to make sure that your properties are being taken care of, and our communication is very open. So give us a call if you have any questions, you should know who your customer service rep is. We're here for you.
Kent Sr.: Good. Nate?
Nate: Yeah. I just want to let everybody know that you've got a great team here working for you and I can't take any of their credit. We've got a fantastic team of folks. Like Kent said, started out when we first started a team here in Memphis, a team in Dallas, a team in each one of those cities that we're in, boots on the ground, working hard for you guys every single day, amidst all of this craziness and uncertainty. And we'll continue to do that. And if you ever need us, let us know, but just know that we're here working for you day in and day out. It hasn't changed our philosophy. Hard work and the harder you work, the better the results you get. So we're here doing that for you, day in and day out.
Let me just say, and I'll wrap it up to our current investors and anybody out there that's new that's maybe not familiar with us or who we are. There is no company in this space, in this real estate space that works harder than us. And we talk about not being a real estate company, but being a customer service company that's in the real estate business. And that's what's got us here today because of the type of service. That's why over half of our business every month is repeat customers. Because we are available to talk to them, to help them on what's going on with their properties, talk about them. We get so many referrals every month from our existing customers that are out there. And because again, I'll go back to what I said early on 30 minutes ago, our reputation, credibility and integrity is the most important thing.
Are we perfect? No. Do we make mistakes? Yes, but is this the hardest working group of people that you will ever find? I'll put our property management company up against anybody, whether they have 500 or 20,000 properties, I'll put our rest of our team and the quality and attention to detail that we do every single day, and again, each year or each month before the COVID hit, we would have five to 10 clients that would travel in from around the country to visit our offices. We hope to start that back up at whatever the time is right for that. But many of you, many of our clients have been to our offices, met our great team to our Texas office, see what we do. We're in this for the long run. We're not going anywhere. We may take a step back to go two steps forward, but we're okay with that because we're set to do that.
We can handle whatever adversity comes our way and we'll work our way through it. Like I said a few minutes ago, we're in about the second or third inning of a nine inning game here, not knowing what June and July and August is going to look like. Hopefully the country opens back up and we get kind of back to normal, but we'll play whatever hand we got and we'll come out much better in the end when all of this is done. Because again, we know how to do this. We have the people that can handle it. We have the experience, we have the knowledge, we have the leadership, we have the great staff of people. And I think that's why people like doing business with us because of the commitment that we have and the culture of our company is nothing but hard work, take care of the details. And that's kind of where we are.
So thank you for all of you for joining us today. We appreciate it. We've gone about 45 minutes. Hopefully there some good stuff on here for you. We'll come back in another week or so. And I'll see if I can talk a couple of other of our folks into getting on here with me. We'll answer some questions and talk about some topics, but on behalf of our company and the Clothier family, thank you very much for one, being a client or being a potential client for us and joining us today. Have a great day. Thank you everybody.