In the summer of 2024, an arsonist set fire to a property in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The flames jumped to the building next door, a four-unit property with some of the highest rents in Lukeman Property Management's portfolio. It burned to the ground.
The client who owned it had 110 units with the company at the time, the single largest concentration of doors Madison and Joe Lukeman had ever managed for one owner. Underinsured and unwilling to rebuild to code, he made a decision that would force Madison and Joe to rethink everything about how they ran their business: he started off-boarding all 110 units.
That’s where the first episode of our new podcast series picks up the story.
Madison and her husband Joe didn’t stumble into property management. Joe started the company in 2011, largely out of necessity, managing his own investment properties along with those of family and friends who’d bought in and around Kalamazoo after the housing crash. Madison grew up around the business too: Her father was a licensed contractor who flipped houses and her mother ran a business managing housing choice vouchers for the state of Michigan. By age 10, Madison was stuffing envelopes for her mom’s office.
By the time she joined Lukeman full-time in 2014, the pieces were already in place: a property management company, a real estate sales arm, and a family history of knowing the business from the ground up.
Many successful operators use systems such as EOS to define company values, establish measurable performance indicators, and create consistency across departments.
The goal is simple: every client should receive the same quality experience regardless of who serves them.
In 2012, the company picked up a client who eventually brought 110 units to the portfolio, doubling its size overnight. It was the launch point for years of organic growth, built on referrals, a strong website, and a reputation for full-service management in a market with a lot of regulatory complexity.
But chasing unit count came with a cost. As Madison put it, the units consuming 80 percent of her and Joe’s time turned out to be the same maintenance-heavy, lower-margin units tied to that original 110-unit client, the units now heading for the exit. They’d been making exceptions to their own processes to keep that client happy, and those exceptions were eating away at consistency across the rest of the business.
They didn’t have a number that necessarily told them this – they just had a feeling. Payroll was getting made, taxes were getting paid, the business looked fine on paper. But something wasn’t right.
When Madison and Joe finally got a clear, benchmarked view of their financials, one metric stood out immediately: labor efficiency Between answering the phone, training staff who’d been there over a year, and getting pulled into day-to-day maintenance issues, their time itself had become the biggest inefficiency in the business.
That insight led to a full structural shift. Joe spent a week at a colleague’s office studying a contracted-property-manager model, and in the summer of 2024, Lukeman hired its first one, tasked specifically with bringing in new clients to help offset the units they were losing. When that model worked, they went further: in January 2026, they moved from a departmental structure to portfolio management company-wide, hiring two new property managers and laying off three staff whose roles no longer made sense under the new model.
The result wasn’t that they didn’t just get more efficient, they got far more consistent. Clients now get dedicated points of contact and, as Madison found, they don’t need it to be Madison or Joe personally. They just need someone answering with the company’s name on the email.
Today, Lukeman Property Management manages 623 units, with 176 added in the first seven months of this year alone, a growth rate well ahead of most companies twice their size. Madison has taken the phone off her desk. Joe set out to work part-time in the business this year and has largely done it.
Madison still watches her direct labor efficiency ratio (DLER) every month, and she’s candid that she keeps it intentionally a little lower than it could theoretically be. She’d rather have trained people in reserve for when something breaks than run so lean there’s no room to absorb the unexpected, a lesson that a fire, a lost client, and a hard look at the numbers taught her firsthand.
This is the first episode of our new podcast series, where we sit down with property management owners and talk through the story behind their numbers, both the good and the messy parts. Watch the full conversation with Madison here.
If you want to see what a clear, benchmarked view of your own numbers would show, get in touch and we’ll book time to look at it together.
