You Can't Vibe Code a PMS

Vibe coding creates amazing prototypes. But when it comes to the ledger and idiosyncratic, regulated money flows for financial institutions, AI isn’t there yet.

Why leave yourself open to a competitor that is friendly today and hostile the day its agent can run your product?

If the typical first-timer were really 40, homeownership among adults under 35 would have collapsed. It was 35.2% in mid-2026, close to 37.4% in 1994.

No one ever meant for the world to be this way. It’s the effect of thousands of well-intentioned, ill-thought-out policies over generations.

Not every discovery was inevitable. Not every breakthrough was fated to happen. It’s false to assume that if one person didn’t build, another would.

Monotony kills innovation. It works for companies where employees are a cog in a machine.

The companies I’ve seen flail the most are chasing trends like dogs chasing their tails.

Management cannot fix problems they don’t know exist, and management can’t reward work they don’t know happened.

Half of these executives don’t even use email daily. Yet, the number one question on their minds is, “What can we automate?”

The only way things work at scale is by having the right culture.

If the Lenape had invested their $24 at a 6.5% real annual return over the past 398 years, they would have accumulated $1.8 trillion.

Numerous friends have had mold issues in single-family rentals that were managed poorly. None of these properties were managed by institutions.

Regions with excessive homeownership show lower levels of innovation, productivity, and overall economic growth.

The market has massively outperformed the housing market for the last 40 years. If you’re going to put money in an asset and not touch it, the market crushes buying a house.

This is two orders of magnitude lower than the falsely claimed 44%. Imagine being wrong by 100x.

It assumes the average person has nothing better to do than grow wealth in overleveraged, hyper-localized asset. It’s lunacy.

If you don’t control your land, you don’t own your land. What most consider ownership is an investment.

They say they appreciate innovation, just not in their backyard.

Someone can’t advise you unless they watch you play the game.

When you shoot the messenger, you lose your messengers. Shooting messengers leads to never getting messages.

Macro and micro are both important. However, exceptional macro and good enough micro make one a top player. This is true of life and company building.

NIMBYs control most of American real estate. It makes real estate a zero-sum game where only a select few get to enjoy an area.

The Best Imaginable stage represents the pinnacle, where "there is no better way one could imagine" meeting a business need using current technology.

The intersection of those who understand the core problems in real estate and those with the capability of building to solve the problems is almost zero.

Life is a series of prioritizations. You become what you prioritize.

Many things in life are features and not bugs.

Spielberg, Phil Knight, and Steve Jobs had a similar management framework– hire smart people who care about the mission, tell them the problems, and trust them to find the best solutions. Directing, shoes, and technology are somehow the same.

If you want something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. To be great, you need the abilities of that busy person.

Refactoring too often and too early is the bane of shipping. Pre-optimization is the root of all evil.

From a management perspective, many think building a startup is like architecture: strategy, planning, execution. Build, build, build! At Ender, we think it’s more like gardening.

A simple, hard thing is to be happy for others’ success.

If people feel like they’re laying bricks, they’re in the wrong place. Build to change a system.

Not every employee needs to follow the same core values. Not everyone needs to be fearless and first principled.

If an organization fails to handle edge cases, it’s no longer respectable. It’s a bureaucracy.

You can be competent, disciplined, and even prioritize correctly, but if you’re inefficient, it doesn’t matter.

Founder David Packard learned from ranching that managing requires balance: "if you slack off, the cattle walk away. If you push too hard, the cattle run off scared."

Our minds only have so much random access memory (RAM). How we use our RAM is how we live our lives.

It’s often impossible to be perfect. Infrastructure lock-in and incentives lead to good enough winning.

When you aren't highly competent in an area, you cannot accurately judge performance.

Nothing matters and everything matters. These are both true.

In a world where we are bombarded with information, it's easy to outsource our thoughts to others.

Core values need to be a trade off. They need to differentiate a company.

We're ok with difficult personalities. We're not ok with those who derive pleasure from co-workers failing.

The simple part is that the number of workflows is finite. The hard part is that there are hundreds of workflows we need to support in one system.

Unstructured data leads to operational complexity.

While debt needs to eventually be paid, its thoughtful use is core to building a fast growing company.

When there is incomplete communication data, the gaps cause major issues over time, especially at scale.

Tenants don't make renting decisions based upon management workflow tools nor based upon their tenant portal.

For every structure you add, you create managerial work.

He emphasized that "most of running a company is doing the simple, hard things" and stressed the importance of selecting pilot customers carefully, as they "make or break a company."

The fundamental tech in real estate is archaic. Imagine if every accounting system including Quickbooks had a closed API.

At Ender, if one of us fails, we fail together. When one of us wins, we win together.

The best sounding idea is different from the best idea. When ideas hijack our identity, they make us seek confirmation and reject dissent.

Existing property management software is a bloated behemoth. A decrepit skyscraper with a different contractor who built and designed each floor.

We have to think everyone else is missing something. We have to think everyone else is wrong. And we need to be correct.

The leaders were essentially mini-CEOs who ran their area of the business with complete autonomy. This works wonders but only with superstars.

Companies fail when they spend too much time looking at the competition. They're afraid of their competition. Anything their competitors do, they copy.

The business model is an arbitrage on banks who can’t adapt fast enough.

There are thousands of workflows that go into real estate. The technology running the fundamental processes of real estate have not kept pace with our times.