I connected with Gina Davis a number of times this year; given her experience; she knows where the bodies are buried. Twenty-five years in property management in every role from leasing agent to SVP of asset management and now on the vendor side at PestShare. That trajectory matters. It means she’s seen both what sellers promise and what buyers actually need.

So when we talked about getting to hell yes, we weren’t discussing pest control tactics. We were talking about how a line-item expense becomes a corporate initiative, and what has to break before buyers start looking for alternatives.

From Operations to Sales: Reading the Room Differently

Gina’s transition from Trilogy Investments to PestShare wasn’t about switching teams, it was about leveraging insight. The property management industry is small enough that everyone knows everyone, but few people understand the gap between what happens on site and what gets discussed in underwriting.

“Listen, at the end of the day, there’s property managers that are super satisfied with the services that they’re getting. And there are some property managers that aren’t satisfied. But guess what? Corporate dictates some of the vendors that they can and cannot use.”

This is the core tension in B2B property management sales. The pain lives on site. The budget authority lives at a corporation. And the buying decision gets made in underwriting sometimes before the property is even stabilized.

The Real Problem Isn’t Pests

When Gina describes PestShare as “Uber for pest control,” she’s not selling convenience. She’s selling predictability in an expense category that everyone assumes they understand but few actually track accurately.

“You might budget five bucks a door for pest control services. Fantastic. I can guarantee you probably eighty percent of the on-site teams can’t hit that number by the end of the year.”

The issue isn’t the monthly service. It’s the emergency calls, the appliance replacements after infestations, the carpet pulls after move-outs, the negative reviews that extend vacancy periods. Pest control isn’t a $5-a-door problem, it’s a compounding operational cost that shows up in turn times, retention rates, and ultimately NOI.

Property managers know this. They’re the ones fielding the 2 AM resident calls. But that knowledge doesn’t automatically travel up to the people controlling vendor contracts.

How Service Procurement Becomes Strategic

PestShare integrates with property management systems and leverages a national network of vetted service providers, which sounds tactical until you consider what it actually solves: the four degrees of separation between where the service happens and where it gets budgeted.

Site level procures pest control constantly – the conventional way. Then you have the fee manager coordinating. Then the asset manager reviewed budgets. Then the investor underwrote the deal. By the time the expense gets to underwriting, it’s abstracted into a predictable line item.

Except it’s not predictable. And that’s where Gina’s pitch changes the conversation.

“When you’re underwriting a deal, knowing that there’s going to be an expense for pest control, you’re going to see a breakout of a budget of what we’re proposing to you and all the fees.”

If pest control is getting underwritten as a planned expense not a site-level exception. Then it needs to be defensible at the corporate level. That shifts the buyer from the property manager to the regional manager, asset manager, or even the investor.

What Makes It Urgent

The objection Gina hears most is price. “I pay five bucks for a door.” But price isn’t actually the objection, it’s the proxy for something deeper: trust in the status quo.

What breaks that trust? Usually one of three things:

1. Retention pressure. When NOI is tied to keeping residents, and pest complaints show up in reviews and renewal decisions, the cost calculation changes. A $5 service that takes three weeks to respond isn’t cheaper than a $15 service that resolves the issue in three days with a 30-day guarantee.
   
2. Scale problems. When you’re managing multiple properties across different markets, and each site is procuring pest control differently, standardization becomes valuable. Consistency across a portfolio reduces admin burden and creates leverage in vendor relationships.
   
3. Audit exposure. When investors start asking why actual pest expenses are 3x the underwriting projection, suddenly you need data. And if you don’t have it, you need a vendor who does.
   

Gina’s advantage is that she can surface these gaps before they become crises. She’s been the person trying to make the budget work. She knows what gets hidden, what gets moved between line items, and what eventually breaks.

The Buy Box Isn’t Who You Think

In property management vendor sales, it’s easy to assume the buyer is whoever feels the pain most acutely. But pain doesn’t equal buying authority.

“There’s nothing more expensive than the wrong customer at the right price.”

Gina borrowed that principle from her operations days. Now she’s applying it in reverse. PestShare isn’t trying to sell every property manager, they’re looking for companies where pest control has already become a strategic conversation. Where retention matters more than the monthly invoice. Where corporations are willing to standardize vendor relationships to reduce portfolio-wide risk.

That’s a much smaller addressable market than “every property manager with pest problems.” But it’s the right market. Because those buyers aren’t shopping on price, they’re evaluating total cost of ownership, which includes resident satisfaction, review management, and predictable budgeting.

From Line Item to Leverage

What Gina described isn’t unique to pest control. It’s the pattern that happens when an operational expense becomes strategic:

• The pain is local, but the solution needs to be corporate
• The buyer isn’t who feels the problem, it’s who controls the budget
• The urgency isn’t about the problem itself, it’s about what the problem reveals (retention risk, budget variability, lack of standardization)
• The competition isn’t other vendors, it’s inertia and fragmented procurement

When service procurement moves from tactical to strategic, the sales conversation changes entirely. You’re no longer selling a solution to a problem. You’re selling visibility, consistency, and risk reduction across a portfolio.

And you need someone who’s been in the room on both sides to make that case credibly.

What I’m Thinking About

Hell Yes! buyers don’t need education about the problem. They need proof that you understand the constraint.

If your buyer says “I pay $5 a door,” they’re not objecting to your price, they’re testing whether you know what they actually spend. If you can show them the hidden costs, you’re not selling pest control. You’re selling budget predictability.

The gap between site-level pain and corporate-level authority is where most B2B property management sales stall. Bridging that gap requires someone who’s lived on both sides.

Gina and I talked about why vendor selection happens at corporate, how NOI goals shape fee manager priorities, and what it takes to move an operational expense into the underwriting conversation.

Catch the replay and I’m curious: Are you solving a site problem or a corporate problem? Because they require different buyers entirely.