From Trust to Authority: What the 2026 NARPM Keynotes Were Really Telling Us

Over 100 panelists. Roundtables, breakouts, main stage sessions. Three days in New Orleans with some of the sharpest operators in our industry under one roof. There was a lot to take in at NARPM Broker/Owner 2026, but when I look back at the marquee keynotes, they were all saying the same thing in different ways.

The message: property managers have to stop underselling our value and start owning our authority.

I want to walk through the three keynotes that anchored the conference, because each one came at this idea from a different angle, and together they make a case that's worth sitting with.

Jennifer Ruelens: "You've Been Drafted"

Jennifer Ruelens of PM Jen delivered what she said was the first keynote of her 22-year career, and she didn't hold back. She opened with something personal before getting into her argument:

"This organization is my family. You all are my friends, and this is my very first keynote/main stage presentation of my entire career and I am so passionate about it."

Then she got to the point. Her central claim is that everyday real estate investors are being steered in the wrong direction by people whose financial incentives are tied to closing deals, not to long-term performance. She had a name for one of the archetypes she sees most often: "The Short Game Professionals." Transaction-based agents and influencers who, despite good intentions, are structurally unable to give investors the full picture.

"The short game professionals do mean well, but it doesn't really serve them to break down all of the operational realities of what this is going to be. Their whole paycheck isn't yielded until the transaction closes, and they're not being compensated for the performance of that asset. Their job is to transact."

Property managers, she argued, operate under a fundamentally different and more aligned model, one the industry has consistently failed to promote loudly enough:

"When our clients make money, we make money, right? They get rich slow, we get rich slow. When we do a crappy job on their property management, we lose the contract, they sell the property, our business declines. When we do well on their property and manage it well for positive returns, they buy more properties and our business grows. It's this wonderful shared wealth building that we don't talk about enough as an asset to us."

Her closing line was the one that's stuck with me: "We are going to become authorities in the real estate investment space, and that's all there is to it. You actually don't have a choice, you've been drafted."

This is the part of the message I think the industry has been resisting for too long. Most PMs I know are still framing themselves as a service provider to a transaction the agent set up. Ruelens is saying: that's backwards. We should be the trusted advisor. The agent should be the vendor we refer clients to when they're ready to buy more.

Marcus Sheridan: Trust as a Principle

Marcus Sheridan, co-founder of AI Trust Signals and PriceGuide.AI, brought a different kind of energy - the hard-won wisdom of someone who has stared down business failure and lived to tell about it.

Sheridan started his pool company in 2001 out of what he described as "the back of a beat-up pickup truck." Things were going reasonably well until the 2008 economic crash. Within 48 hours, five customers had withdrawn their deposits. By January 2009, things were still getting worse.

Instead of accepting defeat, he made the crash into a pivot. He asked the crowd to raise their hands if hardship had taught them something important about themselves and their business. Then he invited one audience member to share their experience.

"You said, 'It was the best thing that ever happened to me,'" Sheridan told the attendee. "The reason is because he decided to make it the best thing that ever happened to him."

The pivot, in Sheridan's case, was to do what most businesses were too cautious to do at the time: radically and openly address every question, worry, and fear his customers had. Online. In public. Without hedging.

"If you just obsess over your customer's questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, and you're willing to address them online, you might just save your business. So that's what we decided to do."

His team set out to become the "Wikipedia" of pools, and eventually built the most-trafficked swimming pool website in the world. Not through advertising. Through trust.

And then he said something that landed harder than anything else in the keynote:

"Google is a platform and platforms come and go, but trust is a principle and principles never change."

That line is going to stick with me for a long time. It's also a useful filter for almost every marketing decision PMs make. The platforms we obsess over (Google, Facebook, even the ratings sites) are temporary. Trust is the only thing that compounds.

John DiJulius: The Enemy of Every Brand

John R. DiJulius III, Founder and Chief Revolution Officer of The DiJulius Group, closed out the marquee sessions with a masterclass in customer experience, drawing on decades of research and real-world examples from Disney, Starbucks, and the Ritz Carlton.

His framework had three pillars. The first he called "everboarding" - the practice of consistently reinforcing the customer experience vision with your team. Not one-time training. Constant reinforcement:

"The first thing great brands do is they create a day in the life of their customer, and they constantly show that. Every week you show your team something. It could be something already learned. It's just to remind you. It's like deodorant."

The second pillar is a clear customer experience action statement — a north star that guides every employee interaction. The third is about eliminating inconsistency, which he identified as the single greatest threat to any brand's reputation:

"The enemy of any customer experience or a brand's reputation is inconsistency."

He was careful to remind PMs that the customer experience extends well beyond our own direct interactions. Maintenance workers, repair crews, contractors — they're all part of the brand whether we treat them that way or not.

"They're part of the experience."

DiJulius closed with a personal challenge: "Today, I'm going to be remembered for how I treat others. How many people had a better day as a result of coming into contact with me?"

Putting It Together

Three keynotes. Three different framings. One underlying argument.

Ruelens said it best: be the authority. Sheridan said: build the trust. DiJulius said: deliver consistently. Stack those three on top of each other and you have something close to a complete playbook for what a serious property management business should be doing over the next five years.

The conference also featured a packed slate of other notable sessions — Brad Johnson of ProfitCoach on the 2026 State of Financial Performance, Ray Hespen of Property Meld on recalibrating owner conversations with maintenance data, Kelli Segretto on building the right tech stack for growth, and Joey Coleman's keynote Never Lose a Tenant Again on building owner-retention systems in the first 100 days. There was real substance everywhere you turned.

But the three marquee keynotes were the throughline. And the throughline was the message.

Stop underselling. Be the authority. Build the trust. Deliver consistently.

I think most of us left New Orleans with a clearer sense of what this industry is supposed to look like in five years. Whether we get there is up to us.

—Peter

Financial Interest Disclosure: NARPM has sponsored projects and media that I have been involved with or have an ownership interest in. They comp’d a Press Pass to the 2026 Broker/Owner conference for a reporter covering the event for me. NARPM did not provide any compensation or incentive for this article or the conference coverage beyond that ticket.