Our Story

By PM Jen, our Broker and Founder

September 17, 2012

When it all began

One Focus started in a borrowed office with a brand-new Dell laptop sitting on a metal desk from the 1960s. My business partner had cleared two agents out of his real estate sales office to make room for me, and that one room was the whole company. A room, a laptop, and a very old desk.

I had spent the years before managing multifamily properties in Harrisburg, including Georgetown Crossing, The Brambles Apartments, and Kings Manor Apartments. These were large properties, over 300 units, with amenities, golf carts and on-site staff. I was good at it and I loved it. I hit my budgets, won awards, got named one of North America’s 30 Under 30 property managers, and was written up in Volume 1 of Michael Levy’s Successful Property Managers.

When the housing crisis hit, I decided it was the right time to go after a goal I had been carrying around for a while, which was getting my MBA. I was accepted into Penn State’s Smeal College of Business for a two-year full-time program, and I finished in May of 2012 with a concentration in finance and real estate. Being a full-time student again at 30 years old at a Big 10 School was an incredible opportunity to have a second chance at everything the university life has to offer.

That same month I decided to make Williamsport my home and start my life with the man who is now my husband. I started looking right away for people who might be interested in what I knew how to do. After a mass message campaign on LinkedIn, I got introduced to my business partner. He owned Fish Real Estate, the market leading real estate sales company in the area, and he had already spotted the gap. The oil and gas activity around the Marcellus Shale had changed the housing market here, and people were coming to him asking for help with managing single and small multi-family rental properties.

We spent the summer of 2012 making plans, and on September 17 we filed the papers and started doing property management. We were called Fish Property Management back then, and we kept that name for the next seven years.

PM Jen in the first One Focus office in Williamsport

Late 2012

One hundred doors in ninety days

I did not expect what happened next. We signed a hundred doors in the first three months, and that isn’t because we invested in marketing. In fact, the only marketing we did was educating our referral sources (Realtors) and this article in the Williamsport Sun Gazette. The oil and gas activity had created a demand for these services, and nobody was focusing on it and pursuing that business. It seemed like as soon as I got the phone line hooked up, it started ringing!

Those first months were a frenzy. I was taking on doors and building every process for the very first time, all at once, and it took everything I had. It also played right into what I am best at, which is stabilizing property and building systems. I was learning about a new market and the single-family management business at the same time, and I got to set the whole thing up the way I had always thought property should be managed. I loved it.

Interns helped me keep my head above water, and about five months in I hired my first employee. I worked out of that one room office for a year and a half before we moved into shared space with our accountant. I used to joke that we got kicked out of the real estate office and had to sleep on the accountant’s couch, which is not quite what happened. What we really needed was room. Room to meet with people, room to store our stuff, and room to hire more people and put them somewhere. We stayed in that office for several years.

Starting the business, I got to choose my market territory, and I chose to manage properties within 25 minutes’ drive time of the Williamsport Office. That gave me access to Montoursville, South Williamsport, Linden, Allenwood, Montgomery, Muncy, Hughesville, Jersey Shore, Trout Run, and Cogan Station. It was a large market, and it kept me running all day every day.

An early One Focus rental property in the Williamsport market

January 2017

The company tripled in a day

By the end of 2016 there were three of us, me, one full-time team member, and one part-time, managing about 250 doors. We wanted to get into the Lock Haven market, and then the chance came to buy an established portfolio.

We acquired Brigandi Kissinger Realtors, a Lock Haven company with about 500 managed doors and a team of six people running them. In a single day the business tripled. We went from 250 doors to 750, from three people to eight, and from one market to two. Williamsport and Lock Haven sit half an hour apart on a map and they are very different rental markets.

It also left me with three offices. Brigandi Kissinger had one in Lock Haven and one in Williamsport, and I already had my own in Williamsport. All three were staffed, so for about a year we were juggling buildings, teams, and two different ways of doing everything while trying to become one company.

The other thing that came with the acquisition was maintenance. They had technicians in house, and overnight, so did we. We have hired our own ever since, working only for us. Until then we depended entirely on third party subcontractors, the way nearly every property manager does. At 750 doors that stops working.

What in house maintenance really bought us was control. Control over when the work happens, control over how it gets done and to what standard, and control over what it costs. When you don’t have control, it takes longer, costs more, and your client is the one who suffers.

The new Lock Haven Business had a similar service radius within 25 minutes’ drive time which includes Howard, Avis, Woodrich, Salladasburg and Mill Hall.

2019

Why we changed our name

Our partnership with Fish Real Estate was a good one. The only real downside was the confusion in the market, and by 2019 that confusion had turned into a problem we couldn’t work around anymore.

Fish Real Estate has more than sixty-five years of history here. Around this area, the name Fish means real estate sales. So, when Fish Property Management was operating right alongside it, two companies with nearly the same name in the same town, our customers were confused. People showed up for job interviews at the wrong office. Mail and packages landed at the wrong building. Owners and renters could not tell whether a house was for sale or for rent. Google reviews ended up on the wrong business profile.

That was nobody’s fault. It is just what happens when a company grows and more people start paying attention to it.

So, we took the chance to rebrand, and I wanted a name that said something about us. We worked with an agency for months on the name and the logo before we landed on One Focus Property Management®.

Residential property management in North Central Pennsylvania is the only thing we do, along with everything it takes to make our investor clients successful in a buy and hold strategy. We are not primarily managing our own portfolio. We are not out selling houses on the side. Your property is not something we get between showings and closings. It is the entire business. It is our one and only focus.

New name, new logo, new colors, and an identity that was finally ours. That part was a blast. It is also when we put our fleet on the road and wrapped every vehicle. For a while there it really did look like One Focus had taken over the town. Lime green, black, and white everywhere you looked.

A wrapped One Focus Property Management fleet vehicle

The same year

How we learned to run a company

Running a company that had ballooned that fast was really difficult. I had always been exceptionally good at managing property. Running the business around it turned out to be a completely different animal, and I struggled with it.

Then I learned about EOS and the book Traction, and in 2019 we became an EOS company.

If you have not run a business on EOS, the short version is that it makes you answer the questions you have been avoiding. Who are we? What do we stand for? Who do we actually serve? What are our people and our tools best at doing? Then it makes you go rebuild the company around your answers.

For us that meant everything. Our vision, data, our people, our processes, our culture, all got redesigned from the ground up rather than tweaked. It took years, was incredibly expensive, and there was no shortcuts.

What came out the other side is a different company. We run on numbers, and we look at them every week. We hire against a scorecard instead of a good feeling in an interview. Everybody knows what they own, and when something breaks we know exactly where to look. That is what people mean when they say high performing, and it is far less glamorous than it sounds. It is mostly just doing the boring things on purpose, over and over, for years.

The One Focus team in a weekly EOS meeting

January 2020

A team on the other side of the world

In January of 2020 we hired our first remote team members in the Philippines. Six years later, five of our fourteen full-time people are there.

They fill the roles that hold the whole operation together. Maintenance coordination, leasing assistant, sales assistant, social media, and accounting assistant. Those jobs take intense attention to detail and real customer service skill, and they take somebody who is sitting at a desk. That last part is harder than it sounds in property management. So much of this work happens out at properties and behind a windshield, and when everybody is out driving around, things stop moving in emails and on phones.

Having part of our team essentially deskbound fixed that. Calls get answered. Work orders get scheduled. Information keeps flowing through the company instead of sitting in somebody’s truck until the end of the day.

They are not a call center and they are not overflow. They are our team, and we have put our money where our mouth is. We have flown to the Philippines twice and spent several days there with them each time. We eat together, we get a little work done, and mostly we just enjoy being in the same place. We have taken catamaran trips, gone ziplining, spent time at the spa, played games, and sung a whole lot of karaoke, which is a very big deal over there. That is not a small investment of time or money, and it is the best thing we have done for how this team works together. You cannot build something real with people you have never sat across from.

If you want the longer version, I told the whole story of how we built our remote team on the podcast.

The One Focus team together in the Philippines

August 2020

Three offices became one

By the summer of 2020 we had three offices. Two in Williamsport and one in Lock Haven. Covid forced every business to rethink how it used space, and when we took a hard look at ours, we did not like what we found. Those offices were draining us. They cost us money, they cost us time, and they cost us energy that belonged to our clients and their properties instead. The pandemic made us and our customers realize that we didn’t really need local offices with people sitting ready to serve walk in traffic.

So in August of 2020 we consolidated. We moved into a single headquarters in Williamsport, chosen because it could serve us well for a long time, and we replaced the other offices with small storage outposts across our markets. We also built our fleet at the same time, enabling us to essentially have mobile workspaces. Our materials and our people are still spread throughout the whole territory.

We used to have a lot of locations. Now we have one, and we believe it is the better answer for what people actually need from us.

The One Focus headquarters in Williamsport

September 2021

Danville, and a market built from scratch

Once we got through the EOS work, I felt like we finally had a real handle on the two markets we were already serving. That was when I knew we were ready to expand, and there was only one other place I really wanted to go. Danville, Lewisburg, and Bloomsburg.

This time we did not buy our way in. In September of 2021 we planted the market ourselves, working out of the small business incubator at DRIVE while we got established there. It was a completely different feeling from the Lock Haven acquisition. We got to build a market on our own terms, taking only the properties we wanted and only the clients who fit our model.

We serve Milton, Lewisburg, Danville, Bloomsburg, and Berwick in that market, and we have been growing that portfolio ever since. I love learning and working in those communities.

That same fall I bought out my business partner and became the sole owner and broker of One Focus. Our partnership had done exactly what we started it to do, and this was the natural next step for both of us. One Focus has been completely independent ever since.

A managed rental property in the Danville market

July 2026

CRMC®

In July 2026 One Focus earned the Certified Residential Management Company® designation from the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM®). It is the highest certification a property management company can hold. At the time, fewer than 40 companies in the United States held one and we were only the second company in Pennsylvania to earn it.

In 2016, I had been a NARPM member for two years when I first learned what CRMC was, and once I understood it, I knew it was the only true mark of excellence my industry hands out. So I went after it. That was a lofty thing to decide at the time, because we were nowhere close to qualifying for it.

The next ten years are what got us there. Every step we took to grow the company, adopting EOS, every process we built, every change that made us run smoother or serve people better or take risk off our clients, all of it added up to this. We did all of it to serve our clients better, to take risk off their shoulders, and to build a company that could outlast me. The certification is simply the proof that it worked.

To earn a CRMC you need a Master Property Manager on staff and 500 documented unit years of experience, and you have to pass an audit. The audit was intense. It examines everything and measures it against the standard of excellence.

We celebrated hard when it came through, because ten years is a long time to chase one thing. We were only the second company in Pennsylvania to earn it. Trust Art Realty earned theirs a few months ahead of us.

PM Jen with the CRMC designation from NARPM

What we got wrong

A lot of property management companies have a story like this one, and ours is no different. You start, you grow, you scale, and at some point you get serious about your processes and about following them the same way every single time. That is when you learn the real lesson, which is that exceptions are where mistakes come from.

For the first seven years we said yes to a lot of properties that were not right for us. I am a buy and hold real estate investor too and I empathize with every owner who has a property and needs help, and I want to help all of them. That instinct is not a bad one, but it was punishing to the team and company to try and be the solution for everyone.

As our team grew and our responsibilities grew, I knew I had to narrow. Expanding into a new market taught me that, and scaling taught me that. So, we spent a couple of years refining our selection criteria and getting clear about which clients and which properties we were going to keep working with.

For a while we were letting go of more doors than we were taking on. That was a completely conscious decision, but scary, nonetheless. Our portfolio had peaked at 750 doors and we brought it down on purpose, because a smaller book of the right clients makes a stronger company than a big book of the wrong ones. Today we manage between 500 and 600 doors, and it is a far better book of business than 750 ever was. It was hard, too. Ending a relationship with an owner who has been with you for years is difficult, and there were conversations I did not enjoy having.

If I had it to do over again, I would have been crystal clear about who we serve from the very beginning. That is a common thing property managers say, and I hear it a lot, because counseling other property managers through this exact problem is a big part of what I do now.

Who we are the right fit for

We are built for buy and hold investors who own single and multi-family long term unfurnished Class A and B rentals. People who buy a property knowing they are going to own it a long time, and who want to be good stewards of it the whole way through. Some of them self-managed for a while and learned exactly how much time and money it takes to do well. Others knew from the start that this work was never going to be their skill set. Either way, they do not think they should be shut out of buy and hold investing just because they cannot or will not do the tasks themselves. I agree with them. Holding property takes a structure that keeps the asset stable and performing, and there is no rule anywhere saying you have to be the person who builds it.

What makes it work is a real handoff. Our best clients let us choose the tenant, let us tell them what the property will rent for, and let us make decisions up to a threshold we agree on before we ever start. Above that line we come to them, and they answer quickly. They keep reserves, because they know a rental does not hand you the same number every month. None of that means handing over the keys and disappearing. It means deciding once, up front, where your line is, and then letting us work below it.

The towns we cover:

Williamsport area: Williamsport, South Williamsport, Montoursville, Loyalsock, Linden, Montgomery, Hughesville, Muncy
Lock Haven area: Lock Haven, Mill Hall, Beech Creek, Flemington, Jersey Shore
Danville area: Danville, Milton, Lewisburg, Bloomsburg, Berwick

If that sounds like you and your property sits in one of those towns, here is how to get started with One Focus property management.

Who we are not right for

We are not the right company for short-term investors. If your plan is to get your cash back out quickly, we are going to be pulling toward different things from the beginning.

We also do not manage short-term rentals, mid-term rentals, student rentals, or furnished rentals, and we do not take on co-living or rooming houses. We will manage manufactured homes, but we do not manage manufactured home communities. Commercial properties aren’t right for us, although office/retail in a main street mixed use with residential is workable with our processes. We do not manage Class C and D properties. Every one of those is a specialty with its own calendar, its own rules, and its own kind of resident, and doing any of them excellently means building a company around it. We built ours around something else.

And we are not the right fit for an owner without capital reserves. Rental property does not hand you the same number every month. Cash flow moves, things break, and every property needs real money put back into it over time. When there is no reserve sitting behind the property, every ordinary bump turns into an emergency, and neither of us can do our job well.

None of this is a judgment about you or about your strategy. Plenty of excellent investors do the things on this list and do them well. They just need a different company than this one.

What comes next

One Focus is my company, and I built it to provide the best services I can imagine to my clients. But I have a much bigger vision than one company in Central Pennsylvania, because there are only so many investors and only so many properties I can personally work with.

I want there to be more companies that run the way this one does. I want you to have excellent options for managing the property you buy and hold, no matter where you live. And I want talented people to look at this industry and want in, to go looking for companies like mine on purpose instead of never considering property management at all.

That is why I launched Hold It with PM Jen at the end of 2024. It is a YouTube channel, a podcast, online content, speaking at conferences and events and meetups, and courses I teach both online and in person. One Focus is the company. Hold It is how I try to move the whole industry.

If you want to follow along while I work on that, come see what I am doing and subscribe to the newsletter.

I am going about it the same way I tell investors to grow generational wealth, which is slowly. Small steps, taken consistently, over a very long time. Buy and hold works because you stay in it, and this works exactly the same way. I am building a legacy the slow way, on purpose.

Fourteen years in

Fourteen years ago this company was a room somebody cleared out for me, a laptop still in its box, and a metal desk from the 1960s. Today it is a team spread across three Pennsylvania markets and two continents, taking care of somewhere between five and six hundred homes. Almost none of it went the way I planned. The parts I am proudest of are the ones where we got smaller on purpose, said no to work we could have taken, and spent years fixing things nobody outside this company would ever notice. That is what the hold looks like from the inside. It is not exciting, and it is not supposed to be. It is somebody doing the boring things right, over and over, so the people who own these houses do not have to think about them.

If you own property in our markets and you want it held well for a long time, we should talk.