MoveZen’s 2026 Small Business of the Year Submission

Published Nov 9, 2026

Submission for the 2026 Business North Carolina Small Business of the Year Award

We’re presenting our case after the hardest twelve months for small rental owners we’ve seen in nearly two decades. We grew revenue 5% while holding expenses nearly flat, raised salaries, launched three new services, and kept giving back across the state. What follows is how we did it.

Why We’re Submitting: The State of the Small North Carolina Rental Owner

Before we make the case for MoveZen, we want to make the case for the people we work for, because this submission doesn’t mean much without the context it was earned in.

The small North Carolina rental owner just lived through the toughest stretch we’ve seen since the 2008 housing crisis. Labor costs climbed. Property tax reassessments landed hard across our metros. HOA dues rose. Insurance premiums rose faster than nearly everything else. Each of those line items squeezed mom-and-pop investors from a different direction at the same time, and none of them are optional.

We watched the consequences up close. Some owners sold. Others moved adult children into what used to be a rental, because housing has become genuinely unaffordable for the next generation and the family home was the only lever left to pull. These aren’t Wall Street portfolios rebalancing. These are people who bought one or two houses as a retirement plan and are now doing hard math at the kitchen table.

Here’s the part that shapes our whole year: when an owner goes looking for costs to cut, the management fee is one of the very few line items they actually control. Taxes, insurance, and dues don’t negotiate. We do. At the same moment, private equity backed competitors with effectively unlimited resources are consolidating this industry, betting that locally owned firms like ours can’t survive a margin squeeze like this one.

That’s the environment this submission should be judged against. Independent, locally owned management firms are what stand between North Carolina’s small investors and Wall Street consolidation. This is what one of those firms did with the hardest year we’ve been handed.

The Two Commitments That Shaped Our Year: Efficiency and Retention

Going into this year, we made two commitments. First, become dramatically more efficient so we could hold the line on cost without cutting quality. Second, give owners more reasons to stay with us than the fee gives them to leave.

On efficiency, we didn’t buy our way out of the problem. We built our own software in-house, and we put AI to work on the routine tasks it’s actually good at: auditing our data for errors and answering internal knowledge questions our team used to spend hours hunting down. We didn’t automate the human parts of this business. We automated the parts that were keeping our humans away from owners and residents.

On retention, the logic hasn’t changed since 2006. Happy residents renew leases and take care of the home. Nothing costs an owner more than an empty house, and in our experience, most owners lose more to vacancy every year than they spend on total repairs. Retention isn’t a soft goal for us. It’s the single biggest financial lever we pull on an owner’s behalf.

The Numbers: 5% Revenue Growth on Expenses Held Nearly Flat

Property management is a low-margin business in good years. This wasn’t a good year. As the cost of nearly everything we buy rose, here’s what our books show for the last twelve months: revenue grew 5% while total expenses rose less than 1%.

Here’s what makes those numbers meaningful. We didn’t hold expenses flat by cutting people. We raised salaries this year, and the software we built reduced workloads at the same time. Most businesses facing this market pick between their margins and their team. We think that trade is short-sighted. Keeping a great team through hard times is how you’re still standing, and still good at the job, when the market turns.

This isn’t the first time discipline like this has been recognized. We earned an Inc. 5000 recognition during some of the toughest years in modern business history, in the aftermath of COVID. Same playbook then, same playbook now: self-funded from cash flow, almost no debt, and long-term consistent results over short-term wins.

Three New Services Built for the Customers Everyone Else Overlooks

Efficiency alone doesn’t grow a company in a down market. You have to find people whose problems aren’t being solved. This year we launched three services, and each one targets a customer the industry has been happy to ignore.

Profit Through Resident Satisfaction: The Philosophy Behind the Model

We work for our owners. That’s never been ambiguous. But nearly two decades of cash flow statements have taught us that resident satisfaction is what actually drives owner returns. Residents who feel taken care of renew their leases, care for the home, and pay on time. Every one of those behaviors flows straight to Net Operating Income. The proof: less than 1% of our residents have been evicted over 20 years, including the period since 2020, across 2,000+ doors and seven metro markets. That figure isn’t luck. It’s screening, pricing, and treating people like partners.

The industry is catching up to this. AppFolio’s 2026 renter survey of thousands of US residents echoed the strategy we published back in 2023: invest in what high-quality residents actually value, and use data to find out what that is. We’ve been running that playbook for years.

Common belief in this industry says the manager’s job is to squeeze the resident for the owner’s benefit. We think that’s false, and our returns prove it. Quality residents have great finances for a reason: they find value, and they stay where they’re treated well. We aren’t just rent collectors. We’re housing providers, and we run the business that way because it pays owners to run it that way.

Education We Give Away, Recognition We Earned, and the Charity Work Behind It

We published far more educational content this year than any year prior, all of it written by people who actually do the job, and all of it given away freely, including to owners who will never become customers. Our reasoning is simple: an owner who runs their rental better is good for North Carolina housing whether they ever call us or not.

The recognition followed. Over the past 12 months, we earned a Consumer Choice Award, the Pulse of the City Award for Raleigh, and bronze in Charlotte’s Best from The Charlotte Observer’s readers’ choice awards. Readers’ choice awards matter to us more than industry ones. Our customers voted.

And the giving continued, in person and in dollars. Our team volunteered in the kitchen at the New Hanover County Senior Resource Center, in the warehouse at the Food Bank of Central & Eastern NC, at Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina, and at Vintage Values, the resale shops that fund Wilmington’s domestic violence shelter. We also donated almost 3% of our total profit to charity organizations across the state.

What We Got Wrong, and What We’re Carrying Forward

An honest submission includes the losses. We lost owners this year to the economics of this market. Some sold because the math stopped working. Some cut the management fee because it was the only cost they could cut. We couldn’t save every one of those relationships, and we’ll lose more before conditions improve. We’ve made mistakes, and we’ll make some more.

But here’s where we come out of the last twelve months: a strong team we paid more and asked less of, software we own outright, three new services aimed at people the industry overlooks, and more ways than ever to serve the small investors who make up the backbone of North Carolina’s rental housing, at exactly the moment Wall Street would love to see them gone.

That’s a fight worth showing up for. We plan to keep showing up, whether or not this submission wins. Thank you to Business North Carolina for considering it, and thank you to the owners and residents who trusted a locally owned firm through a year like this one.