Ten cities, 9,964 miles, and 156 hours of drive time. Sentral chief product officer Todd Butler has been on a journey over the past year.
In September 2023, Butler became a digital nomad, traveling across the nation and staying in fully furnished units at communities managed by Sentral, a full-service multifamily operator, for a month to 45 days in each location.
The idea started in jest. When he joined Sentral in early 2023, he was no longer tied to Dallas, where he moved for a job in March 2020 and then subsequently worked from his apartment for the next two-plus years during the pandemic. Once at Sentral and free to relocate, his first instinct was to move down the road to Austin for a change of scenery. However, while on a call with his executive team at Sentral, they joked he could stay at a bunch of properties to get a crash course in Sentral while he was figuring out his next home base.
“I love to travel. I backpacked around to find myself after college, places like Europe and Australia, and I would pick up part-time jobs in those locations to try and live like a local. But I had never taken the time to really explore the United States, my own backyard,” he says. “And the more I thought about it, this was a great opportunity to better understand the product and the nuances in each of the buildings. By traveling and doing this, it helped me see our product in practice, get quicker feedback to our product team, and make the on-site team feel like their concerns and nice-to-haves were being heard and actioned on in a more effective way versus being pushed down from corporate.”
He started in Miami and ended last month in Austin. His other Sentral stays included Atlanta; Nashville, Tennessee; Chicago; Denver; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Los Angeles; and Scottsdale, Arizona. In between the stops, he also checked out other properties, with furnished and non-furnished units, that Sentral manages or has an affiliation.
Butler’s on-the-ground experience at the Sentral properties would start with the check-in process as a guest and looking at it from a resident perspective to see how it could be improved. He would spend time in the lobby a couple of days a week to watch the experience of guests and residents coming in and listen to the overall sentiment.
He would aim to connect with all the staff and would try to get everyone together for a pizza party or happy hour once or twice during his stay.
He also talked with site teams about how they use the SentralLife app. “If you give someone a tool and it’s not intuitive, the execution is going to fall flat, content will not be fresh, and it will feel like more of a burden than a benefit. By listening to our staff feedback and interacting with the product as a guest and a resident, it helped me work on those pain points in real time and improve how we train our teams,” he says. “Where there are deficits or things that can be improved, our hospitality-focused staff do their best to execute as flawlessly as possible, and then I help fix gaps in tech or operations.”
In Portland, he arrived at The Sutton, a new 15-story luxury tower, just when Sentral was taking over the management of the property.
“I was able to jump in and be another set of hands for the transition team taking over management of the property and implementing our furnished unit program,” he shares. “You get pretty intimate with the team because you’re rolling up your sleeves to get the property set up and tackle challenges as they arise together.”
For his personal journey, he says each city had its different charms.
He had never been to Portland before and even stopped at the world’s last Blockbuster store in Bend along the way. While only ever staying a few days in Chicago for work in the past, he says he was surprised at how much he liked it, even though his stay was in February, attributing it to being a beautiful and clean city with great people and their Midwest kindness.
The property where he stayed in Nashville brought back memories because it was across the street from where Niido, a flex living company where Butler previously worked, had its first property. And he notes he enjoyed his time in San Francisco, where he worked out of the office of Sentral’s majority investor.
While the units where Butler stayed are furnished with all the fixtures of a home, he admits to not taking advantage of the full kitchens and opted to venture out whenever possible.
“I would intentionally make the effort to go do something local,” he says. “That’s the whole point—enjoying the local cuisine, checking out the vibe, and people watching. You want to make sure you try what the city is known for.”
The experience also taught him how much of a minimalist he is.
“I am constantly shocked by how little I need to live off of day to day,” he says. “With each new location, I found myself shedding more and more ‘dead weight’ to make traveling easier. Moving forward, when I buy a house or a condo, my closet is going to be empty. It was an education and resetting about materialism and what you need to enjoy your life.”
As he was finishing his final leg, Butler says he’s working on a proposal to allow others to live, work, and travel and get to know cities the way he has.
“This was more of a passion project for me. As I’ve been doing this, I was able to understand that not many companies have a robust network of furnished units in places people want to be. The ability for someone like me or anyone else to travel and experience great cities in the U.S. like a local within a network of furnished communities that are welcoming and apartment-centric, I think there’s an opportunity for packaging it in a programmatic way—think of it as ‘subscription living.’ With many people being able to work remote and unsure of where to start the next chapter of their lives, what a great way to ‘try before you buy.’”
As for Sentral’s and Butler’s next chapter, he says the firm continues to expand. It recently took over management of Spera in San Francisco and opened a new property, The Everett, in Nashville last week. Over the next six months, the firm anticipates onboarding at least one property a month from California to Atlanta.
“The ethos of Sentral is changing the way people live, work, and travel,” he says. “That is in the DNA of what we do.”
Butler says he’ll be off the Sentral trail for the holidays, but, with the pipeline of new properties stacking up, he’ll be traveling to these new properties to assist with the onboarding in the first part of 2025.
“That won’t be permanent,” he says. “But I haven’t completely settled on my permanent stop. And with the velocity of inbound business, it makes sense to keep my stuff in storage and insert myself where needed to help Sentral continue to scale.”
