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Ensuring your rent roll continues to grow requires diligence and relevant marketing strategies, writes Debbie Palmer of PPM Group
IN THEIR efforts to build rent rolls, many business owners, property managers and business development managers waste time and money on marketing strategies that often don’t work and then become costly.
They overlook the easiest and most cost-effective way to build the rent roll: via the people you currently have relationships with or come in contact with on a daily basis.
If you want to grow your rent roll and thrive, you absolutely have to have a dedicated person to drive this growth.
The property manager is busy enough; you need someone with sales and relationship development skills who is 100 per cent dedicated to building and retaining the business.
So, take time out now to review and implement the following strategies:
Ensure you have a database with the email addresses of all landlords, tenants, tradespeople, prospective investors, prospective tenants, past landlords and past tenants
Send regular emails focused on generating new business. These could include:
– An overview of sale properties of the month
– Incentives for transferring the management of other properties to your department (i.e. first three months free)
– Incentives for referring new managements (e.g. $200 gift card)
– Incentives for tenants to purchase properties through your agency (e.g. last two weeks’ rent free)
Regularly phone your landlords and tenants to conduct service surveys, not just to generate business but to show you are dedicated to customer satisfaction
Reward all team members (including sales staff) for new managements
Ensure your sales team all have marketing brochure material – available at open houses and auction sales – to promote the property management department
Ensure you have a system, procedure or form on which every ‘investment’ sale enquiry is recorded, with contact details. This allows the business development manager to contact every investor to introduce themselves and the business
Allocate time for the business development manager to introduce themselves to local business owners/professionals and to keep in constant contact
Establish a database of referring clients so you can keep in touch with them on a regular basis
Invite the business development manager to sales meetings to update all parties on current investment property listings, appraisals required, tenants looking to purchase, etc
Always include and promote the property management department on all sales marketing material
Place rental lists and marketing material everywhere on local noticeboards (i.e. kindergartens, shopping centres, churches, sports clubs, libraries, etc.)
Write editorials about the local market or relevant property management issues for your local newspaper
Work your website to ensure clients and customers are driven to it. A great starting point for this is to include your most commonly requested tenant forms on the site (e.g. tenant application form). Most important, if you are going to drive people to a particular web page, make sure you include marketing advertisements that will generate more income for your business
Include promotional and marketing referral incentive statements on all general correspondence that goes out of your office (e.g. something at the bottom of your end-of-month statements)
Building a thriving business takes planning, time, action, persistence and effort. Apply these principles, however, and you will see results.
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