This head of property management has such a robust onboarding process that he can charge a 7.7 per cent fee without resistance.
Most property owners walk into a management agreement with the fee already firmly implanted in their minds. It is the first question they ask, the first number they compare, and the frame for every conversation that follows.
However, Alistair Shearer, partner and head of property management at Belle Property Mornington and Mount Eliza, has spent years building this onboarding process designed to flip this sequence on its head. The result is that he charges 7.7 per cent, but his new owners ask whether the number is a typo because it sounds lower than expected.
Speaking with REB director and co-founder of Managed, Alex Whitlock, in The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast, Shearer said he was driven to embed this onboarding process after watching a generation of property managers concede the relationship before they have even introduced themselves. This is because they let the fee be the first piece of information that is divulged to the owner.
Articulating your services justifies your price
However, Shearer has a specific process in place in the agency. Every new owner sits through a face-to-face meeting that lasts around two hours before a lease is signed. If the owner is interstate, the meeting happens online. He emphasised that an emailed presentation with a follow-up call is not an option.
“You can’t just send an email and say here’s my presentation, that’s the end of it,” he explained.
“It’s more about building that relationship, making them have confidence that you know what you’re doing.”
Shearer runs the new owner through several topics in his two-hour presentations. These include:
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Leasing and advertising
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How the property would be managed once tenanted
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The routine inspection process
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The proactive rent review and lease renewal cycle
Owners with a friend who once had a nightmare tenant get the conversation about how that doesn’t happen under Belle Property’s process. Owners worried about maintenance and disrepair receive a detailed understanding of the inspection workflow.
Shearer said he wants the concerns raised in the meeting so he can avoid a complaint email three months later.
“We need to explain how that won’t happen under our management because of the processes and systems we have in place. Proactively, not reactive,” he underscored.
The last piece of the presentation is informing the owner of the property management fee. Shearer said that by the time the number arrives, the owner has spent two hours understanding what it covers – the leasing process, the frequency of communication, the inspection methodology, the rent review approach, and the proactive arrears management. The number lands as a confirmation of value already established, not as a negotiation about price.
Shearer cited an example of when a peer asks how the model actually works. A first-time investor sat through the full presentation, visibly tightening as the list of services kept growing. The owner kept asking about the cost. Shearer kept walking through the process. When the fee finally appeared at the end, the response was the opposite of pushback.
“He was like, oh my goodness, I thought it’d be a lot more than that,” Shearer recounted.
“You just need to make sure that you explain it to them. Articulate the value, and they will pay for it.”
Owners need to understand your value proposition
Shearer is aware that other agencies charge lower fees, but he has no interest in matching them. He argued that the owner who leaves Belle Property to save for a couple of percentage points did not do so because of the maths. They left because somewhere in the conversation about the cheaper agency, the value was never properly explained.
“There are other agents at 5.5 per cent,” he acknowledges.
“We’re not that agency. What is it you want? Are they going to do everything that we’re going to do? Often, the service levels at a cheaper agency are going to be nowhere near what a premium agency will provide.”
Premium service leads to premium price
Shearer maintained that the agencies losing management to cheaper competitors are not losing them on price. They are losing them the moment the fee was the first thing the owner heard, before anyone had earned the right to ask for it.
For Shearer, the two-hour meeting is not overhead. It is the mechanism that makes the premium price defensible and the owner relationship durable.
Managed was built to help next-generation agencies win market share fast. It is the only comprehensive property management platform that exclusively delivers secure, instant, and automated direct payments from tenant to landlord, eradicating the need for a trust account.
If you’d like to find out how Managed can help power your growth, call Conor on 0452 298 394 or book a discovery call today.