Property managers who don’t call every one of their owners each month risk high levels of churn, according to one industry veteran.
Director of growth at offshoring service provider Wingman Group, Nick Georges, has spent enough years inside property management businesses to know what property management sounds like from the owner’s side: silence.
The average property manager (PM) typically handles any issues related to the property, processes the work, and files the paperwork. The owner hears radio silence until something breaks or a lease renewal happens.
In Georges’ view, that is not a service model. It is coasting through with a management agreement attached. It is also the quiet reason many rent rolls churn at what should be unacceptable numbers, but something principals have learned to live with.
Georges – who was previously in senior leadership roles, including national head of property management at LJ Hooker – joined REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock in a The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast episode, where he did not hesitate to give PMs critical advice.
“It’s really hard to lose business in any sector if you’re speaking to your client a minimum of 12 times a year,” Georges told REB.
Relationships lead to retention
Discipline is not optional in property management, he asserted, because the structural protections most service businesses rely on do not exist here. The barrier to switching is an email. The retention work has to be done in the relationship, every month, on a schedule, or it does not get done at all. This should entail one structured call per month instead of only contacting the owner when there is a problem or when a lease is due to expire.
Once reletting, repairs, and inspections are taken into account, the touch points run to 20 or 25 times a year. Georges said that at that frequency, the owner is dealing with someone who knows their property, their priorities, and their tolerance for difficult news, rather than a generic department.
He noted that the pushback he hears most often is that owners do not want 12 empty calls a year, but said that misses the point.
"There’s always something to talk about,” he pointed out.
This could include a rent review, a routine inspection that is due to occur, or local vacancy pressure. Other triggers for contact could be a repair job, an interest rate move, or a nearby listing with a stronger yield that changes how the owner thinks about the asset.
Georges said the point is not to manufacture conversation. It is to make regular contact commercially useful rather than reactive – so that when the difficult call eventually arrives, the relationship behind it is already in good shape.
The proof point Georges leans on is one he has watched up close. Housemark, a business he works with through Wingman, runs its portfolio managers at 250 to 300 properties each, supported by executive assistants in the Philippines handling administrative work. The only key performance indicator (KPI) attached to the structure is the monthly call to the landlord. Over six years, the agency has grown from zero to roughly 3,500 properties under management, picking up around 100 new managements a month, with no acquisitions. Georges suggested that the communication rhythm is not separate from the growth. Rather, it spearheads rent roll growth.
Retention leads to referrals
Several factors lead to the collapse of contact in most agencies, according to Georges. For example, when PMs are buried in administration, the first task that is sacrificed is proactive contact with owners.
He said that when the day fills up with arrears, maintenance, and tenant issues, PMs have little time or energy left to call owners and conduct meaningful conversations on issues that matter the most.
Agencies that hold the cadence successfully have, in his experience, made a deliberate decision about how that time gets protected – through support staff, offshore assistance, or a cleaner operating model.
The compounding benefit sits beyond retention. Georges argues that while a roof repair is still a roof repair that could cost the owner thousands of dollars, owners perceive it differently when the PM has consistently framed decisions around yield, maintenance timing, and long-term value.
It is important to remember that owners talk – in the suburbs they live in, in the investment circles they sit in, in the conversations they have with people running similar portfolios. The PM remembered for useful calls is the one who gets recommended. The one who only ever delivered cost is the one who gets replaced quietly, by an email. If the owners only hear from their PMs when something goes wrong, the foundation for that relationship is weak.
Georges concluded with a warning: that as next-gen agencies keep building around proactive owner contact, the weakness is going to get more expensive.
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