A property manager has insisted that the easiest growth lever in property management is right in front of agencies, but it is leaking out the back door.
Alastair Shearer – partner and head of property management at Belle Property Mornington and Mount Eliza – appeared in The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast with REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock, where he discussed how property management and sales teams could collaborate to win more business.
According to Shearer, property management growth strategies almost always look outward. Agencies buy rent rolls, hire business development managers (BDMs), run digital campaigns, and attend events. Shearer said he has watched principals work through that playbook for years, and his view is that most of them have skipped the simplest source of organic growth they have. It is sitting in the same building. It is the sales department. And it is bleeding management they never had to compete for in the first place.
Shearer uses a specific word for what he sees happening in most real estate businesses: leakage.
“The amount of leakage that can happen out of a business, because the property management team and sales team are not connected, is huge losses,” he told REB.
“You get that alignment happening, there’s just a win straight off the bat.”
How to close the gap
The shape of the problem is familiar to anyone who has worked across both sides of an agency. A buyer purchases an investment property through the sales team. The deal closes, but nobody from the PM department is told.
By the time someone follows up – if anyone does – the management has already gone to a competitor, because the buyer has been interested in property management from the moment they signed the contract, and nobody at the agency they bought through ever picked up the phone.
Shearer’s protocol is built to close that gap. The BDM, or whoever is filling that function, is in every sales meeting. Every buyer who goes unconditional gets a phone call from the PM team while the buyer is still emotionally engaged with the purchase and forming the rest of their plan around it.
Shearer explained that “you build a process into the business where you just naturally call those people and introduce yourself”.
The window matters. According to Shearer, settlement is too late because most owners would have already made the management decision based on whoever talked to them in the weeks beforehand. The agency that calls at unconditional has eight to 12 weeks to demonstrate value before the keys change hands.
He illustrates the point with a recent example of an owner-occupier buyer at unconditional who needed to lease the property out six months later due to changed circumstances. Because the conversation had happened early, the owner already knew who to call. That conversion does not happen if the first contact is weeks after the settlement.
PMs need to win a sales agent’s trust
There is a subtler dynamic underneath the protocol that Shearer has come to understand over the years. Sales agents who lack confidence in their own PM team will refer buyers elsewhere – or simply not refer at all. The instinct is self-protective. Recommending a property manager who fails to follow up reflects badly on the sales agent who made the recommendation, and they know it.
“If they say my property manager is going to call you and they don’t, that makes them look bad,” Shearer observed.
“That’s no good for the brand or the business.”
In Shearer’s view, agencies require a property management department that is operating at a standard the sales team is willing to put their own reputation behind. Until that is in place, no amount of internal mandate is going to produce the referrals an agency could be capturing.
Stop the internal leakage first
His broader observation is that the principle extends beyond the agency’s own walls. Sales agents who operate without a PM division are natural referral partners. Developers selling investment-grade stock are another. Buyer’s agents play the same role in some markets.
But the first move, Shearer stressed, is always internal. The leakage happening inside the building is the cheapest growth available, and most agencies are walking past it on their way to look for something harder.
“It’s not just about restricting it to your own sales team,” he said.
“But your first protocol is to look in your own backyard. That’s an easy win.”
He concluded that the agencies that fix that bottleneck will enjoy scalable and rapid growth in their rent roll.
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.