Many sales agents who close deals are referring clients to PMs outside their own agency, reflecting leadership issues, according to a property management expert.
Director of growth at offshoring service provider Wingman Group, Nick Georges, has seen a pattern in Australian real estate that frustrates him. When a sales agent closes a deal with a property investor, they hand the investor over to the property management team in an awkward non-conversation. Even worse, the investor opts for a property management team at a different agency.
This is another potential relationship that is lost to one agency and grows the rent roll at another. In a Property Management Excellence (PMX) podcast with REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock, Georges said that while the cost is high, most principals have stopped noticing it because the leakage has been normalised.
Georges said: “It blows my mind how many sales agents who work in a real estate office are referring outside of that office.”
While it is tempting for a principal to attack the sales agent for disloyalty or lack of teamwork, Georges has a different view.
“I don’t blame the sales agent for that. I actually blame the organisation.”
Leadership failure means loss of rent rolls
Instead, he said he believes that salespeople refer externally when they do not trust the in-house property management team to protect the relationship they have spent months building. This instinct is self-protective. Recommending a proper department that drops the ball would reflect poorly on the sales agent who made the recommendation.
The solution, Georges explained, is for principals to build a property management department that operates at a standard the sales team is willing to put their own reputation behind. Until that is in place, no amount of internal mandate will produce the referrals the agency could be capturing.
The way Georges describes the cost of leaving the gap open is the part that principals tend to underestimate. The agency does not just lose the first management. It loses the chance to build the broader owner relationship that comes with it – future purchases, referrals to other investors, advisory work over the life of the portfolio.
The client experiences fragmentation where they should have experienced continuity. Georges’ point is that this is not a process failure. It is a leadership failure to design the agency around the client instead of around the silos.
Agencies that see PMs as integral will thrive
Next-gen agencies are operating differently at a structural level from day one, Georges insisted. Instead of introducing property managers (PMs) as someone who picks up the file after settlement, principals position them as part of the business that helps owners make their assets perform.
As a result, the investor experiences a more seamless handover process. They are introduced early (often during the sales process), and the PM starts learning the owner’s priorities before the conversation has narrowed to arrears and repairs.
That intelligence around owners’ goals – whether they are yield expectations, future purchase intent, hold period, maintenance appetite, or risk tolerance – is commercially useful across the entire agency, not just the rent roll, Georges said.
It also creates room for a stronger ecosystem around the client. Mortgage broking, building and pest, trades, leasing strategy, future acquisitions – all of these sit closer to the owner relationship when sales and PM are genuinely connected.
Build an ecosystem of providers
Georges is careful not to overstate the implication. The point is not that every agency needs to bolt six side businesses onto the operation but rather that the owner rarely has a single need. As such, the rent roll is often the most durable part of the relationship. Building the agency around that durability is the structural play.
The market is moving this way regardless of what legacy operators prefer, Georges argued. New entrants and investor-minded founders are already designing their businesses around owner lifetime value rather than the next transaction. Offices still treating property management as an afterthought are not just missing growth. They are training their own clients to trust someone else with the part of the business that compounds.
"Bridging that gap between sales and property management is one way to supercharge your growth," Georges concluded.
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