The founder of NU Management said he hires ahead of the standard he has set, not in response to the pressure he is under.
Grant McKay grew his rent roll past the first 100 properties largely on his own, and his keenest observation is the one he believes most principals get wrong: the hours were not the problem – the promise to owners was.
McKay had established his property management business on a different foundation, and he could see that the workload was about to eat into the credibility of his service offering. His view is that this is the threshold most property management businesses miss when thinking about recruitment; overlooking this could damage many rent rolls.
“I thought I can’t go out there and advocate something different and then be dropping the ball all over the place,” McKay said in The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast with REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock.
The way he responded to this bottleneck separated his recruitment strategy from his competitors. McKay mused that most agencies wait until the team is under pressure, the inbox is running hot, and service is starting to slip before rushing to recruit staff.
However, the standards could drop by then, as principals risk recruiting the wrong candidates, and the business becomes more reactive than it was before the headcount grew. This is a timing issue disguised as a recruitment problem, with McKay warning that the cost of getting the timing wrong is far higher than the cost of hiring early.
Planning before panicking
His own approach was to plan for headcount before the urgency arrived.
“Let’s build the team quickly. Even if I’ve got to invest in people, the right people early to manage that growth. So, I’m not reactive to that,” McKay said.
He was equally conscious of what he wanted to avoid when growing headcount. Years of observation of what he felt was wrong with how property management businesses operated had given him a clear picture of the habits a quick hire from the wrong background would drag in with them.
McKay said hiring fast from the conventional property management talent pool, when an agency has set out to do something different, is one of the fastest ways to dilute the standard the agency has been built around. The hire might solve the workload problem, but the underlying issues could seep deeper into the team.
McKay recounted his experience of recruiting a staff member to demonstrate how selecting candidates himself is more effective.
A property manager with more than 10 years’ experience called NU Management directly rather than going through a recruiter. She told McKay the last two offices she had worked in had been negative environments, that she had come across his agency, and it felt different – so she picked up the phone.
McKay said that he met with her despite not having any positions available, not only because her initiative impressed him, but also because she was seeking a different standard rather than just a new job.
Hire to set the benchmark
McKay argued that in property management – where culture can deteriorate quickly under volume – networking and self-selection produce better results than the standard interview process. Someone who has actively sought out a better environment is far more likely to engender that positive culture than one who took the role because the timing was convenient.
This is why more agency leaders are now open to candidates from outside traditional property management backgrounds like hospitality, customer service, and other roles built around the client and service, according to McKay.
His view is that those habits are sticky, and the agency that does not actively decide who it wants to recruit out of the candidate pool will end up reproducing what already exists in the market.
McKay added that recruiting out of desperation when the agency is stretched could be detrimental for an agency in terms of cost, a drop in the quality of service, damaged team confidence, and the reputational fallout that follows when owners begin to notice.
The property management businesses that understand this before feeling pressured into making a decision are the ones that improve as they scale and hire to stay ahead of the standard they have set, he concluded.
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.