Many property managers invest heavily in winning new landlords but don’t embed a rigorous process for retaining them, a prominent real estate trainer has said.
Tom Panos – who owns Real Estate Gym – joined REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock in The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast, where he flagged that property managers are leaving money on the table.
Elaborating on how they are doing this, Panos said the gap between a business development manager’s energy to win new property owners and the deafening silence that follows it is costing agencies their hard-earned clients.
The problem typically begins immediately after sign-up, Panos said, and recounted a conversation with a senior industry figure who had just been through the experience as a landlord.
“They said to me, ‘When they actually went to sign me up, it was all positive. But as soon as I signed up and started the onboarding experience, I was confused. What happens next?’”
The fix, he said, is straightforward but rarely executed: he suggested what he calls the “set to rent” meeting, borrowed from the sales side of the business, where top agents run a “set to sell” session before a campaign begins.
“If you just turned around and said, ‘Hey, I just want to have a very quick meeting which is called our set to rent meeting – what we’re going to cover is your onboarding, the first 14 days, what to expect, what can go wrong, what we will be doing’ – you will find your landlords are going to think, man, I’m dealing with a pro here,” Panos said.
He envisions the set-to-rent meeting as running through the team behind the asset, the compliance checks, and the professional photography. On top of this, it would include a strategy session after the first week of market feedback. It does not leave the landlord wondering what happens next.
Speed to service is the simplest competitive advantage most agencies are leaving on the table, Panos said. He pointed to a recent example where a barber he knows bought an investment property. The agent who sold it promised a property manager would call. That call did not come.
“About a week later, I got some phone call, and he goes, ‘Oh, I spoke to such and such, he reckons that you might want to rent out your property’. But in the meantime, I’d already sat eyeball-to-eyeball with this guy,” Panos said.
“It was both speed to service – this person was there quickly – and it was face-to-face. They understood this was important. This is an eyeball-to-eyeball meeting.”
Panos said there’s one simple rule: the first call often wins the deal in life. And in property management, where most agencies respond slowly (if at all), the agency that moves first and moves in person is often the only one the landlord remembers.
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.
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