A former property manager said she believes that the property management relationship is broken at the opening, not the middle.
Mignon Ahrns was an experienced property manager (PM) before joining automated rental payments and property management software provider Managed as a key account manager. She has plenty of observations about the property management industry, including watching agencies repeat the same pattern and knowing that it is no coincidence.
As she saw it, the PM signs up the owner and the property gets tenanted. However, the next time the owner hears anything personal from the agency is when they have to spend money. They’re either confronted with a maintenance approval, a repair quote, or a tenant arrears situation. The relationship that was meant to begin at the appraisal effectively starts at the first invoice.
Ahrns warned that this opening sequence is doing more damage to retention than principals seem to recognise.
“The only time that they ring owners is when they’ve got to spend money,” Ahrns said in The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast with REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock.
However, Ahrns is cautious about where she lays the responsibility for this issue. She emphasised that the PM rarely avoids the owner out of laziness. They are buried in arrears, maintenance, statements, lease issues, and the backend work that still clogs much of the industry.
The workload is real. But it is invisible to the owner. What the owner experiences is the call. Ahrns’ view is that when every call carries a bill, the owner has stopped associating the agency with value within the first three months of the relationship.
Once that association forms, in her experience, every subsequent conversation gets harder. As a result, trust gradually erodes, and fees come under pressure. The owner who would have stayed for a decade with proper engagement instead becomes one who answers a competitor’s call without hesitation, because they had already decided their current relationship was transactional.
Ahrns made it clear that more contact points alone cannot fix this. The remedy has to start at the initial stages, when the owner is forming the picture of what the agency actually does.
Set the tone early with owners
Her view of what most owners need at that stage is straightforward. They need to understand, early, what the agency is managing on their behalf and how decisions are made. They need to feel they are seeing the work, not waiting for it. The commercial consequence of the lack of visibility will inevitably show up later, but agencies end up blaming the owner.
Ahrns pointed out that PMs regularly find out an owner is selling – or has already bought another property – only after the decision has been made. That is not just a service gap. It is a revenue leak through the wider business.
The strongest operators are closing that gap, she continued, by making their work more visible from the opening. She said owners should not be required to chase PMs for lease details, statements, invoices, inspection records, and maintenance progress. Instead, she suggested that when the routine information is accessible on demand, the PM gets time back, and the owner gets a clearer picture of what is actually being managed on their behalf. The fee conversation looks completely different in that environment.
Bairave Jeyasothy, customer success team leader at Managed, points to a more uncomfortable observation about why this is so hard to shift. Owners have been trained, over decades, to expect little more than a monthly statement. That is the reference point most of them carry into the relationship. If the agency does not actively replace that expectation with something better at the start, it does not get replaced at all – and the owner ends up underestimating the work for as long as the relationship lasts.
Strategic alignment leads to owner retention
There is a broader strategic point Ahrns lands on. In a legacy model, the PM-owner relationship survives largely on habit. Owners stay because switching has historically felt complicated, and the alternatives have looked similar.
In a next-gen model, however, the relationship is built on alignment instead. The owner wants a stable tenancy, visible cash flow, and an asset that is performing well. Ahrns insisted that PMs must explicitly communicate this shared interest from the first conversation (rather than the first invoice) to establish a strong relationship with the owner and retain them over the long term.
Ahrns acknowledged that some owners will always be price-driven, reactive, or disengaged. Still, agencies exacerbate this problem when they fail to communicate their value proposition and only build contact points around a cost.
But she stressed that an owner who looks back over six months of communication and sees nothing but bills and repair approvals has already started to question whether the relationship is worth keeping.
Ahrns concluded by warning that by the time they answer that question, the email to switch is the only thing left to send.
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