OPINION: Owners want their PMs to lead from the front, but many PMs lack the confidence. It’s time for PMs to take charge of their relationship with clients from day one.
When I decided to sell a property through one of the country’s top sales agents, he sat me down and told me exactly what I was going to do. Not what he recommended. Not what we would discuss. What I was going to do. And I did every single thing he said – not because I am an easy vendor (I am not) but because he had the confidence to lead before he had delivered a single result.
The agent was Sydney-based agency Chan Yahl director William Chan. I had known him socially for years. In The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast with Real Estate Gym owner Tom Panos, I recounted that when I asked Chan to handle the campaign, I tried to set the terms.
“I don’t really want to do too much, William,” I said.
His response came back so fast it nearly cut me off: “Alex, you are going to need to do what I tell you to do to get success.”
It was not a negotiation or a suggestion – it was a statement of professional authority, delivered before a single buyer had been engaged or a dollar earned. I decorated, I landscaped, I cleared every obstacle he put in front of me. He sold the property well above the price I expected, and I thanked him for it.
The moment has stayed with me because it reveals something about the property management industry that I believe holds it back more than any technology gap or regulatory burden: when the relationship starts, most property managers do not lead it.
Think about how the typical first interaction unfolds between a property manager and a new landlord. The BDM who won the business – the confident one who made promises and set expectations – disappears the moment the paperwork is signed. The onboarding experience leaves the owner confused about what happens next, and the property manager who inherits the relationship walks into a dynamic where the owner has already decided how things will work. That dynamic tends to stick for the life of the account.
This is not because property managers are less capable than sales agents. It is because the industry has trained them to accommodate rather than lead. A sales agent’s relationship with a vendor is short and transactional – six to eight weeks, no time to waste on second-guessing – so the agent sets the agenda from day one, and the vendor's choice is to follow the plan or find another agent. Most follow the plan.
A property manager’s relationship with an owner is very different because, in theory, it is indefinite – five, 10, sometimes 15 years – and yet at the exact moment where that relationship should be established with the same clarity and authority, too many property managers defer. They do not set the terms because they are afraid of what might happen if they do.
The consequence of that deference is not just a weaker relationship – it is a weaker business. When an owner sets the terms from the start, the property manager becomes an order-taker, and those are the relationships where every phone call is about maintenance cost and never about market performance or asset growth. They are also the relationships where the owner questions every fee because nobody ever educated them on what the fee actually delivers.
I have been an investor for more than 30 years. I own properties with multiple agencies across different states. In all that time, no property manager has ever sat me down and explained what I should expect from the first 90 days. Nobody has ever set the terms of engagement with the kind of confidence that tells you this professional knows what they are doing. The one agency that did – the BDM who came to my house and spent a full hour walking through their service model, educating me on what would happen and when and what I needed to do – that agency has had my business for years and has never had to defend a single fee.
Let’s be honest about why this is hard. Property management is a relationship business, and relationships are easier to maintain when the other party is happy. Saying “this is how we do things” carries risk. What if the owner pushes back? What if they leave? That fear is real, and it is rational.
But here is what I have learned from watching the best operators in this industry: owners are not looking for someone who accommodates them. They are looking for someone who leads them. The difference between a cost call and a value call is not the platform or the portfolio size – it is whether the property manager has established, from the very first conversation, that they are the professional in the relationship. The best time to earn that right is the moment the relationship begins, because if you wait until the owner stops trusting you, it is already too late to set the terms.
Alex Whitlock is REB director and Managed co-founder.
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