Building a property management business from scratch doesn’t necessarily mean chasing new clients, but prioritising the fundamentals to achieve long-term success. Here’s how it’s done.
By going the extra step for clients and refining their internal systems, emerging property management businesses can build sustainable rent rolls for long-term success.
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Mignon Ahrns and Bairave Jeyasothy, from Managed, said that start-up agencies faced an increasingly competitive playing field, requiring them to think outside the box and set themselves apart.
“You really need to come in with a point of difference - what is going to place me above the guys down the road,” Ahrns said on The PMX Podcast.
“Everyone claims that they do everything good with the best, but you really need to have something that makes you better than everyone else.”
According to the pair, trust, transparency, automation, and organic growth were the key pillars to helping businesses succeed and set themselves apart in the industry.
Here’s how start-ups can build for long-term growth:
Transparency
To achieve growth and stand out as a trusted property management business, Jeyasothy said it was important to maintain transparency when dealing with clients.
“The ones that don’t want transparency do often drop the ball with how they manage their owners and clients or tenants,” she said.
She said rather than only contacting clients about maintenance tasks or when a tenant was in arrears, property managers should constantly keep owners up to date about their property.
“Just be more direct and clear with them – you want to know where your investment is heading, you want to be able to be contacted at the right time without just finding out about a bill at the end of the day.”
“You’re not only selling the service that you’re offering – you’re a reflection of the management fee that you charge.”
Trust
In addition to building relationships, Ahrns said property management businesses needed to develop trust with clients over the long-term.
“It’s not a three-month relationship; it’s a long-term relationship. It’s something that you need to build, and the trust has got to be there,” she said.
Ahrns said most investors wanted to expand their portfolio, giving property managers an opportunity to grow their rent roll if they had built trust with the client.
“A lot of PMs go into the market, and if they haven’t got the trust factor, the only way they’re going to get the business is to reduce their fees.”
“If they’ve got the trust with you from the start, the fee’s not even a factor because they would not go with anyone else. So that’s a real strong point of difference.
Automation
Additionally, Ahrns said start-up agencies also needed to find ways to automate tasks so they could spend more time building connections and supporting investors in their goals.
Ahrns said one Melbourne agency had achieved immense growth by using a tool that reduced their administration time, giving them better scope to help owners.
“It means they’re not just chasing their tails doing property management; they’re actually being managers, relationship managers with their owners.”
Jeyasothy agreed that using software to automate repetitive tasks made agencies more scalable for the long-term.
She said one agency had grown their rent roll from 200–300 properties to over a thousand after implementing new systems to automate day-to-day tasks.
“A big focus for them is using owner and tenant portals, so they can lodge any type of maintenance request, which takes away much of PMs’ time, which can cost a lot of time over the long run.”
“Getting users to use the owner and tenant portal has helped them sort of leverage their growth.”
Turn sales into PM referrals
Additionally, Ahrns said property management divisions should collaborate with sales, keeping updated on prospective clients from within their agency to generate constant referrals.
She said while many agencies didn’t encourage interaction between the two, successful businesses built their rent rolls from organic growth by fostering communication between them.
“You can hear them when they’re saying, oh, this client’s buying an investment, and then the PM goes, oh, okay, what’s their details? Let me give them a call.”
“You shouldn’t have to keep buying rent rolls. You should be growing because you know about the sales that are going through.”
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