As competition for landlords intensifies, property management businesses are being urged to look beyond traditional KPIs and use data to uncover what drives retention, stronger performance, and long-term growth. Here is how to do it.
As investor activity slows and opportunities to win new clients become scarcer, businesses need evidence-based strategies to improve performance, ultimately enabling growth and retention.
Agile Market Intelligence director Michael Johnson said agencies should use a four-step framework to turn data into measurable results, helping them make better decisions to improve owner retention and grow more effectively.
He said, rather than focusing only on key performance indicators (KPIs), businesses needed to go further by identifying an objective, understanding what would drive outcomes, taking action and measuring whether it worked.
“We want to know: what should we focus on? Are we making progress? And is what we’re doing actually helping?”, he said at the Property Management Excellence (PMX) conference.
Here are the four key steps for an evidence-based strategy:
1. Identify the objective
According to Johnson, the first step to creating an evidence-based performance strategy is to set a clear, overarching business objective before deciding how to measure success.
Rather than simply stating a numerical target, he said the agency should visualise the kind of office it wanted to be and give its team something to aspire to.
“The objective isn’t something where we’re saying, ‘I want to make an extra 25 per cent of revenue this year’, or, ‘I want to make customer retention increase’,” he said.
“In this case, your goal might be to become a property management business that doesn’t lose owners.”
While the framework can apply to any area of the business, Johnson advised starting with one department to hone the strategy before applying it to the rest of the office.
“Use it as a starting point and experiment with this framework, this methodology to see if it’s something that helps keep you and your teams on track,” he said.
2. Determine measurable outcomes and drivers
After outlining the business’ main objective to boost performance, Johnson said the second step was to identify a realistic outcome.
“This is often where we might have a stat of, for example, 95 per cent customer retention, 96 per cent satisfaction,” he said.
“These are our big KPIs that often end up in our end-of-year reviews or our big presentations to executives, to our partners, or to someone who might be looking to purchase the business as well.”
After setting their objective, Johnson said it was crucial to determine the key drivers, which were the factors that would determine whether the business would achieve its goal.
“What are the metrics underneath that we can start to look at and measure within our business that give us clarity over whether we’re heading in the right direction?”
“What are the things we think are going to make it likely for a customer or a client of ours to stay with us? And on the contrary, what are the things that may result in them churning?"
Johnson said drivers for client retention might include returning calls, replying to emails, or contacting owners proactively.
He said agencies may decide to focus on the percentage of calls that were returned within a day, the percentage of emails that were returned quickly, or the number of calls that weren’t automated.
“They can also identify how often they’re speaking to an owner about something other than a maintenance issue, or something to that effect,” he said.
3. Take action
Once a business understands the drivers that would help it achieve its goals, Johnson said agencies should implement initiatives and make practical changes.
“This is ultimately where we take action to try and move the needle on some of these areas,” he said.
To boost landlord satisfaction and increase retention, Johnson said an agency might seek to consistently respond to client emails within a 24-hour period.
“That could involve introducing email templates, maybe it’s allocating an individual in the office to drop everything that they do every time an email comes in and respond to it,” he said.
“There could be a whole bunch of different initiatives and ideas that you could have, but you want to run that, you want to introduce it, you want to set it up as a team as the new expectation.”
While introducing new initiatives, Johnson said that businesses should be able to use data and evidence to explain the reason for their changes and how it will help overall performance.
So they’re much more likely to get the budget again in the future from executives because they have evidence that the work and time and energy that they’re putting in is actually adding up,” he said.
4. Measure, review and repeat
After putting the necessary initiatives in place to achieve a goal, Johnson said the next step was to measure and monitor the driver’s performance over an appropriate time period.
“We want to make sure, are we hitting each of these markers throughout this period?”, he said.
Johnson said agencies should record the results in a spreadsheet or visually map them out as a diagram, enabling staff to see their drivers, initiatives and results for each goal.
He said the chart should be colour-coded, with green representing progress being made, yellow if some results have been achieved, or red if there have been no developments.
“If you can build out this mind map across your business, it can give you better clarity around where in your business you’ve invested the time, and you’re seeing the results from it,” he said.
After mapping out their progress visually, Johnson said teams should then identify the biggest drivers that helped achieve the agency’s results and double down on them.
“What you might find is that if you started in one area of the business, you can then evolve and grow it from there,” he said.
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