Doubling Unit Count Without Adding Headcount

Bassett Property Management

Rick Bassett became an accidental property manager when he sold his software business in 2000. Not long after, he and his wife Jennifer bought more properties throughout Greater New Haven, Connecticut, which they managed themselves. Eventually, Bassett decided to go pro and manage other people’s properties too, so he founded Bassett Property Management.

Today, Bassett Property Management manages a mix of roughly 160 single and multi-family units as well as a few small offices.

Long before that, Bassett was managing everything himself with a scheduling tool, email, texting, and invoicing software. But once his unit count grew to around 30, Bassett’s tech stack wasn’t cutting it. So he adopted Buildium and a dedicated CRM, which worked well — to a point.

When ‘Make Do’ Becomes Unsustainable

After more growth and about 50 units under management, Bassett’s tech stack was again at its breaking point. So he brought his wife on to help stem the tide of administrative work. Even that wasn’t quite enough.

The software he was using, Bassett explained, simply wasn’t purpose-built to handle the logistics of leasing and lead generation.

This all came to a head when Bassett took on a new, lower-income property. He knew, given the property’s rental rates, that it was going to generate a huge volume of interest. Bassett Property Management needed a solution. Fortunately, Jennifer Bassett found one when she stumbled upon ShowMojo.

We were getting killed with phone calls. I thought, ‘This is crazy, we need to find a better way’. We initially thought about setting up an answering service, but they wouldn’t know how to answer questions about our property. So we set up ShowMojo and Live Answer. Calls are going to Live Answer and ShowMojo handles the other inquiries. We hardly talk to any prospects until they’ve applied.
Rick Bassett, Founder, Bassett Property Management

Making Time to Thrive: From 80 to 160 Units Under Management

When Bassett started with ShowMojo, his company was managing around 80 units. Now they’re up to 160 and they haven’t had to hire additional staff. While he stopped short of handing ShowMojo all the credit, Bassett believes ShowMojo saves him from having to hire at least one, maybe one and a half, full-time employees.

For Bassett, ShowMojo Removes the Tedium of Responding to Inquiries, Screening Prospects, Scheduling, and Following up on Showings. Plus, by activating Live Answer, ShowMojo’s 24/7 live answering service, Bassett — without ever picking up the phone himself — can still accommodate prospects who want the option to talk to a live person.

On top of taking care of this huge administrative burden, ShowMojo has all but taken over the task of nurturing leads.

Yet as powerful as all that is, for Bassett, it’s not just that he’s been able to outsource or automate much of what he previously did manually. The real magic is how ShowMojo makes Bassett Property Management’s processes smarter, more repeatable, and more effective.

Improved Scheduling and Showing Process

Before ShowMojo, when Bassett scheduled showings, he’d allow prospects to choose their preferred times through the day. On occupied units, he also had to coordinate these times with tenants, so the process was difficult to manage.

ShowMojo, as Bassett explains, institutes discipline into the process using Autonomous Scheduling, which clusters showtimes in defined time blocks. This way, instead of letting renters schedule showings throughout the day, Bassett can group showings. ShowMojo can even double- or triple-book showings, since prospects typically show up at different times anyway.

Also, with Showing Acceptance, if a prospect wants to book a showing on an occupied unit, ShowMojo automatically notifies the occupant via email, text, or both. And the occupant can accept or decline showtimes. That way, ShowMojo (not Bassett) figures out the time that works for both prospect and occupant.

Broader, Easier Syndication

ShowMojo’s long list of Syndication Partners has also made Bassett Property Management a more effective advertiser for its listings.

Before, we were limited to syndication on five or six sites. ShowMojo gets us out on many more. We can even advertise on Facebook Marketplace. All we have to do is take an auto-generated code and copy it over. We couldn’t do that before.
Rick Bassett, Founder, Bassett Property Management

In addition to providing broader exposure for his listings, ShowMojo makes the syndication process easier for Bassett. It automatically imports and continues to Update the Listings Bassett Has in Buildium, his property management software. This also makes lead nurturing less awkward and time-consuming.

More Effective Lead Nurturing

With Bassett’s old setup, getting a basic nurturing campaign set up was a thorn in his side. Each time he got a new property, he’d need to set up a new, property-specific template for it in his CRM. If he changed anything in Buildium, he’d have to fix it in his CRM. “It was a lot of data entry. It was awkward and time-consuming,” Bassett said.

With the streamlined integration between ShowMojo and Buildium, that manual data entry awkwardness is gone. As a result, Bassett can use ShowMojo to easily engage new prospects and re-engage old ones. Bassett particularly enjoys Dynamic Prospect Nurturing, which automatically emails prospects with relevant updates, including:

New Listing Announcements: When a new listing goes on-market, ShowMojo notifies prospects who have inquired on Bassett’s similar listings within the last 30 days.
Rent Reduction Announcements: When Bassett reduces rent on a listing, ShowMojo emails each prospect who inquired on the listing within the past 30 days.
Off-Market Announcements: When a listing goes off-market, ShowMojo sends an email notification with a list of Bassett’s similar on-market listings to each prospect who inquired about the off-market listing.

Another nurture campaign Bassett and ShowMojo have deployed is an annual check-in. With this campaign, ShowMojo identifies prospects who were looking a year ago and re-engages them by emailing them with a list of available properties.

Reducing No-Shows and Lookie-Loos

For Bassett, and any other property manager conducting in-person showings, no-shows are a huge waste of time. But while ShowMojo can’t eliminate all no-shows, it has Greatly Reduced the Pain of No-Shows for Bassett Property Management.

ShowMojo does this in three main ways:

When a prospect schedules a showing, ShowMojo sends them a calendar invite with the showing details (time, date, location, etc.) via email.
For the prospects who inevitably still forget about their showing, ShowMojo automatically sends one confirmation 24 hours in advance of the showing time and another confirmation a few hours before the showing. If the prospect doesn’t respond to either confirmation, the showing is canceled.
As referenced earlier, Autonomous Scheduling clusters showtimes. This reduces the pain of no-shows because if there are cancellations, there are showings scheduled immediately before or after the no-show.

Bassett also believes that ShowMojo helps him reduce both no-shows (indirectly) and lookie-loos (directly) by enabling him to more effectively screen out unserious tenants.

[With ShowMojo] we’re much better at declining showing requests that aren’t from serious prospects, which helps reduce the number of cancellations and showings with people who have no intention of moving in.
Rick Bassett, Founder, Bassett Property Management

Enabling the Right Kind of Growth With ShowMojo

Thanks to a culture of constant improvement and the adoption of ShowMojo, Bassett Property Management doubled its unit count without hiring additional staff. And they’re not the only ones that’ve done it. Nor are they the only kind of property managers that can do it.

Whether they’re in a different market, have thousands of units under management, or they’re exclusively self-show, ShowMojo Has Given All Kinds of Property Managers the Edge They Need to Grow Their Businesses.

Want to make ShowMojo part of your leasing success story? We can help with that.