With multifamily home supply reaching a near 30-year high in 2019, there’s no time like the present to dive head first into growing your property management business. Whether you’ve got 50 doors or 50,000, when you’re setting your sights on growing your door count; there are a few small steps you can take to make things go more smoothly.
Office of Policy Development and Research U.S. Housing Market Conditions report
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Know Your Business
It’s easy to get involved in the big picture of a growing business and forget to check in on the day-to-day, but how can you position your property management company for growth if you don’t know what’s going on with it? The first step of growing your business is just to get to know your business.
Putting in some time getting to know each department and your properties will make sure you understand how performance is going. This can help you make sure every cog in the wheel is running smoothly and ready to take on the next challenge. Consider digging into things like your property lifetime value or your owner pricing structure to make sure you’re setting the business up for positive growth as you begin adding new properties.
Identify which teams will carry the biggest strain of your growth – is it your leasing department? Your maintenance team? You may identify that you need additional training, new technology or more employees to handle an influx of new properties. If you know what’s going on with your teams, you can help them be better equipped to take on more doors.
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Know Your Market
Another way to prepare your property management company for growth is to make sure you know your market. There might be 10 other property management companies in your area, so it’s a good idea to know what you offer potential owners and their properties that your competitors don’t. Do you offer lower costs? Higher quality or more involved services? Maybe you offer better protections against evictions?
Some property management companies have overviews of what they offer owners or even their prices listed on their websites. Take some time to look through your competitors? websites and learn what makes your property management company stand out from the pack. Another interesting place you can check is their online reviews. Using a platform like Yelp, you can learn what a competitor’s actual customers like and don’t like about them and what you offer (or don’t offer) that is comparable.
Empower your sales team by showing them the best things about your company that make you stand out from the crowd.
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Invest in Technology
Scaling your property management company probably won’t come without minor roadblocks around the way. Investing in technology early, before you’re overwhelmed, is a hugely popular suggestion from business advisors in every industry. The property management industry is no exception to this advice.
Chances are, you’re already utilizing property management technology for several of your teams. Tools to automate communication with your current tenants or to automate maintenance requests are great to help your property manager and maintenance team be able to handle more doors.
What about your leasing agents? If you’re going to start bringing in new properties, someone is going to have to source tenants for those new properties to make sure they’re collecting revenue. Between intercepting calls and emails and attending countless showings, the leasing agents? job can be very labor-intensive and time-consuming.
A Leasing Automation platform like ShowMojo can prepare your leasing department to scale your properties without stress. ShowMojo’s customizable platform handles incoming calls, emails and texts from potential renters, freeing up hours of time each day that your leasing department normally wastes playing phone tag with prospects.
With ShowMojo the hard work involved in prospecting is placed in the hands of the potential tenant, making your leasing agents’ jobs a little more passive so they can handle more properties. Take a look at our video on prospect-driven leasing to learn more about how ShowMojo saves the leasing agent time and hassle.
With these tips in hand, we hope you’re feeling a little better prepared to begin scaling your property management business without placing any extra strain on your team. When you’re ready to start adding doors, so we can help you start on the path toward sustainable growth.
