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Growing your property management business entails more than just adding extra things to your portfolio. Planning, budgeting, and communication are all required.
Without a growth strategy, you risk developing too rapidly or too slowly. Rapid expansion may be at the expense of service or corporate culture. Meanwhile, poor development may jeopardize your bottom line.
What should property managers do to diversify their portfolios and gain additional clients? Check out these five property management growth tactics to conquer your industry!
Property Management Strategies For Growth
Define Business Objectives
Identifying your goals is the first step in choosing the best property management solutions for your company. Consider your specific expansion goals.
Do certain communities and geographical areas interest you? Do you want to add more properties right now or over time? What types of properties are you looking to include in your portfolio?
Examine your yearly budget projections as well as your staffing forecasts. After all, every door you open means more effort for your team and more money spent upfront on improvements, advertising, and regular maintenance.
Don't raise your door count more quickly than your resources, money and personnel, can handle.
Establish a timeline for growth and include checkpoints along the way. Consider the company's state after the initial quarter, the first half of the year, and so forth.
Evaluate the Market and Other Property Management Businesses
Next, fully comprehend the markets into which you intend to enter. Think about the following:
- What kind and how many rentals are there in the area?
- Is it a market for renters or owners?
- Avoid any obstacles to having low vacancy rates, such as a lack of public transit or a lack of jobs that might draw residents?
- Are there any municipal intentions to increase the market's appeal to renters soon?
- Avoid opportunities to enhance the services?
- Avoid any chances of increasing the rent?
- Are owners happy with the competing property management services, or do they feel they could be better?
Examine closely comparable property management firms in the neighborhood that have door counts similar to your objective.
How does their corporate structure look? What facilities are offered, and how are properties marketed?
If you can, find out what their portfolio entails, how they conduct business daily, and how they employ technology to accomplish these tasks.
You should be able to use such findings as benchmarks for your own business.
You may need to modify your goals or look for potential owners in different target locations as you research the market and other property management companies operating within it.
Continue your search until you identify a market that fits your product or service and targets that are doable for your company.
Set up the Ideal Software Solution and Staff Up
Your present staffing structure and tech stack won't be able to service your business or your clients as you expand adequately.
Please pay attention to how other, bigger property management companies in the market have structured their staffing and integrated technology to achieve their objectives.
Your business may expand with the correct technology without taxing your team. The basic components of a tech stack are:
- To connect with workers, owners, and residents, use email and chat applications.
- Cloud storage for business records and property
- Syndication of listings
- Software for tracking maintenance
- Rent and bill payments online
- Application and screening tools for residents
Of course, there is certainly an app for any task you can think of. Residents can reserve space in gyms, swimming pools, and other shared facilities using a reservation system, for instance.
You can assemble a variety of apps to perform various jobs, or you can research property management software that can handle all of your needs.
In fact, despite growth, a solid property management software solution can even enable you to minimize workers.
For instance, you'll be able to handle more requests with less stress if you can automate maintenance tracking and vendor billing.
In addition to increasing efficiency throughout the process, using a resident center to connect with your team may allow you to reduce traditional "front desk" support duties.
Make Your Brand Visible
Consider ways to promote your name so that you can grow once you have a growth plan in place. Make sure prospective buyers can find you online if you still need to.
This could be a perfect moment to review your website carefully and make any updates. Ensure your services, listings, and about page have landing pages.
On every page of your website, include a contact form so that owners can reach you as well. Make sure to include such markets in your business description if you intend to target them.
Finally, make it simple for search engines such as Google to find your pages by including keywords on your web pages.
Next, claim your company on Google, Bing, and Yelp engines, your business will appear with the relevant contact details at the top or on the right side of the first search results page.
This allows visitors a chance to get in touch with you, find your website, or write a review.
Finally, create company accounts on your target customers' social media sites.
LinkedIn is a given, but you should also take into account other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for company updates and neighborhood news or Instagram and Pinterest to show off your properties.
Develop a Sound Marketing Strategy
Now that you've established a strong online presence consider how you might use it to improve your marketing efforts. Naturally, you'll still want to reach your target owners using conventional ways.
Incorporating content and social media marketing increases your audience engagement.
Use your social media platforms for informative posts on the real estate market and whatever your residents and owners might be interested in inside their community, rather than posting listings or company announcements.
Consider starting a podcast or blog to talk about rental housing trends or practical advice for property owners. Anything that establishes your business as an authority in the rental and property management industries.
Prioritize SEO
We looked at how you may use direct marketing to expand your business while streamlining your internal operations. How about inbound marketing, though? How can you get leads sent to you instead of having to go out and fish for them?
Developing your SEO skills is one of the best things you can do as a property manager.
Having local SEO as a property management firm makes it simpler than attempting to rank for keyphrases throughout the country or the world.
The best SEO strategies to use are listed below:
- Make sure the information on your Google My Business listing is current and accurate.
- Request Google reviews from clients (the more reviews you have, the more likely you will appear in search results in the Map view).
- Learn how to rank for highly precise key phrases using your website content, such as "city name property management company."
- Create high-quality links pointing to your website.
Invest in Paid SEM
We then go on to paid advertising. SEM will produce significantly better outcomes for gaining new customers than social media PPC.
It will take time to find potential clients on Facebook and Instagram who are homeowners. In contrast, while using SEM, you target specific search terms.
Therefore, even if your website doesn't rank for the greatest key phrases, there's still a potential that paid search advertising will appear.
Even if you achieve organic ranking, you should still make a modest investment in sponsored search to compete with your nearby rivals for the top spot in the search results.
As you can see, growth tactics for property management go beyond just generating leads. You must set up your company for expansion and be ready to deliver the greatest level of service without causing your costs to increase.
Create a Network
People you're familiar with can help you get some of the best rates, and we're not just referring to other property management businesses here.
Real estate brokers and even service providers who deal with rent can be excellent resources for new owners. They might even recommend you if you get along well with them at work.
Nevertheless, it's crucial to maintain a list of the real estate agents, property managers, and other experts recommending you to owners. Future reciprocation of the favor enhances it even more and may result in closer collaborations.
Improve Your Customer Service
Take the time to learn what your target homeowners want from property management as you try to grow your portfolio.
The following are the top 10 services most wanted property management companies to handle, according to our 2021 Rental Owners' Report, Volume.
- Collection of fees and rent.
- Repairing and maintaining.
- Promoting vacancies and leasing properties.
- Evictions.
- Property examinations
- Bookkeeping, accounting, and tax preparation.
- Cleaning.
- Legal counsel.
- Outdoor offerings.
- Renovation and construction.
Examine your present offerings to ensure you can handle other doors without sacrificing the quality of service.
Next, consider additional services you can offer to attract new owners. According to our report, other services owners were interested in were:
- Design of the home and staging
- Services for Insurance
- Buying, selling and brokering the sale of investment properties
- Guidance on finances and investments
- Utilizing analytics to increase profits
Examine the services that other property management companies offer. Ask business owners in your target areas what services they require. Consider introducing things that owners desire but that other property managers do not provide.
Utilizing a Property Management System (PMS)
It is easier said than done to expand a property management company. While there are tactics you may adopt, sometimes all you might need is the help of a streamlined property management system like Booking Ninjas.
These tactics help you get through procedures or personnel challenges that prevent you from managing other things.
Booking Ninjas provides additional management options. These options cover utility billing, customer relationship management, and business intelligence.
Despite this, Booking Ninjas can still handle a bigger portfolio of properties. It's really comforting to know that you may always choose to develop without switching service providers or losing your data.
Together With Your Team, Prepare Your Property Management Strategies
Bring all the processes together into a thorough plan with quantifiable objectives and benchmarks. After then, let your team as a whole know about the plan.
Describe your property management strategy in detail, including the steps you'll take to monitor your effectiveness. After that, assign tasks to the right team members and give them realistic deadlines to complete them.
To plan and carry out the work you must do to increase your portfolio, consider using a project management application like Trello or Asana.
To link project management or other applications to your property management tool, determine if your property management solution has an open API. The job is centralized in this manner.
Allowing your property management business to grow naturally seems logical. You spend money and build infrastructure to accommodate new owners as they join on.
However, doing so could result in overspending or underfunding, a drop in service quality, and crucial business procedures that should be noticed. It's not what you want.
On the other hand, if you actively plan your growth using property management techniques, you'll be able to track your progress. You will also be able to make adjustments as you expand.
A property management software solution can aid your growth by automating procedures and collecting all vital records, data, and conversations in one secure location.
Do I Need a Property Management Coach?
Increasing the number of doors you handle might be overwhelming without the proper approaches and knowledge.
With the assistance of a property management coach who has been there before, choose the best regions to begin your company's growth!
Real-Time Consulting Services guides great real estate managers through a detailed goal-setting process. It also involves defining success metrics, evaluating what's working well, and pinpointing areas for improvement to help them expand their companies.
How to Increase Your Property Management Portfolio
Even if your portfolio may be modest now, what will happen if your real estate holdings grow? It's usually a good idea to make future plans.
If your portfolio increases to more than 1,000 units, think about larger portfolio property management software.
- Improve your existing assets
- Enhance newly acquired homes
- Think about including new property types.
- Online business promotion
- Networking with local property owners
- Become a member of a property management company
Key Takeaways
Growing your property management business can be challenging, however, it’s not that difficult.
Utilizing property management systems like Booking Ninjas can be of great help to property owners and managers. We are aware of the difficulties in managing a plethora of operational tasks and how time-consuming property management may be.
Booking Ninjas will take care of all operational tasks so you can relax and concentrate on management and strategy.
Schedule a free appointment if property management automation sounds like something you'd be interested in learning more about.
