At Fourandhalf, we spend a lot of time sharing best practices on marketing your property management business. We explain the process and share the benefits. As a property management entrepreneur, business may be going well and you are able to rely on referrals. You may end up pushing off your online marketing presence for sometime in the future. But is that a good idea? Today, we’re talking about what happens if you do nothing.
The Property Management Death Spiral
If you do nothing, you’ll go into what we call the property management death spiral. It starts due to normal external factors. You will lose a certain percentage of your doors every year through natural attrition; the average annual property management portfolio turnover can reach 30 percent in a bad year. Andrew Dougill of Hoffman Realty, a Tampa property management company, likens property management to a bucket with a leak in it; you have to keep filling the bucket with water to sustain a certain level.
You have to replace those doors, but when you aren’t doing any marketing, you’re left with just taking whatever comes your way. That’s not a targeted client base, and you aren’t going to get enough leads. So, you take what you can get. These may be marginal clients: a client who takes a lot of your time but doesn’t necessarily provide the amount of money or income that justifies the amount of time spent.
You’re still losing clients because that’s what happens, and so you find yourself continuing to take these wrong clients because they’re the only ones showing up. When you work with marginal clients, you are taking your focus away from the right clients. That leaves you with less money and no personal time to handle this or turn it around.
And the cycle continues. Once you start losing good clients and taking on wrong clients, your business suffers. You lay people off and you continue to spiral out of control, wondering the whole time what is going on and why this is happening.
How to Turn Your Property Management Company Around
Get out of this cycle, or even better – avoid it altogether. Listen to our property management blogs and get some marketing help. The truth is, you’ll have to spend money and time. Spend money on a campaign that will bring in more leads and more of the right clients. Spend some time to define your marketing strategy to your marketing person and what the good leads look like. You want to bring in a lot of leads, but have to if you want to be choosy about who you work with.
This deliberate approach will save you time and headaches and, not to mention, increase the overall satisfaction with your business. Find a stable source for new owner leads that doesn’t solely rely on referrals and if you need any advice, visit our blog, podcast, or simply contact us at Fourandhalf for a personalized marketing assessment from one of our experts.
