Finding, engaging, and retaining great employees is a critical part of growing your property management company. Our guest today has built a unique culture that fosters care and competency at his organization. We’ve brought in Andrew Propst, the immediate past-president of NARPM, and the owner of Park Place Property Management in Boise, ID.

He’ll be speaking with us at the Property Management Grow Summit on how to engage your employees to get more engagement for your company. Today, we’ll go over why it’s so crucial for property managers to get this area right in order to have a successful property management company.

Park Place started in 2008, where Andrew began by managing about 200 doors. Currently, Park Place manages around 3,500 doors and have about 1,400 more in the pipeline over the next 12 months.

Building Culture While Building Property Management Business

Any time you start a property management business, you need to develop the culture that’s important to you on Day One. This must be done before you build an organization of any size.

Meg Whitman, who has run for governor of California and is the current CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said that when she got to HP she thought that culture was the most important thing. She took down the walls and dividers in the offices in an effort to bring people together. After being there, she knew that it was the only thing that mattered for her company’s growth.

Andrew just returned from a multifamily executive conference, in Las Vegas, where the biggest multifamily property management CEOs were on stage for 90 minutes. They manage millions of properties, and the one thing they really wanted to talk about was how hard it is to hire and maintain good people. Property management is not always the sexiest industry, and when the job market gets better, people start looking for other opportunities. The executives identified that employees are the number one threat to their business on a national scale.

Keeping Employees Engaged – PM Grow Summit Topic

Andrew will talk about this subject at the PM Grow Summit January 25 – 27, 2017 in West Palm Beach, Florida. The three things he’ll focus on are:

  • Why engaging employees needs to be a focus in our industry. As the job market gets more competitive, people will leave for better jobs. If you’re not taking care of your employees, they will go away. Gallup recently did a poll and found that 32 percent of the workforce population is “engaged” and 17 percent is actively disengaged – or trying to do harm to your business. They feel like objects, not people. We want to get maximum return from our employees so it is important to find out what they need.
  • Finding employees. He’ll discuss how to interview them and what to do outside of the interview process. People are typically not themselves during an interview.
  • Finally, he’ll talk about counseling and firing those employees who are underperforming. One of the top reasons for management failure is the inability to counsel or fire poor performers. What does that mean to you as the owner of a property management company? Andrew believes if you’re not counseling or firing those bad employees, you should be fired yourself.  

Checking in with Employees

A lot of you may be familiar with LeadSimple as the CRM that helps you close owner leads. However, you can also use LeadSimple to engage employees. You can set up reminders that stop you from doing whatever you’re doing during the day to check in with your employees.

If you’re in the property management business, you’re probably really busy and maybe even too busy to stop and walk around the office. But it’s important to talk to your team and find out what they want and what they need. If you have LeadSimple, try opening a new lead type and put your employees in as prospects. Set up your reminders to engage with them. This will help you be a better boss if you make sure you check on how they are doing.

If you have any questions about this topic, please contact us at Fourandhalf, and we’ll see you at the PM Grow Summit.