If you are starting a property management company, you are entering a world of diplomacy, organization and negotiation. Easy, right? Property management is a services-based business within the real estate industry and, while sometimes challenging, it can be a very lucrative endeavor, offering long-term growth and significant success for your company. Let’s examine the five steps to success within the property management industry:
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
The first step to creating a successful property management company is to define the customers for your services. Are they young renters seeking a first home? Are they corporate representatives looking for a building to lease? Are your clients looking for someone to manage properties in repairs and upkeep on a maintenance basis? These types of questions will identify your target audience in your business. Ask yourself additional questions to frame your target customers further: will your company require leasing deposits and, if so, at what rate? Will you determine eligibility for property rentals by past references, credit checks, or other means? How will you standardize your business models for best practice results? Continue asking yourself these questions until you are satisfied that you know your target audience.
Step 2: Define Your Competitors
Knowing your target audience will help you to define your competitors. And, knowing your competitors will lead to the ways in which you specialize your marketing and create a unique proposition for customers that will overcome your competitors. This definition will make competing for customers a qualified process. Find out what your competitors charge for services, how many customers they serve, and whether they offer special discounts or packages for larger commercial clients. Continue researching your competitors until you have a sizeable number of parameters that describe their businesses versus yours.
Step 3: Build Your Property Management Business Plan
In this step, you’ll identify the services offered by your property management company and the customers the company will serve. As part of the building block process, you’ll add this information to your business plan. If you do not yet have a plan, use this business plan for property management as a comprehensive guide. Your completed plan will include your mission, objectives, marketing strategies, financial projections and operational plans. When completed, your business plan can be utilized as a presentation tool to interested investors or lenders if startup funding is needed.
Step 4: Put Effective Marketing Strategies To Work
There’s nothing more ineffective than ineffective marketing strategies. In this step, let’s talk about the ones that actually work. First, use social media, including Facebook and Instagram, to post about your property management business. Use light humor, fun photos, or whatever you believe will engage with potential and current customers (keeping it appropriate for all ages). As a property management company, you’ll be able to establish contact with multiple potential customers in this fashion. In the same way, build a creative and inviting website and place a column in it for clients to ask questions and receive answers. Offer property announcements, advice on proper care of facilities or other items of interest. Offer referral incentives to your current customers when they bring in a new contact. Social media and website connections are the driver of today’s marketing world, however, there are still traditional ways of reaching out in your community: local newspaper ads are especially effective in communities with property management needs.
Step 5: Improve Your Operations Plan
A startup company will often work from a minimally-organized operations plan, only to discover a year later that the initial plan worked for 3 to 4 months and hasn’t worked since. Work through every process in your company operations, including employee roles and responsibilities, to determine improvements and updates that can be made. This tightens the efficiency of your company, saving funds, and creating a smooth-running operational grid for your staff. Utilize property management software to obtain the tools that will shortcut many of your time-wasting tasks. In short, make improvements wherever possible and update your business plan accordingly.
In each of these steps, you’ll find the basics of success: identifying your customers and your competition, building your business plan, putting marketing strategies to work and improving your operations plan. It’s your turn to take each of these and place your own stamp of success on them to create your own property management company positioned for long-term growth and personal wealth.