Recognising the importance of longstanding relationships in property management, a suite of marketing techniques can be used to ensure success in this arm of the real estate industry.
Agencies with both sales and management departments are hiring staff as specialists to handle each role within property management, rather than having a small team deal with everything from listings and inspections, to debt recovery and crises.
Didier Grossemy from Razor Brand Agency, Rental Express’s Chris Rolls, Arabella Cooper from Toop&Toop and Suzie Hamilton -Flanagan know what it takes to find, and then keep, business and are sharing their insights into property management marketing.
As with building any business, success hinges on having the knowledge and tools to provide information to clients and prospects. This is something Digital Business Architect Didier Grossemy from Razor Brand Agency has been doing in marketing, and now specifically in social media, for more than 30 years. He has worked with the likes of Maserati and large hotel chains so he knows how to market a big brand effectively.
Effective communication starts with understanding who you should be communicating with. This is not about doing a bulk letterbox drop exclaiming why you are the best in your industry, but building a relationship based on trust with your target audience.
“It’s not about you reaching me; it’s about me reaching you. [The prospect thinks] I am going to decide when I want to talk to you and you need to attract me to talk to you,” Mr Grossemy explained. Working at a community level, property managers need to tap into what is important to the prospects in their core area and then start doing something for the community.
“So now you’re building up your profile. You’re creating a trusted relationship with the community. You’re not a salesman anymore. You are basically somebody who’s doing good for the community and [prospects think], I want to deal with this guy,” he explained.
Mr Grossemy is careful to mine data well, so his specially crafted messages find the relevant audience. "Business intelligence" is what Mr Grossemy considers comes into play when an organisation targets only the people who will be interested in its message. While a business may have a database of 10,000, not all of those contacts will be interested in every single piece of marketing it issues, so the contacts must be segmented. Technology can help separate the contacts into like groups and identify which information they want to hear more about.
For instance, an email campaign can sort out prospects by whether they open the email, what they read and what they click on. “This is the art of managing your database. It’s what we call data mining, not just adding one centralised database and that’s it," he said.
Using this concept in a property management scenario, the data can be divided into existing clients, those with properties managed by other agencies, prospects and so on.
"Wouldn't it be great if you have a car, a property or whatever and you say, 'I’ve got 1000 potential clients for that particular property and I can contact them now, not tomorrow. I’m going to send them a communication right now and from my 1000 maybe 100 people will be interested, then down to 10 and the fight will start and I’ll sell it in two days'," Mr Grossemy said.
Powerful brands that understand effective communication are Apple, Ferrari, Louis Vuitton and Coca Cola, Mr Grossemy said, adding these brands were so powerful if you received an email from them it was unlikely you would delete before reading it.
"Coca Cola decided you can print your name on their bottle in Australia. So now suddenly the brand is going to the street level, talking to you and engaging with your persona and that’s fantastic, because that’s brand engagement," he said.
Covering Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Perth, Rental Express has had great success in sourcing new business with seminars and its online marketing strategy after introducing multiple websites and email campaigns. However, its most successful strategies are internal referrals, where property managers are rewarded for bringing in new business, and direct mail.
“We actually set [staff] up in almost a profit share scenario, so they generate a percentage of the income of the portfolio that they manage. Every extra property for them in our business is about a $500 a year pay rise,” Chris Rolls from Rental Express said.
Rental Express is known for striking gold in an area many write off - direct mail campaigns. To write a winning direct mail letter, Mr Rolls said there must be four key points:
A headline that makes people want to read the rest of the letter The letter must be personalised so it is relevant to the reader Long letters sell better than short letters There must be a genuine offer to make the reader act immediately.
“You’ve got to have a message that the reader is interested in,” Mr Rolls said, adding a business development manager must be available to convert the lead once the person has expressed an interest, whether by phone, in person or online.
Something often forgotten when it came to growing a property management business was the natural attrition rate of 10-15 per cent each year. People sell properties or take them back to rent to their children or move into the properties themselves. If these aren’t replaced with new properties, the business falters, Mr Rolls explained. “If you’re not marketing and building your business, and replacing those ones that you’ve lost and more, then you’re not going to grow,” he said.
Toop&Toop receives calls to its five South Australian offices, but always monitors the source of those calls to pinpoint exactly where property management business is coming from. Measuring any marketing activity is essential to determine what is working and what isn't. These calls are backed up with local area marketing campaigns and prospecting, where the team builds relationships with people in the finance and banking industries, tax accountants, mortgage brokers and conveyancers.
Former Toop&Toop Business Development Manager and Team Leader, Suzie Hamilton-Flanagan started her real estate career in property management and then moved into sales. She combined her experience in both to get the best for clients from her team. When it comes to generating business, Ms Hamilton-Flanagan said it was imperative to know the marketplace and understand your point of difference. “You have to believe in your team; you have to believe in your product and you have to believe the service that you’re providing is the best there is."
“I get up every morning believing that we do great business for our clients. It’s all about providing knowledge and information and giving back to our very loyal clients and the community as a whole. At the end of the day we need them as much as they need us,” she explained.
Unlike clients of real estate sales agents who may only be around for a matter of weeks, property management clients make a commitment of four, five or more years, which makes the relationship very different.
“They are here with us for extended periods of time. We call it the lifecycle of real estate - people buy investment properties, they have them managed and then they sell them - and that is a normal phase or a lifecycle of property investors,” Ms Hamilton-Flanagan explained.
Known for its innovation and savvy marketing, Toop&Toop's brand recognition extends nationally because of its strong reputation. In the same way a sales team would, the property management team’s leasing partners work to prospect, appraise and convert business. They are aiming to grow beyond the 2,000 plus properties Toop&Toop currently services, at a rate of 40-50 new managements each month. Ms Hamilton-Flanagan’s former colleague Arabella Cooper is a sales agent, however her take on relationship building crosses real estate sectors. Ms Cooper said she found it easier to build relationships as herself, rather than trying to put on a front or pressure clients to work with her. She tells people straight, and they appreciate her for it. "I’m really lucky I’m in an area where I can be me and I can be honest and transparent. I can be quite colloquial, if I like, and develop really good relationships," Ms Cooper said.
Instead of getting bogged down in other's problems and allowing herself to be swamped by their emotions, Ms Cooper shows she understands and gets on with her job. "I can’t take on people’s burdens. I’ve learnt to not do it, but I’ve learnt to still be empathetic and sympathetic and understand people, because otherwise I would hurt them," she said.
"If you can nurture [the relationship] properly and can deal with the people and not take advantage of them, but just do what you have to do to get the result, you’ll get the business," Ms Cooper added.
And it’s important not to forget the tenant in the property management relationship. While the client is the landlord, tenants form the final connection in the three-way relationship. Tenants are often successful business people or executives who may have their own property portfolio. They choose to rent, rather than have the situation forced on them.
“As property managers we had to suddenly stop and think: they aren’t the person who can’t afford to buy the home anymore. They invariably are the person who can afford to buy the home; they choose not to,” Ms Hamilton-Flanagan said.
“Look after your tenant and treat them like you would like to be treated because then they will do the right thing by you, by the owner and by the property,” she added.