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Property Management Success: Creating Your Game Plan

Overwhelmed?

Fifty to sixty-hour work weeks. Over one hundred emails per day. You spend almost all of your time putting out fires and keeping your business from failing. You don’t have the time to improve your processes because it takes everything you have to stay afloat.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

What you need is a Game Plan. A strategy to get out from behind and start scoring points where you need them.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Table of Content

Perform a Market Analysis

Perform-a-Market-Analysis

Knowing where you are in relation to the competition is incredibly valuable. It is impossible to create a strategy for success without identifying market trends, researching your competitors, and knowing the demographics of the area in which you operate. A thorough property management market analysis should include:

Competition Research
  • Who is your competition?
  • How are they marketing?
  • What is their fee structure?
  • What makes them different than your company?
Housing, Economic, and Demographic Trends
  • How many rental homes exist in your market?
  • How many SFR vs. MF rentals homes are there?
  • How many of those rental homes are vacant vs. occupied?
  • How many of those rental homes are owned by investors that live in the area versus investors that live out of the market or out of state?
Area Rental Analytics
  • What is the average rent amount per square foot in your market?
  • What is the average application fee in your market?
  • What is the average number of days on market in your area for rentals?
Want to learn more? These blog posts will provide further reading
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Michael Park Aug 5, 2024   |   icon 3 min read
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SWOT Analysis for Your Property Management Company

Performing a SWOT analysis for your property management company is crucial for identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. ...
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Heather Park Oct 28, 2024   |   icon 5 min read
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4 Essential Property Management KPIs Every Property Manager Should Track

As a property manager, tracking the right property management KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is essential to not just surviving, but thriving in a ...
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Perform a Financial Review

Perform-a-Financial-Review

You know what is in your bank account, but when was the last time you took the time to dig deeper and analyze your financial health? A financial review will give you a better understanding of what is working for you, and what areas are threatening your success. Your financial review should include:

Prior Year P&L Review
  • Identify all categories of revenue and expenses.
  • Calculate the number of doors per staff member that you are currently managing.
Revenue Source Analysis
  • Identify all avenues of incoming revenue and rates of income.
  • Identify opportunities for additional revenue sources.
Expense Analysis
  • Identify and review all overhead expenses.
  • What percentage of your total revenue is allocated for overhead and expenses?
Fee Structure Analysis
  • How do your fees (both owner and tenant side fees) compare to the other companies in the market?
  • Analyze the impact of different fee structures.
Want to learn more? These blog posts will provide further reading:
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Heather Park Jun 5, 2020   |   icon 6 min read
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6 Ways to Not Leave Money on the Table in 2024

Updated and republished 1/22/2024. Property management is a specialized field that requires above-average intrapersonal skills, patience, and ...
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4 Essential Property Management KPIs Every Property Manager Should Track

As a property manager, tracking the right property management KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is essential to not just surviving, but thriving in a ...
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Review Your Technology

Review-Your-Technology

Does your technology work in concert, or is it a technology rat’s nest that hinders efficiency? Too many programs can cause you to duplicate work, or miss essential data entirely.

Selecting the right software will not only help you improve your operational efficiency, but it will also increase your leads as well as your sales. Automating lead management leads to a 10% bump in revenue within 6 to 9 months, and businesses who nurture leads see a 50% increase in their closing ratio at a 33% lower cost.

When Geekly Media creates a Game Plan for our partners, our technology review looks at all of the technology in play and we devise a plan to maximize your technology spend. We review your:

  • Property Management Software
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Signature Software
  • Website and Listing Feed Service
  • Application Provider
  • Commission Tracking Software
  • Task Management Software
  • Performance Reporting

If you are creating a Game Plan on your own, you should review all of these technology pieces and look for options that help you automate operations to improve your organizational efficiency. Increasing automation of smaller tasks adds up to significant time savings, with the Harvard Business Review finding sales increases from marketing automation at 10-30%, with investment returns exceeding 100%.

While some sales and marketing technology options may cost more, they can provide savings in the long run when you calculate the increased efficiency and decreased mistakes that come from trying to track your data across multiple spreadsheets and programs.

Want to learn more? These blog posts will provide further reading:
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Michael Park Jul 6, 2020   |   icon 6 min read
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Property Management Process Automation Leads to Success

Property management has many repetitive tasks, but that doesn't mean that property managers need to stay bogged down by repetitive tasks, day after ...
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Heather Park Oct 18, 2018   |   icon 3 min read
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Stop Drowning in Emails With Property Management Automation

January 4, 2023. Tenants, vendors, owners, your leasing team and that inspiring “quote of the day” filling up your inbox? Do you frequently hear, “I ...
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Michael Park Nov 4, 2024   |   icon 6 min read
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How to Find the Best Property Management Software

Property management requires a strategic approach to handle tasks such as tenant communications, maintenance requests, rent collection, and ...
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Operational Review

Operational-Review

You know your competition, you have a better understanding of your finances, and you’ve identified areas of improvement in your technology. After thoroughly understanding these aspects of your business, you are ready to conduct a review of your operations.

We recommend that you don’t skip to this step, as tempting as it may be. Completing the first three reviews in your Game Plan you will give you the tools you need to make the most of these next two steps.

Your operational review should include:

Departmental Analysis Overview

Document all processes and workflows pertaining to any of the following departments)

  • Property  / Client Onboarding
  • Leasing / Move-ins
  • Make-Ready / Turns
  • Maintenance
  • Inspections
  • Collections / Lease Violations
  • Lease Expiration's & Renewals
  • Move-Outs
  • Business Development / Sales
Identify Any:
  • Process Overlap (similar tasks completed by multiple staff members)
  • Baton passes (potential drops in communication)
  • Opportunities for process automation
    Hint: The average property management company should be able to fully automate approximately 60% of their internal operations and increase the number of doors per staff member by at least 50%.
Create Workflow and Process Maps to Illustrate the Flow of Processes Through Departments.

It is no secret how much value we find in identifying and documenting workflows. When it comes to creating a scalable property management business, workflows are the difference between chaos and harmony. Additionally, workflows help give you the high-level understanding of your company that makes it easier to identify opportunities for operations automation.

The Geekly Media Blog covers this topic in detail, and our property management consulting services for start-up and existing property management companies always include the creation of workflow and process maps, as well as instruction on how to best deploy them.

Want to learn more? These blog posts will provide further reading:
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Heather Park Aug 2, 2018   |   icon 2 min read
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You're Not a Landlord; You're a Property Manager

There are two ways you can run your property management company: as a landlord or as a property manager. If you run your company as a landlord, you ...
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Michael Park May 3, 2018   |   icon 2 min read
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Training Your Staff:  Scaling Your Efforts and Creating a Successful Army

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been managing properties for a while, you’ll eventually come to a point where you’ll need to know how to ...
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Michael Park Jan 9, 2024   |   icon 5 min read
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The Property Management Life Cycle: Everything You Need to Know

Research reveals up to 30 percent of your assets may be left to the wayside simply because you don't know they are there. For those operating in the ...
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Marketing Strategy

Marketing-Strategy

The final piece of the Game Plan is creating a marketing strategy. Inbound marketing and marketing automation is the key to optimal ROI for your marketing spend. To improve upon or create a new marketing strategy, use the following steps.

Review Current Marketing Strategy:
  • How do you attract new owners and tenants?
  • How effective is your current strategy?
    • How much does it cost for you to acquire a new lead (not close, just acquire)?
    • How many leads does it require for you to close one new owner on average (your closing ratio)?
    • How long is your sales cycle and how long does it take for you to see a return on your marketing spend?
Perform a Content Audit:
Compile Marketing Recommendations: 
  • Define your buyer personas.
  • Define your marketing campaign goals.
  • Determine the desired outcome of the campaign.
  • Define your offer.
  • Identify the core topic for your campaign marketing materials.
  • Develop content that supports campaign goals.
  • Identify the conversion path you want your customers to take.
  • Create content, landing page, calls to action (CTA).
  • Use this Free Inbound Marketing Starter Kit for Property Management Companies. 
Want to learn more? These blog posts will provide further reading:
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Heather Park Sep 6, 2023   |   icon 4 min read
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Property Management Marketing Has (Not) Changed: Inbound Still Rules

Published July 12, 2018. Updated September 6, 2023. When we first wrote this blog, the big idea was that outbound marketing was no longer the best ...
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Heather Park Oct 26, 2023   |   icon 5 min read
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The Definitive Guide to Property Management Marketing [Updated]

Published December 20, 2019. Updated October 26, 2023. The property management industry is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a ...
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Heather Park Aug 23, 2018   |   icon 4 min read
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A Property Manager's Guide to Establishing a Realtor Referral Program

Cultivating leads is vital to helping your property management company continue to grow and thrive. Long-term success in any business means ongoing ...
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Heather Park Jul 3, 2020   |   icon 6 min read
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Your Guide to Property Management Marketing Automation

Whether you're new to the property management industry or you've been around for the last several decades, garnering and managing leads to grow your ...
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Gameplan-Mockup

Bringing It All Together

All of the elements of a Game Plan are helpful alone. As a package, you have a complete strategy for sales enablement, operations automation, marketing automation, and inbound marketing. Creating a game plan based on these steps will provide everything you need to increase your property management company’s efficiency, increase your revenue, and do it with less work.

Start now to create a Game Plan like this on your own. To make it easier for you, we’ve packaged all of the tools and recommendations from our plan into a downloadable document that you can keep to reference over and over again. Remember, by following these steps and investing in your plan, you are 30 days away from transforming your business and running a more efficient, effective, and profitable Property Management Company.

Overwhelmed? Don’t Be!

If creating a Game Plan to fix your business is more than you want to manage, let Geekly Media create a game plan for you!

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