At what point is it wise for you to hire a consultant to help you retain clients? Growing your property management business is challenging without the right strategies to keep existing clients while pursuing new business.
In a competitive market, real estate investors have options when it comes to choosing professional property management services. How can you stay ahead of your competition and help property owners stick with you and your management service? If you don't have the right processes in place to avoid mistakes and serve clients well, you're at risk of losing business before you have a chance to grow.
Engaging a property management consultant can help you analyze your business operations and help you retain more clients! Here are a few valuable tips to get started.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
Are you doing everything you can to deliver the best property management services? Finding and impressing new clients is important, but forgetting to provide the best service to your existing can send clients to another property manager in the area.
Research shows that marketing to a new customer will cost you up to five times what it would cost you to market to existing customers to keep them engaged with your services. While you'll always need new clients to maintain your business (or grow), keeping existing clients happy is the most cost-effective way to build a successful property management business.
It’s also easier to persuade existing clients to try out your new brand products and services. Between 60-70% of your revenue comes from repeat (or ongoing) business from your property owners—but they won't stick around if you don't serve them well.
What Is Excellent Customer Service?
What are you doing now that delivers excellent customer service? What more could you do? A property management consultant can help you ensure that:
- Your team is available to handle tenant requests for repairs and maintenance and quickly dispatching contractors to fix the issues.
- Your rent collection process makes it easy for renters to pay the rent
- You deliver every service outlined in contracts with property owners
- You meet their goals
- Property owners have access to you and their financials in real-time
- You apologize for mistakes and make them right (right away)
Don’t underestimate the power of customer service when analyzing your customer retention rates! Keeping clients happy is critical to future growth.
Listen to Client Goals and Communicate Well
Before a potential client becomes a new client, start delivering excellent communication that lets them know you're listening. Clear communication throughout the onboarding process—and as you build customer relationships—goes a long way to improving customer retention.
As a property management professional, maintaining clear lines of communication between tenants and property managers is also critical. When renters feel well-cared-for, property owners benefit from long-term residents and more income! When you manage properties and tenants well and help investors meet their long-term financial goals, property owners are more likely to keep their doors with you.
Hire and Train the Best Talent
The people working for your business will influence its success. Good employees help make your business (and clients) more successful. Bad employees, on the other hand, can sink your business. However, sometimes "bad" employees simply lack training, while at other times, it's critical to evaluate each team member and make difficult decisions about hiring and letting people go.
Developing training programs for your staff helps them stay up-to-date on the latest property management best practices, software, office policies, and emerging trends to help you serve property owners and tenants better. Helping employees acquire new skills and learn new technology will also help you keep your best employees longer.
Engaged employees will contribute to your business growth by being productive, providing excellent customer service, and promoting your brand in your market.
Start With Onboarding
We mentioned good communication during onboarding, but don't stop there. How you start a new client relationship can set the tone for either a lengthy (or short) relationship. Develop a fine-tuned process to get new clients integrated into your processes and build trust from the start.
When clients love you from the beginning, and you continue to serve them well every day, they're more likely to stay!
Retain More Clients With a Property Management Consultant
To be the best, it helps to learn from the best. It can be difficult to identify where your company falls short of service clients well when they start to leave you for another property manager in your market. The right property management consultant can help analyze your team, training, processes, and overall operations to help you deliver the best property management services to investors and tenants.
If you're ready to take a deep dive into your operations and keep your best clients longer, let’s talk! Reach out to schedule a free consultation.
We will review your business plan and make sure you are on track.