By Kilo Kenan
In the world of property managers and business owners, positioning can be a blind spot. Here’s a question every property management owner should ask themselves.
What separates and differentiates you from your competition?
In most cases, the answers to this question are: We make sure our clients have peace of mind, we look out and care for your property like our own, or I’m a business owner and an investor myself.
These are good and valid reasons for an owner to engage your services and work with you. However, these are not competitive advantages that’ll distinguish you from the pack. They could be considered value propositions or selling points, but they wouldn’t come off as differentiating factors that will set you apart from other companies.
Nonetheless, it’s important to communicate that you invest in your own rental properties, provide peace of mind and treat clients’ homes like they were yours. Most importantly, you also need a differentiating factor, and these qualities are not that.
Many property management companies use these sales points. The commonality of their usage isn’t the most effective proportioning to make to prospective clients. If you want to position yourself better and have an unfair advantage, you need something unique ad arresting. These are a few questions to help you identify or create a differentiator: What does it feel like when a client hires your services? How would you want your owners to feel when they know you’re handling the leasing, management, and maintenance of their investments?
In order to position yourself better, you have to think outside the box when it comes to your market and what you can offer. There are two things that will help you with this blind spot:
- Study and observe your competition. Pay attention to what are they doing and what aren’t they doing?
- Understand and know your perfect client.
Elevate Your Positioning
This is a Herculean task and it’ll take time, thinking, and creativity. Nowadays, most property management companies offer guarantees. At a time when no one was offering guarantees, this would have been a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, now that most property management companies offer the same guarantees it’s more like table stakes. More so, it’s become so rife that many property management companies feel the need to offer guarantees, just to be on the level playing field with their competition. This is a good move but it is one devoid of innovation or ways to make yourself stand out.
Interestingly, reputation has a significant impact in determining the relevance of table stake offerings. If your company is credible and has a great reputation, it won’t matter as much if you don’t offer guarantees like other property management companies. People are going to want to engage your services on the basis of your reputation. If your company doesn’t have a good reputation, offering guarantees and meticulously following through with them may turn the tides in your favor and play a bigger role in improving your reputation.
Guarantees are like sales pitches and they can help you create traction and gain some visibility. However, you’ll need something better and cogent. It’s preferable to look inward and find that differentiator. If you’re always chasing the next big thing it can be detrimental to your business. The downside to this is that you can overextend your team or put your business model at risk.
If you look inward, it’ll enable you to gain sight of who you are. Guarantees are nothing more than accessories for your business. Your inability to know who you are and a constant back and forth between what you offer will make it hard for customers to get to know you.
The Positioning Blind Spot and how to beat it
There are some key questions you have to ask yourself when you’re positioning your company.
· What’s required for us to stand out?
· Who are we and why are we here?
· What have we structured?
· Who do we want to be?
A fast way to hurt your brand is to position yourself in a gimmicky way that includes new and unrelated promotions every month. What you should do is figure out what makes your company different.
More so, the way you position your company can also influence the type of clients you attract to your company. Let’s assume you’re positioning as a company that manages luxury estates, the types of clientele who reach out to you will be different from a company that positions itself as one that promotes affordable housing and Section.
Every business is uniquely different. It is important for you to be clear on your strengths. Branding and messaging can enable you to get over the dead spot of positioning. Do everything possible to figure out who you are and identify what’s really important to your ideal client.
No one has the monopoly of knowledge, this is the reason why you should reach out to professional resources when they’re available to you. Teamwork is important and when necessary hire experts to make things easier for you and get to the place you want to be.
Utilizing Data in Property Management
One of the biggest blind spots in property management is data. Data can be polarizing, some people love to use data, others don’t want to use it because they don’t understand it or know what to do with it. The fact is that so many property management companies have access to a vast reservoir of data and they don’t even realize it. That’s a huge blind spot that shouldn’t be ignored. Here below are specific areas where data can help.
Reputation Management for Property Management companies
Reputation is an essential component when it comes to your data. Pay attention to online reviews left by your customers, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral, they are data points.
The misconception most people have about data is that they think it’s always a number. It doesn’t have to be represented on a chart or graph. It is simply an input of information. Online and in-person reviews are data, and as a property manager, you need to know how to utilize that data. You can make decisions and implement a change based on this data. If you utilize it properly, it will help your business.
We recommend that you ask for reviews in order to have access to the data. There are software systems at your disposal that will automatically send requests for reviews to owners and tenants. Once it’s set up and automated, you’ll have that data.
Once you have the data, the next step would be to use it to examine your process. Take a look at a number of reviews and identify the ones that provide feedback, this will enable you to identify a problem with your process. A common mistake people make is they assume all negative reviews are false. With this in mind, you’d want to conduct thorough research to see if you can use it. Resist the urge to apportion blame on any one of your team members. Instead, take a critical look at the process that led to the bad experience. Device ways to fix these problems and create a positive ad memorable experience for your clients.
It is equally important to know that bad reviews can come from difficult tenants who complain incessantly. In most cases, negative reviews are maintenance-related or they may be about the leasing process not meeting or exceeding an applicant’s expectations. In some cases, it may be related to an application being declined. Sometimes it’s the process and sometimes it’s perception, a smart property manager should be able to determine the cause of the problem through careful examination.
In cases where expectations were different from what actually happened, you should revisit your communication. But, if it’s a case of multiple reports regarding the same experience, you definitely need to look at your process. Create and allocate time to read reviews, you cannot overlook them because they are data points and if properly used will make your business better.
Tenant and Owner Retention
It shouldn’t be a daunting task to understand how long you retain owners and tenants. Technology makes it easy and simple. As a matter of fact, most software systems provide statements that show average relationship lengths.
Different factors can account for tenant retention, and your market is an essential one of them. If your market area is a college town with so many digital nomads, you’ll obviously have different tenant retention rates than an area with families who are nesting. It is imperative for you to understand the normal length of tenancy for the types of homes you manage. Thereafter, examine and compare those numbers to your own numbers. Thorough data analysis gives insight on where your tenancy numbers should be or it’ll inform you on what to do to improve and increase tenant retention.
Also, take a look at your owners’ retention. When an owner terminates a contract or declines to renew it, do you ask them why? In instances like this so many property managers just move forward and disregard the fact that this is valuable data that you’ll want to access. An astute property manager should know long they’re able to keep an owner. More importantly, you should know why you lose them. When dealing with data, keep this in mind, quantitative data is numerical and qualitative data is more nuanced. None is dispensable, you need both.
Lastly, endeavor to track information and study the current trends, this will enable you to compete and identify ways in which you can position your company in order to leapfrog your competition.