I love offering listeners fantastic benefits, such as some great discounts for products. These include the PM Grow Summit, website production through Property Managed Website, showing services through Tenant Turner, and more, with new offers coming all the time! You can see a complete list of the current offers at propertymanagementmastermind.com. For all of these offers, use the discount code “Brad” to secure your discount.
My guest today is a true luminary of the property management world. Bob Walters, who hails from Australia, is the founder and godfather of LPMA (the Leading Property Managers Association). Bob has been in the industry for over four decades, and has been doing conferences in Australia and New Zealand for over a decade. He’s a successful entrepreneur who has built up, sold, and successfully exited three property management companies totaling well over 4,000 units. Thanks to his deep expertise, Bob is also a consultant.
Together, Bob and I will dig deeply into the five S’s of property management: structure, strategy, systems, service, and standards.
In terms of structure, you need to keep in mind that there’s no right or wrong way to structure your business; you just need to delight your clients! When you start out, what you need to figure out about your structure is how many staff you need on your team to delight your clients while still making a profit.
One important aspect of strategy is having a properly documented business plan and a properly prepared budget. Even so, when Bob is working as a consultant, he often finds that property management companies don’t have these sorted out.
Having good systems for everything you do is an easy thing to say, but difficult to execute. Bob will explain how many property management businesses still don’t have properly documented systems, and clarifies that property management is mostly processes and absolutely requires strong systems to be successful.
The standards category covers both personal performance standards and company performance standards. These should be carefully calculated, achievable, and regularly monitored.
If you want to hear about the customer service side of things, tune into the episode! In addition to the important five S’s, we’ll discuss other topics including keeping your books, health checks for property management companies, why policies and procedures manuals are so important, marketing materials, and lots more. Once you’re done listening, if you can’t get enough about property management, join our Facebook group to get in touch with more industry professionals!