Three Pillars of Property Management
25 October 2023
Jonathan Bell
Managing Director at Housemark
Property Management has often been treated as secondary to property sales, which is why I founded Housemark. I wanted to make sure from the start the brand had three clear pillars that would withstand time. If what we are doing doesn’t align back to these pillars, we would need to re-evaluate. In my opinion, these are the main pillars any property manager should bring to the table but are important to any client facing role.
Proactive not reactive
When I talk about being proactive, it’s about actually forecasting what’s going to happen and calling the owner before they call you. When you’re only reactive, clients may start asking, ‘well, what are you offering?’ If a client is approaching you and using your services, they want to see you as the expert and the expert should be aware of the problems before they happen.
Solutions-based
At Housemark, we use a systematic approach called SBAR (situation, background, assessment & recommendations). This allows us to always provide the solution as a property manager. By understanding the situation, you can further look at the background before assessing the solutions available. For example, rather than coming to a landlord saying, your dishwasher is broken.
We provide more context around the situation, saying, “As your dishwasher is broken, we’ve reviewed it and we don’t recommend you get it repaired. It would be better longer term to get it replaced. Here are three options and here’s the one we think is the best for your property.”
It can mean having some tough conversations, but allows for landlords to see that you are coming to them with solutions, not just the problem. Ideally, I know the business is doing well when we’re hearing back, ‘yes sounds good’ or ‘yes proceed’ because we’re giving them clear options, and cutting down on the back and forth.
Integrity
Integrity comes with the above, when you’re being proactive and solutions based, there is no point in being dishonest. If a property isn’t going to find a tenant for the landlords ideal weekly rent, then it’s telling the landlord exactly that. If Housemark or any property manager is going to be able to balance tenants and landlord requests, maintaining honesty throughout and having open communication is key.
If you’re a business owner looking to improve your service, my biggest piece of advice is to get out of weeds. A lot of business owners get so stuck in micromanaging and focusing on all these tiny little issues and not leading. When you’re the owner of a business, your time should be focused on creating a really crystal clear vision.
As a leader, there are three other pieces to remember. Have a clear vision, find the best people to execute it with you and get out of their way and let them do it. To scale, you have to trust your team. You have to find really good people, get out of their way and get out of the weeds. Stop focusing on all these tiny little issues and focus on the vision and the growth.
