Wise Strategies to Attract New Commercial Property Managements
Winning commercial property management appointments is not all about lowering fees for clients that simply want a ‘service for nothing’. If you were to accept too many of those clients into your property portfolio, the integrity and strength of your real estate business would decline. It is better to leave ‘low paying’ property management clients and those with unrealistic investment expectations to other less professional agents.
So, let’s focus back into the ‘quality’ end of the property market and the good clients that respect professional management services at a fair fee. They are the clients that understand what it means to boost income, refine the lease documentation, and resolve risks.
Quality Services for Quality Clients
How do you attract and keep these high-quality clients for the longer term? Try some of these ideas:
- Make the investment stability easier for the client – most properties under management will have issues of some instability or volatility. Remove the problems. Getting the volatile issues under control and then redirected to a positive trend or overall property improvement is important; that redirection may take time. Look for the weaknesses in an asset and then seek to reduce or remove them. Where do you look for those ‘negatives’? Start with the leases and then move into the tenant mix facts, the physical aspects of property use, the locational factors, and then the plant and machinery. You will find things to address and help with.
- Resolve weaknesses like vacancies and leases coming to an end – these things impact income stability or growth potential. Look at all the leases in a property and have a ‘checklist’ approach to do so. Poor quality lease documents should be replaced when the occupancy changes in the mix. Existing leases should be ‘policed’ to ensure compliance by the tenant and the satisfaction of critical dates.
- Provide plenty of up to date information – take a strategic approach to lease, tenants, and operational issues. You can develop the idea of a ‘business plan’ for the property and the investment requirements of the landlord. Accuracy is everything in property performance; ensure that your reports are checked before they go out.
- Strengthen the tenant mix – weak tenants should be removed from a managed asset when times permit. Good tenants should be retained. Do a full tenant mix assessment and implement a tenant retention plan. You can use the tenant mix review or retention planning process as a point of difference in your professional services.
- Grow the income base – they say it’s all about the money! Or sometimes it is for some property owners. The income earned from tenants in an asset can stabilise first, then optimise through a strategic approach to tenant selection and lease date ‘staggering’. Know your income base, its variable factors, and then refine the income growth plan. Look for other income streams such as storage, extra lettable space, and property expansion opportunities.
Simple ideas like these will help you boost your real estate business with a ‘quality’ property management service. Put a ‘floor level fee’ in your property management business model and don’t accept properties or clients that fall below that ‘floor level’. Profitability and stability in your real estate business will improve as a result.
