How to Market Your Property Management Business
I’ve learned a few things about how to successfully market property management services to customers over the course of the last 9 years. These skills, hard won, helped us build RL Property Management from 0 to 700 units.
If you’re new to property management, don’t miss my article Introduction to Residential Property Management (For Buyers & Founders)
In this post I’ll distill most of what I’ve learned into a few bullet points. If you are trying to grow your PM business, see if any of these aren’t helpful.
Reviews matter. Get your Google Business profile set up and start soliciting positive reviews immediately. Never stop. Handle bad reviews professionally. Prospective clients notice & comment about online reviews all the time.
SEO matters a lot. You need to rank within the top 5 organic results (map results too) for "YourCity property management". Keep working on your website until this is true. Again, basic SEO stuff is all you need here. There's no magic. Keep at it.
Niche down to scale up. You want to become known among brokers, realtors, clients etc as "The best PM company for X". And X cannot be "everything". It should be something like "Class B 2-4 unit MF" or "Low-end SF rentals". You want a direct association to form in the mind.
Get in front of customers. Go out to real estate networking/meetup events constantly. Don't pitch business - you're there to make friends & add value. Become the property management expert and be super-approachable. Help run events if possible. Speak at events if possible.
Track leads & closing rate religiously. You need to know how well your sales "team" is performing. That info combined with CLV (customer lifetime value) will inform how much money you can spend on marketing & still be profitable.
Adwords can be very effective. Work with an expert (don't try to do yourself). See #5 for how to budget. Work with your expert partner to tune, tweak & experiment. However I have not had good luck with Google "Local Services."
Start building an email list. Anyone who contacts you & doesn't buy goes on it. Run webinars/events & collect emails. Put a lead magnet on your website (high quality content) & collect emails. This email list then gets marketed to on a regular basis. ADD VALUE. While you’re at it, subscribe to my email list here.
Don't get cute with pricing. Just set your pricing to a nominal market rate or a bit higher. You don't want sales calls to become focused on price, or leave question marks about how much your service costs. Many ways to make money in this business.
Answer the phone! Customers will rarely leave a message. You need to basically *never* miss incoming calls from prospective customers. By time you call back, they're talking to competitor or unavailable to speak with you.
No silver bullet. There's no hack, code or secret. Results generally come with sustained effort for 2+ years, doing basic marketing activities like those described above.
Did I miss anything? Contact me and let me know!