Tips for Attracting and Retaining Clients in Property Management

Client acquisition and retention in the property management business can be stressful and time-consuming for many management companies. The process of fine-tuning your management company’s abilities to find new clients, or look for ways to maintain their business, takes a dedicated and concerted approach that many new property management companies might find daunting to implement. 

Finding clients, keeping them happy and satisfied, and figuring out methods that make their partnership with your management company profitable all introduce behavioral and structural changes to the way you approach your business. Luckily, these behavioral strategies are neither overly complex nor impossible to understand, but instead essential and tested methods for success that can increase the business opportunities for your management company. 

Below, you will find a simple guide designed to highlight the best methods for handling the client process. These methods are broken down into the best tips for acquiring new leads and opportunities. These strategies are designed to keep clients happy after you have secured their business. It also provides ways to optimize their experience so that your relationship with the communities you manage becomes profitable for both parties. 

Tips for Attracting Clients:

Develop your online abilities

A key area in attracting new leads for your management company involves a numbers game of increasing the volume of leads you encounter. In other words, the more opportunities you create to place yourself in the view of potential clients, the better odds you give your management company at securing new business. As well, what better way to increase the volume and scope of the net you cast for potential leads than by using the internet to your advantage. 

Creating a website for your management company, along with developing an online platform to broadcast your services to potential communities that may need them, is one of the absolute best ways to generate leads. Although the initial setup may take time to implement, the rewards are not only worth it but will place your company in the best possible position for long-term success.

Implement a Referral System with Current Clients

Another classic approach to virtually any long-term business is a well-run and well-organized referral system. Such a system functions via a management company effectively asking for and acquiring new leads from existing clients eager to promote your brand. This is a must for any property management company looking to increase its profits and workload. Referral systems not only ensure that your management company acquires well-sourced leads from associations, but the system also inherently builds an even stronger bond between your company and the referring client. In many cases, this referral system can offer benefits to the referring clients, such as small discounts in pricing or other gestures of appreciation that build the reputation that your management company is the helpful resource that potential clients need to be in business with. 

Implement Property Management Software

Although this can be a multi-faceted tip that can apply to retaining clients (more on that below), one of the surest ways to generate and increase your business in an ever-growing age of technology is to utilize a third-party management software system. These systems, much like TownSq Business, operate using advanced metrics and up-to-date market information that take much of the guesswork out of where the glaring holes might be in your management company’s ability to acquire new leads. Systems like TownSq streamline this information into an easy-to-use app that merges your current business metrics with an interface that allows you to reach clients in a much more efficient way than ever before. 

Approaches such as this separate some of the more traditional methods that work in conjunction with software like TownSq from the more current methods that allow for a broader yet more refined outreach for management companies. 

Tips for Retaining Clients:

Expand your communications outreach on all fronts

Although email blasts and monthly check-ins are tried and true methods to client management, it’s also time for property managers to begin thinking longer in terms of client communications and how they can best support their current clients. This means expanding your respective company’s outreach and methodology to ensure clients’ needs are met. 

This could be a combination of increasing your company’s social media presence and maintaining updates about how your clients could be improving their associations with valuable articles and content for them to consume. It could also mean responding to Yelp or Google Reviews that detail any negative impressions or interactions with your company thus far. Furthermore, this could even entail implementing the aforementioned third-party software that allows for more streamlined communication techniques with the HOA’s and communities you deal with daily for a more hands-on method of reaching you when they need you. 

What clients want is to be heard and for your company to meet their needs quickly and efficiently. An essential part of that process, and maintaining your quality of service towards them, is implementing the proper channels never to feel as though they aren’t being heard. 

Invest in your brand, and get your clients to invest as well

The most successful businesses in terms of client retention are usually the ones that understand what their particular brand of service is and know exactly how to channel that investment from their clients. This means for your property management company to invest the time and energy into hiring dedicated staff, implementing the highest quality systems possible to support both your clients and the team managing them, and continuing to look for ways to improve those services at every turn. If your management company is smaller in size but known for its unmatched staffing services and communications, building upon that brand is of utmost importance. 

What you will find in that investment is a carryover from company to client, as the communities and associations that begin to trust your quality of service will continue to remain loyal long-term. Clients are looking for consistency and stability in the management companies they work for. The more your company works to invest in itself to develop and maximize those characteristics, the more the clients will buy in on that vision. 

Continue looking for new services to provide clients.

The final tip, which can be referenced back to the property management software, is the notion of increasing profitability for your business while improving and maintaining the relationships you have with your clients. If a particular client of yours hasn’t fully implemented a well-functioning communications system with its residents or online payment portals that consistently work, providing services that could increase those functions will only result in better business for your management company. 

Although the process of finding and maintaining clients is about providing them with the highest quality service, a significant component of continuously looking to find new ways to assist them ensures that your management company’s business remains profitable too. Taking care of your clients’ needs ultimately means taking care of your business’s needs as well.