Tips for growing property management company??

[Doug R.]

Looking for some tips on inexpensive marketing to grow and generate leads from landlords interested on property management.  Any input would be appreciated...

[Jason Hull]

Here are some solid helpful tips (completely promotion free):

• Prospect FRBO's Leads (for rent by owner). Cold call them. This will sharpen your sales skills naturally, which will improve everything. If a property has been vacant for 2-3 weeks, the owner should be pretty open to some help ;-) - a month? that's about a year of management fees anyhow!
• Make sure your property management website is focused on just property management, and your homepage primarily focused on new owners/clients and is built to convert owners to clients (you could be leaking half your leads & deals here). 
• Word of mouth is easy to close... Make sure you are a rockstar at sales - doubling your close rate on cold leads can be a nice multiplier on leads. Usually cold leads only get a 10% or lower close rate. Word of Mouth 70% or higher. Both of those could be improved with some sales clout. 
• Fees - You need money to reinvest to grow... make sure you have a solid fee structure in place & outsource to keep costs low - it's not about doors, it's about revenue. Just a slight increase in fees and a slight decrease in costs can mean double the profit. 
• Research foreclosure auction prospecting for property management - There is a PM in Seattle that went from 0-300 doors in 3 years just doing that.
• Research Realtor Referral Prospecting - this almost never works, but when it does it is great. There is a gal in Atlanta that lives completely off these - she teaches continuing education credit courses on leasing to agents & pairs up with the top agents in her market netting 10-30 deals a month.
• Some people buy leads, or pay for marketing (ppc/adwords, content marketing, SEO, - I would avoid this until you have 200-400 doors & even then I'd be very cautious (avoid anything with lengthy contracts).
• Online reviews trump marketing - create a proactive process to get consistent reviews online from your tenants & owners - the leads you get from review sites will take half the time to close and your close rate will be more like word of mouth. Be wary of review services that waste the bulk of the reviews by capturing them into their tool instead of them going to the review sites people are on (people rarely review twice). Every review site you have high rankings on can become a lead bucket! 

Good luck!