PM Collective - The ART of property management
The ART of property management with Ashleigh Goodchild is a leading platform supporting collaboration not competition through an online community and events throughout the year with one purpose: to create happier property managers. She creates connections for property managers looking to create momentum in their careers and personal life. Join Ashleigh and her guests as they discuss challenges, struggles, mental health, mindset and give advice to property managers and anyone in the industry. To get the support in your property management career, join our PM Collective Facebook and Instagram community.
PM Collective - The ART of property management
Managing the new age investor
The property investor landscape has dramatically transformed over the past two decades, requiring property managers to adapt their approaches and services to remain relevant. Understanding these changes is essential for developing effective strategies to better serve modern investors and build lasting client relationships.
• Shift from accidental to intentional landlords with more business-minded approaches to property investment
• Self-education playing a larger role as investors research more before engaging property managers
• Need for property managers to provide quality education through videos, webinars and annual investor audits
• Transition from transactional management to relationship-based service delivery
• Building trust with clients leading to easier maintenance approvals and management decisions
• Importance of being a holistic real estate resource for investors, not just a rent collector
• Annual investor audits covering emotional check-ins, financial reviews, and property forecasting
Head over to pmcollective.com.au to access our Annual Investor Audit course for $99 and implement these strategies in your business.
PM COLLECTIVE - GUIDE AND SHAPE AN ENJOYABLE FUTURE
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Welcome back to the PM Collective podcast. I am so glad you are back here for another listen and I realized I don't think I've actually done this topic before as a podcast. I've done lots of training with annual investor audits, but not actually in a podcast. So I'm not going to go through like all the detail because you sort of need to do the. I've got an annual investor audit course that you can do, which is $99. And you can head over to do the. I've got an annual investor order course that you can do, which is $99. And you can head over to pmcollectivecomau to get that recording and all the like details for actually implementing them in your business. But what I do want to talk about is why they're so important and also a little bit about how the investor model has changed a lot in the last 20 years that I've been in real estate and because I think it's really important to know, because this is sort of the reason why I started doing the annual investor audit. It's one of the reasons why the second reason why I'm actually going to share at the PPM conference that's coming up in August I'm actually going to share at the PPM conference that's coming up in August, so not sure when you are listening to this podcast, but if the conference hasn't been, then it's a good opportunity to hear the story.
Speaker 1:But the investor landscape has changed quite a lot and back 20 years ago, you know, our roles were so different. We collected rent, we arranged maintenance. Life was so much easier, despite being harder, with street directories and manual diaries and all of that stuff, it was still easy. And the investor now, I think we can all agree it is different. It's hard, it's time consuming, it's complicated, and that just goes for humans in general, like people are just complicated these days. But if we can start understanding how the investor has now changed, we can then start equipping ourselves with how to be managing them better as investors and landlords. And so that's really what we need to understand. If we don't understand who they are now, how are we meant to be serving them better in our businesses? So that's what this today's session is going to be talking about is just really get your mind thinking about you know what the investor looks like in your business. So I'm going to share my thoughts on this topic, because there's three things that have definitely changed the way I do stuff in my business because of this evolution. So the first thing that I've really noticed is how we have gone from an accidental landlord to the intentional landlord so much faster.
Speaker 1:So for those that don't really know the difference, an accidental landlord is what I would consider a landlord that has accidentally become an investor. Maybe they have moved overseas for work and they're just needing to rent out their home for 12 months. Maybe they inherited a property. Maybe they're just upsized and they can't afford to sell their property. Maybe it's gone backwards or something, but they have upsized their property and now renting out their original. So that's sort of what I consider a bit of an accidental investor. Or maybe they've had, they've bought the house for kids. Kids have grown up, now no longer need it. They've still got the property Accidental and an accidental landlord to manage is a lot different and that's really what I would have said.
Speaker 1:The majority of my investors back in the day actually were where. Now it's completely changed and most of my clients are intentional investors, and intentional investors are people that have bought for the pure purpose, for the pure reason of investment. They've got a business mindset, the numbers need to work, they're less emotional, they're more price-driven All of those things you would probably see in a business that's what they are when the accidental investor is a bit more emotional. Maybe they're not as worried about having to spend better money on maintenance because they're coming back to the property and they're going to be living in a very, very different with how you manage them when it comes to maintenance and the landlord's intentions. So if we have gone from having the mainly accidental landlord back in the day and now we've got the intentional landlord that is making up the majority of a lot of rent rolls around Australia, what's interesting is that there might be some of you listening that haven't been in the industry that long and you probably only really know the intentional investor, like the intentional landlord, like they're the main ones that you're used to dealing with. But just understand that it definitely has changed over the years and I guess our mindset and our frustrations can sometimes come from where we have been so used to dealing with accidental landlords who are so much more emotional in a good way to their property than these business-driven landlord that we've got now. So, understanding that maybe you can reflect on your portfolio and your clients what type of clients do you have? Do you find them to be more accidental investors or intentional? Does your management style change to allow for both of them? Are you still working as if all of your clients are accidental or are you working towards all your clients being intentional? Really good self-reflection. Maybe something at the next team meeting you can actually talk about your experience with how you feel your majority of the portfolio is going.
Speaker 1:The second thing that's a major factor in property management at the moment is the self-education. So as a result of the intentional investor being such a large part of our business, the self-education is playing a really big part. So, because it's a bit of a mindset, these intentional investors they're doing their research before they get you. I mean they can do research on Facebook and Google and Reddit and all of these places. They can find out a lot. They can probably even just about use chat GPT to work out all the information they need to manage a property. So with that self-education comes with a lot more responsibility for us as property managers to really make sure that they are getting the right advice, they are finding it in the right places, that they are also being educated by us and that we are forming part of their self-education and hopefully they're taking our instructions over anything they see on TikTok or somewhere else. But that's why it's really important to make sure that we're giving them that extra information they're needing and, if anything, let's give them more, because our education that we can provide those investors can be so much more valuable because it's based on real life case studies and real life experience on the ground. So let's make sure that these investors are getting educated by the right people and the right places, which is us.
Speaker 1:So if you in your business are not providing some more self-education to these clients, this is something that I think you should really consider bringing into your team. So, self-education from a property manager's point of view, let's talk about ways that you can actually do this. So you might have monthly videos that you send to your clients, which gives them a little bit of more information about what goes into managing a property and your processes. So, for example, I do these, and the most recent one that I've just sent out to my clients is education on who is responsible for putting in an insurance claim. Should the owner be putting in the insurance claim for their property or should it be the property manager? Now, that can go either way. What I talked about in. That was what our process is, and I also did encourage owners reasons why they would be better off putting their own insurance claim in as opposed to getting us to do it. That type of education is really, really important for clients. So something that you might like to put in as well is something as simple as recordings of that education of your processes.
Speaker 1:The other form of self-education that I do is in webinars. So we host webinars every three months. They are open for all clients, so this is not just for our clients, this is for everybody, all investors Australia-wide, and I bring on in a guest speaker to talk about different topics like buying an Estrada or finance or accounting, and so that type of thing helps you control the education that your clients are getting. And then the third thing is our annual investor audits that we do for all of our clients, and they're a massive education piece with the landlords as well, and they are frothing over it. They're loving it. So if you haven't yet got annual investor audits in your business, then highly recommend you pay attention to that, because more and more property managers are now getting them done. And a funny story I had someone who thought that an annual investor audit was just doing that rent review every year of the property and doing an updated CMA. That's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the annual investor order. I'm talking about checking in on them emotionally, financially mortgage rates, suburb intelligence reports, forecasting what could possibly happen in their property, what's their level of maintenance like. There is so much to it and that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:And the third thing is, with the changing of the landlord is they are no longer looking for transactional property management. They're looking for relationships. They want you to be their real estate agent. So if they want to know a settlement agent to call, they're going to call their property manager. If they want to sell their property to call, they're going to call their property manager. If they want to sell their property, call the property manager, find out who they should sell with. If they need a finance broker, call the property manager. If they want advice hey, I need to spend some money on my property, how should I best renovate it Call the property manager. All of that is really what you're aiming to create that relationship so that you are the one person in real estate that they can call and trust to get any advice that they need not just property management.
Speaker 1:I'm talking all real estate and property related. Ash, I need a plumber at my own house. Who do you use? Here's the name and the number. That's the type of energy and the type of effort you should be putting into having these relationships.
Speaker 1:It also goes as far as your social media Investors. I've got them on my personal page personally because I don't mind and everyone's going to be a bit different with an opinion on that, but I can tell you that the relationships that I have with my investors are so much better. When they know me personally, know my hobbies, know my children, know how I work, whether I work mainly at night or during the day, they're my best clients. And when you can create a better relationship with them and they're not seeing you as just someone who collects rent, you are someone who they can trust with opinions, feedback, bouncing ideas off, you are going to find that they're going to trust you so much more. And when they trust you so much more, it is so much easier to get work done, maintenance done, because, hey, mr Landlord, I've just organized a plumber over the weekend because I had to. Sure, no worries, because I trust her. She wouldn't send someone out unless she had to. That's the type of relationship you're aiming for, and not only is that what the landlord wants, it just makes your life so much easier as a property manager.
Speaker 1:So don't avoid creating that somewhat nearly personal relationship with them, because that's where I find people really shine. So they're my three thoughts on how the investor has changed over the last 20 years, and while I haven't got into the actual annual investor audits, they play such a big part in how we actually deliver them to the clients and how it sort of helps with retention in our business as well. So I hope that sort of helps understand a little bit of my mindset when it came to creating that and how I think about the change of the investor and how I implement those things into my business and how we manage property every single day. So, yeah, you need to get out of that space of that transactional, because you've got automation VAs, other people that can do that transactional stuff.
Speaker 1:That's not where you should be spending your time. It's time that you start building those relationships and building that education platform for your clients to continue to remain relevant to them for another five or 10 years before it all changes again. I'm sure. But I hope that helps with a little bit of insight, a little bit of what's inside my brain, how I think, and if you've got any questions with that, reach out. If you've got any fan mail for me, send me a message and let me know. And love to have your feedback and I'll see you next week.
