How To & Education | Commercial Real Estate
So you’re tired of waiting for referrals. You’re frustrated that four other companies rank higher than you on Google. Not to worry, in this tutorial post, we’re going to show you exactly how to find property management leads and how to manage your prospecting for ultimate success.
Ready to grow your property management business?
In order to get property management clients, you’ve most likely been trying the following:
- Growing your referral network of real estate agents
- Waiting for referrals
- Making your website look nice and pretty
- Sending out random mailers
- Trying to get your company to rank in Google
There’s nothing wrong with any of these strategies. (Except for sending random direct mail. You should never do that, and we’ll get to the fix in just a minute.)
But what is wrong is that these strategies are not tailor-made for property managers itching to grow. Learn more about the common strategies that property managers use to grow their businesses and why they don’t work if your company is new, expanding, or ramping up.
How to find property management leads
At best, the above strategies are passive. At worst, they’re a complete waste of time. In order to grow your business reliably, you’re going to need to find high-quality leads. But what does a good lead even look like for a property management business?
- Home is not owner occupied
- Home is within reasonable territory to manage maintenance and showings
- Owner could be in county, out of county, or even out of state
Finding quality property management leads is easy with PropertyRadar. Here are the steps you can follow:
1.) Login to PropertyRadar.com (you can start a free trial if you don’t have an account).
2.) Click on Make a List to start defining the criteria of your ideal new property management clients.
3.) Add your city in the Location Criteria, then select on the Draw a Shape tool to literally draw your territory. For example, maybe your office is in Roseville, but you’re open to managing properties in Folsom and Granite Bay as well.
4.) Next, add additional criteria besides just location. Prospecting to every homeowner wouldn’t be very smart, now would it? Select “Quick Lists” to pull up existing data sets that are relevant to your business. You can click on Absentee Owner - Out of County to create a list of all the Out of County owners in your area.
5.) Click on “Make a List” at the top to save all of the information. Any new properties and property owners will get automatically added to this list continually! Pretty awesome.
6.) Repeat this process for all of the Quick Lists that apply to property managers, or consider combining different Quick List criteria into one list.
How to optimize the process prospecting for property management clients
Finding property management leads is just one part of the prospecting process. We recommend that you approach prospecting as a four-step process:
- Discover prospects
- Understand their needs
- Connect with them directly
- Automate your outreach
1. Discover prospects
The first step is to discover best-fit prospects using the steps we outlined above. Trying to prospect to all homeowners would be a complete waste of time. That’s why PropertyRadar comes pre-loaded with Quick Lists for property managers, including vacant properties and absentee owners.
2. Understand their needs
The next step is to learn a bit more about the property and its owner. Do they have a high or low percentage of equity? Are they likely to be able to afford a property manager (based on their known income levels and equity) or are they more likely to try to manage the rental themselves?
Is the property in a highly desirable area or one that is harder to rent out?
You can learn more about the properties and their owners to create segmented marketing lists (i.e. send direct mail with certain messages to certain people), or to help you do a much better job when you’re cold calling or otherwise reaching out one-on-one.
3. Connect with them directly
The next step is to connect with your prospects directly.
In a nutshell, prospecting means that you’re defining best-fit prospects and then reaching out to them. You don’t have to wait for the best opportunities to reach you via paid advertising or Google searches. You see an opportunity, and you call, email, or send mail to the prospect. It’s so simple and reliable, but we can guarantee that a lot of your competitors aren’t doing this. They’re too focused on all the cool digital marketing stuff, like Instagram. (Good luck growing a property management business with Instagram, buddy.)
4. Automate your outreach
One of the absolute most exciting things (when it comes to prospecting) is setting up automation.
Imagine this…
- You create your criteria for your ideal prospects
- You create a super awesome direct mail postcard with a great testimonial, what makes your company unique, and your contact information of course
- You send a postcard to everyone on your PropertyRadar lists
- You create a very simple automation with just a few clicks, so that any time a new property gets added to one of your lists based on your pre-defined criteria, the property owner receives your postcard to their home address—not the home address you hope to manage
For somewhere around 60 cents a pop, you’ll be reaching out to ideal prospects before anyone else, because you’ve got this system on autopilot.
Finding property management leads is really difficult if you spray and pray. But if you know what criteria to look for and where to find it, then your outreach is so much more successful.
Get our free guide on growing your property management business, including a case study from a property management company doing everything we’ve just described.
How to monitor your existing doors
Property research data is absolutely brilliant when it comes to building a list of the right local prospects. But this type of data has another use case too, and that’s monitoring your existing roster of client properties.
Have you ever felt like the last to know when your client passed down a property to their daughter or decided to put it on the market?
When you learn how to monitor your client properties, you’re never the last to know. Learn how to do this in our free guide.
Key takeaways
Prospecting for property management clients can work really well if you know who to reach out to. If you send direct mail or try to cold call every homeowner in your area, you’ll work yourself into the ground without a whole lot to show for it.
But when you use the right criteria to segment property management leads, then you can save time and money by marketing only to the right people.
You can use combinations of the following criteria to choose who to reach out to:
- Location
- Income level
- Equity level
- Absentee owner out of county
- Absentee owner out of state
- Vacant properties
- Owned by trusts
Happy prospecting!
