The struggle for any business when defining a growth strategy is determining where your new business leads are going to come from. Without a data management strategy, your lead pool can dry up pretty quickly.
There are two types of new business data. The first is internal data - the enormous amount of data either flowing into your business every day or is already inside your four walls. The second is external data - the data you are tasked with chasing. Let's have a look at the simplified version of each.
Inside your business, you have an enormous amount of data you use every day. You have your existing landlords and tenants, prospective tenant enquiries and perspective sales enquiries. Given over 30% of your existing clients may own a property not managed by you or, are considering buying another property in the next twelve months, this is a rich source of leads and should be a focus for your sales team.
As a general statistic, up to 20% of existing tenants may have an investment property they don’t live in or are considering buying one in the next 12 months. I have, over the years, picked up new managements through potential tenants who are moving out of their own home into a rental due to upsizing, seeking a better location or to move inside a designated school area. We should be upskilling our leasing team to ask every prospective tenant they are exposed to.
Sales enquiries is another rich source of data that literally lands in your lap. Many people challenge their teams to land every investor sale that is sold by the business, however, for every sale, there could be another 30-40 enquires actively looking to buy a property in your area, and maybe it is an investment property. All sales leads should be going into your property management new business team to ensure followup and an opportunity to connect. When they buy through your opposition, you have them in the can to take on the management. This data is known as channel one and channel two in our ‘Numbers Game’ book by Ben White.
External data requires a little more hard work, however, is still available in abundance. This data you will have to actively chase, however, can be easily done. The key to external data is to build multiple streams as one stream alone may not drive enough new data into the business. Some obvious ones include active social media campaigns. This could be anything from paid Facebook and Instagram campaigns to Google Adwords and YouTube videos. Create content for these platforms that show your business as experts in your area and highlight solutions to landlord friction points. This knowledge-based content could be topics such as ‘Reducing your days on market’ or ‘Ensuring your property remains attractive’.
Data mining is the other big collection of data that is available to a proactive business looking for leads. The most common and easiest one is to keep a record of all properties currently being marketed in your area. There are two angles here. The first being that landlords are most likely to switch property managers while the property is vacant. The second is that many businesses overpromise and under deliver. Making a followup call to these landlords two to three months after the property has been let may yield some fruitful outcomes.
These are not the be-all and end-all of lead generation in your property management business as the list goes on and on, however, these are concepts that are easy to execute on and can yield quite beneficial results. If you are looking for somewhere to start, the internal data can be a very rich source of leads as you already have an existing relationship with these people.
