Property managers across the country are reporting heavy workloads and according to a recent study, 29% of Property Managers are intending on changing their careers. This represents an increase of almost 25% from last year.
Interestingly, those who report being overworked aren’t necessarily managing a giant portfolio. Most respondents had a portfolio of less than 150 properties, which indicates that it’s not the day to day management of these properties (inspections, maintenance etc) that’s causing the problem, but rather the back and forth administration and management of Trust accounts that is causing the angst.
We recently spoke to a number of Property Managers asking them how often they worked after hours in order to maintain adequate customer service levels and their response was alarming. On average property managers were working after hours 2 or 3 times a week!
This begs the question, what can be done to alleviate this?
Staff turnover is bad for business. Lost relationships, time spent hiring and training new recruits is time not spent managing properties. There is a direct correlation between staff turnover and churn of landlords for agencies, with landlords often following Property Managers to competing agencies when they leave.
Investment in people is essential to ensure they’re fit and able to deliver the level of service you and your clients (landlords) expect. By harnessing technology, specifically automation, agencies can free up time for their Property Managers to concentrate on building client relationships, servicing customers and tenants, adding value, and do more interesting work, rather than requiring PM’s to work long hours doing tasks that add no value and provide no personal satisfaction.
OurProperty does just that. By utilising machine learning and AI, OurProperty is able to save up to 68.5% of Property Manager’s time by automating the admin. Arrears, invoicing, advertising, and more are taken care of, allowing PMs to spend more time working on high value tasks such as new business development and putting the relationships they manage at the centre of their day.
To learn more about how OurProperty can help your team please visit our website here or book a Demo with one of our team members.