Some of you may remember the PMGrow conferences that Jordan Muela and Alex Osenenko used to put on in the pre-Covid days. By far one of the best events I’ve been to. At the last event that they put together, they had a speaker by the name of Joey Coleman. He wrote a great book called “Never Lose a Customer Again” that I recommend, and he spoke at the conference about the importance of the first 100 days of a new client’s time with your company. With all of the talk that goes on in our industry about business development, we just don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the importance of the initial onboarding experience and the first few months with your company. So let’s talk about it today.
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First Impressions Aren’t Just For Tenants
One of the most perplexing things to me in our industry is that it seems that most PMs put more thought into the tenant onboarding experience than they do to the owner onboarding experience, while the owner is the actual client. I’ve seen companies with gift baskets, educational onboarding videos, in-office lease reviews, all sorts of things for tenants. But when it comes to owners, PMs seem to be a lot more haphazard. As a result, a common time for owner terminations is actually before the property even gets leased the first time.
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It’s important to remember that the clock is starting the very second the owner signs the PMA. While you may think it makes sense for onboarding to take a little time, the owner is signing when she actually wants to get things moving NOW. Most clients aren’t signing up with a PM several months in advance. They might be researching PMs that far out, but by the time they sign the contract, they want to see that “For Lease” sign out in the yard. It is vitally important that your onboarding process starts immediately and doesn’t have any bottlenecks. This is why I’m such a big advocate of automation. Here’s what happens at my PM company:
Owner receives an explainer video going through the PMA in plain language when they receive the contract for signature
Owner signs PMA electronically in PandaDoc
A Zapier automation automatically triggers the creation of a LeadSimple Owner Onboarding process immediately
A welcome/onboarding email immediately goes out to the owner with a link to an Owner Onboarding JotForm
Owner submits the form and that data immediately pushes back into LeadSimple and advances the process to the stage for our team to enter them into Propertyware (soon to be Rentvine) and get things moving.
Essentially, if the owner is ready, they can be getting their Owner Portal login same day. When you act that speedily, it creates an impression immediately for the client that you know what you’re doing and you have things locked down, which is exactly the impression you want when someone is handing you over control of their most valuable asset. Automation isn’t just something that makes your life easier, it’s something that creates an image of professionalism for the client.
The Sticky Client Formula
I won’t pretend that we have perfected this at my own PM company. But we’ve certainly learned plenty of valuable lessons that I can pass on. In my experience, the onboarding process being successful comes down to a formula of these three things:
Education - Informing the owner from day 1 about how things will work
Communication - Making sure the owner knows how to reach you and get information
Personalization - Make the owner feel like they’re not just a number
Let’s look at each of these individually, starting with education. I’ve seen some amazing ideas out there from PMs on how to handle this. For example, one of my consulting clients has professionally recorded a 30 minute video that walks the client through their philosophy on property management and how the relationship will work. The owner is literally not able to finish onboarding until they’ve watched the entire video. The same client also has an entire online training platform available to clients with all sorts of educational content. The whole goal here is to set expectations right from the beginning. If the owner knows ahead of time how an eviction will work, or how you handle repairs, they won’t be angry later when it doesn’t go how they just assumed it would go. It isn’t the actual events that tend to make people angry, it’s the lack of expecting those events up front.
Next, communication. It sounds similar to education, but it’s actually a different idea. Education is limited to imparting knowledge in one direction, while communication is a two-way street. We want to make sure, especially during the early months of the client relationship, that clients understand how to best reach us when they have a question, and we want to be proactive with outbound communications so that we aren’t leaving the owner in the dark on what is going on. That period of time when the property is on the market and no rent is coming in is a very stressful time for a new landlord, and making sure to over-communicate during this phase is very important.
You’ll want to have regular check-in phone calls with owners during that first 100 days. Not just emails. Phone calls. And yes, many owners will be like me and never answer their phone, but just that voicemail message is enough to let them know that you’re on top of things and making the effort to reach out. I also recommend the initial hand-off from BDM to leasing or property management to be done by video. You don’t need to get on a Zoom call, as owners frequently can’t meet during normal business hours, but recording a Loom video where the BDM introduces the owner to the people they’ll be working with going forward and explains how communications will work goes a long way.
Finally, and this is something I’ve added only in the past year, personalization. In years past, I was hardcore about standardizing everything about the product and service. Same pricing plans, same policies, same everything for everyone. That’s because in the “old days,” this was necessary in order to scale. When you have to remember every little difference from one owner to another, it becomes impossible to keep track past 100 owners or so. But with the introduction of platforms like LeadSimple and Aptly, we no longer need to remember, because the processes can be setup to automatically do things differently for different owners using conditional logic and a few simple custom fields. One owner wants one level of landlord insurance while another wants a different level? No problem, just a custom field with the different insurance options and some conditional logic on some processes to go down differents paths for different insurance coverage. It’s all automatic, nothing needs to be remembered by anyone.
The reason I made this change and started allowing for much more customization of things about a year ago was a survey that Jordan Muela and Peter Lohmann did of landlords across the country. This was a scientific poll of a decent sample size so that we had statistically meaningful information, and it clearly showed that owners wanted things to be more customized to their wants and needs. While we simply didn’t have a choice but to not give them that in the old days, with the changes in technology, we now can, and that means we now should. There’s really no excuse for not offering a more customized experience with today’s technology. And the closer your product or service conforms to what the owner actually wants, the more sticky that client will be.
The Owner Statement Video
One of the things that I think PMs can do most easily is implement a simple video walking the owner through their first statement after a tenant has moved in. Not a stock explainer video of a generic statement, but a personalized video going over that specific owner’s actual statement. It takes less than 5 minutes in most cases, definitely less than 10, and you only have to do it for an owner’s first statement, but it goes such a long way. I’ve heard of several other PMs doing this for a while, but we just recently implemented it at my own company after reviewing some owner survey results and finding that this could be a cure for a major point of frustration for new clients.
It’s important to do this after the new tenant has moved in. That isn’t to say that you can’t do another video for their first statement while the property is vacant if you just want to go over the reserve deposit and their expenses, but the most important video is after their first tenant move-in, because this is where the confusion usually starts to pop up. It’s probably been a couple of months since the owner had their discovery call with you and you explained the fees and how things work, so the owner has likely completely forgotten that they have to pay a leasing fee when the tenant moves in. By far, this is the biggest question owners have after getting their first owner statement. By just getting in front of it and explaining it to them before they have the question, you will solve so many problems. They just need a reminder. Your video coming before they even think to ask the question instead of them having to take the time to call or email you after they’re already confused and perhaps even frustrated or angry will make all the difference.
When recording the video, walk through the statement line-by-line with them. Don’t just explain the items that are actually on the statement, but also the items that they’ll probably see in the future, such as any annual fees, annual preventative maintenance or inspection fees, how prepayments show up on the statement, what a bounced tenant payment will look like, etc. Go ahead and explain this stuff now so that confusion doesn’t reign later. Many of you know Wolfgang Croskey, and he always says something that I love: “if the owner is calling, we’ve already made a mistake.” The whole point is to prevent the call (or email) in the first place.
Final Thoughts
An owner who is educated, feels that communication is flowing freely, and is able to customize their client experience is a whole lot less likely to churn. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t prevent all churn. There will always be crazy Karens out there who will get mad no matter what you do and how proactive you are, but you can drastically reduce churn, particularly early churn, but taking these proactive steps.
I would encourage you to go do a full audit of your owner onboarding experience and see what you can do to tighten it up, prevent onboarding bottlenecks, and proactively communicate on any areas of common confusion. I think you’ll find that your churn goes down and your client satisfaction goes up, which means your lifetime value of each client will skyrocket.
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Debate Me
Disagree with my take here? Have a different perspective? There’s nothing I love more than a good debate or even just an intelligent conversation. If you’d like to jump on a podcast recording with me to discuss this topic, please let me know!
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