As a property manager, you know all too well that homeowners are the life and blood of your business. Success in this hyper-competitive niche requires trust and credibility, which further need a careful approach to interacting with clients. In most cases, you will likely have a wide range of small homeowners with unique requirements, making it important to learn about their pain points.
If you’re wondering how to build credibility with customers, you’ll want to keep reading this article.
Understand What Home Owners Want
Your credibility is only as good as the quality of services you provide to homeowners. The first step to improving your services is to properly understand your clients' expectations from the ideal property manager. In general, most owners seek the following characteristics from their property manager:
- Complete transparency
- Peace of mind that their properties are in safe hands
- Access to analytical data about performance
- Personalized attention to detail
- Driving revenue and boosting their investment portfolio
Some owners have a hard time giving up control and will try to micromanage how things are done. As their property manager, you’ll have to demonstrate that you’re the expert so clients can sit back, relax, and relinquish control.
Creating Good First Impressions
Customers should be able to reach you from various touchpoints, including websites, social media accounts, phone, email, and in-person meetings. In all cases, the first impression will set the tone for how these customers will interact with you. This is why you should strive to create a stellar first impression.
Most clients will look you up on your website; so make sure your website looks great. Compare your website with the competition to learn about the latest trends. If you don’t already have a website, you’re missing out!
Make Communication Easier
By far, the biggest pain point for homeowners is communication with the property management company. It’s not always easy to reach their property manager, which can be frustrating when customers need something addressed urgently. One way to boost communication is to increase your response time to queries on social media, live chat on the website, and email.
In short, remove points of friction that are making communication difficult for your clients.
Create Transparency
Transparency is the cornerstone of credibility. Homeowners invest a lot of their time and money into these projects - and are very skeptical about property managers. But don’t worry as this is human nature, and you can significantly bolster credibility by providing 100% transparency on how you collect rent and charge owners for work done.
Social proof, in the form of online reviews, is another very effective way of demonstrating transparency. Positive online reviews show that you care about your customers and are willing to go above and beyond to provide exceptional value.
Speaking of social proof, if you’ve won any company awards, display them proudly on your website. If your team has done an exemplary job, tell the whole world about it.
Pro tip: Always share detailed reports about property performance. Compare performance with previous months to show how the client has progressed in terms of ROI.
Use Data Analytics
Data analytics can be used to identify factors that will provide the most prospects of growth for clients. It also allows you to make evidence-based recommendations to clients. It’s worth noting that data analytics in property management is a fairly new trend. Adopting data analytics could give you a competitive advantage and make you seem ‘future proof’ to clients.
Wrapping Up
In most cases, credibility comes down to how effectively you can understand your client’s pain points and achieving their required results. To this end, we recommend investing in technology to make communication easier and provide owners with transparency.
When owners realize the benefits you’re bringing to the table, they will happily refer you to other clients, which can ultimately attract more owners and drive profitability of your business.
