Kyle Crown is the President of Crown Commercial PM. He holds a B.S. in business from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
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In commercial property management, no two portfolios are alike, so there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy you can apply to every client you serve. Each owner has their own unique investment style and set of expectations for your work on their property. Therefore, your only hope for success is that elusive thing experts say is essential to every relationship: communication. I think of our main communications with property owners as falling into three categories. Covering all three has served us well, and it can do the same for you.
Communicate about the owner’s desired level of involvement.
By definition, a property manager should be perfectly capable of taking all operational responsibility for a property off the owner’s hands, and many owners want exactly that — to receive only the most essential updates and think about their property as seldomly as possible. We typically aim to send nothing more to our clients than a monthly owner statement packet and an owner distribution payment that matches it. But that’s not what every client wants.
Some owners want to remain highly involved in the management of their property, and it’s up to you to give them that opportunity. Make it clear that you’re ready to accommodate them whether they want nothing to do with the day-to-day or they want to choose the color of every floor tile. More likely, they fall somewhere on the broad spectrum in between, so go out of your way to ask them what they want their involvement to look like.
Communicate about the owner’s goals for the property.
This might seem like a silly thing to ask your clients about, because they’ll all share the goal of making their commercial investment more profitable. But they might have ideas about the future of their property that you won’t know unless you frequently check in with them and ask. Even if nothing has changed since the last time you spoke with them, they’ll appreciate you inquiring about their level of satisfaction with the work you’ve done.
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Certain owners have highly specific goals and intentions for the spaces they own, and even in some cases have emotional attachments to them. For instance, one of our clients is an architect who designed a building specifically to house a restaurant. When the original tenant went out of business, he was willing to accept a lower rental rate in order to make sure the new tenant was also a restaurant. Without knowing his full story, we would have disappointed him by leasing it as a high-end retail space at a higher rental rate.
Communicate all financial information about the property.
Don’t just find out what exactly it is your client expects from you — show them exactly what they’re getting from you. I’ve found that taking the time to walk a new client through their first month’s packet of statements can do wonders for your professional relationship with them — and for their understanding of your service going forward. Transparency is essential to trust between an owner and a manager, so make sure that your clients have access to user-friendly statements that show and explain every transaction made in relation to their property. Some clients want a one- or two-page statement every month, and some want a 400-page statement. That’s not an exaggeration. Good property management software systems can easily accommodate both and anything in between.
Communication is what allows a property manager to do perhaps the most important thing they can for their clients: put themselves in their clients’ shoes. If I can’t do that, then how can I manage somebody’s property as if it were my own? A mutual understanding is crucial, and only communication can bring that about. So when you interact with the property owners who’ve hired you to look after their assets, don’t assume, or merely imply or try to infer. Communicate instead.
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