Property Management Company Profit

June 08, 2023

How to Improve Profit

The latest Buildium survey (and our own surveys) reveal that landlords and property managers both want to improve profitability.

And it seems they understand that profit from how they manage their properties rather than risking new investment and relying on cost cutting measures. Rising above cost cutting is the first step in improving profits and building success.

A Significant Challenge

If you focus on profit, you’ll get it. If you focus on stability, growth, efficiency, quality service, or comfort, that’s wonderful, yet without profit, what do they mean? Profit isn’t a dirty word. In fact, profitability proves the business is worth it, is managed well, and will likely exist continuously.

What Do Your Accounting Reports Say?

Using your ManageCasa dashboard, you’re able to produce some insightful property management financial reports, and you’ll discover industry performance benchmarks to give you some new numbers to aim for.

That’s an important comparison, because your company could be hemorrhaging money big time. Just reducing costs can be a profit center. Other times, you might have to look deeper at the properties, cities, and tenants you’re involved with.

It could also be a lack of digital automation in managing accounts. Using smart automation helps you redeploy staff, attract new landlord leads, and helps you see the status of your business without self-deception.

Improving your Profitability comes down to 6 Criteria:

optimizing budget and operating costs using data — be guided by your financial reports and then compare to industry benchmarks if possible. Do you need more money, or are your daily operations out of date?
setting and raising rent prices appropriately – set the best price possible, and raise it according to your requirements to stay viable (it’s not about profiteering)
acquire better tenants – improve how and where you recruit new tenants from listing ads to syndicated advertising online, to the kinds of leases you offer to retain tenants
automate and manage time as a precious resource – use ManageCasa to digitize and automate as much as possible which cuts staff labor costs, and lets you reallocate staff to more important profit building tasks
scale up and improve your service mix – adding services and improving them (e.g., online rent payment, tenant portals, marketing automation, accounting, and adding digital amenities) impresses owners and creates additional revenue streams
market your business professionally – get more done and bring your leasing activities inhouse. Automate marketing and leverage the power of a property management website. Online marketing is absolutely essential. Your company website and lead generation sources should be market leaders always providing a rich source of landlord leads and renter leads. Marketing says: “we’re ready and eager to do business.”

What are Your Biggest Challenges?

Property Management Challenges. Screenshot courtesy of Google.

Assess and Optimize How You’re Doing Business

Like most property managers, you’re heavily focused on what you’re doing day to day. But that kind of focus gives you tunnel vision. You may need to review your property management business model, add services, and adopt automation technology to improve profit margins, and improve your competitiveness.

Today, you would be wise to reassess how you’re running your business. You’ve likely suffered reduced profit margin on all your units. Given the economy, inflation, supply issues, you’ll be forced to do more with the operations budget you have.

Streamlining, improving profitability, increasing services, improving maintenance, and lowering staff and contractor costs are all part of thriving in property management in 2024.

A Few More Management Tips:

use software messaging tools to communicate well with your staff and tenants
communicate with tenants with a plan, and make it easier for them to listen to you and pay you
automate any work that can be automated to free up your time
grow your profit centers and entertain the idea of digital amenities
create a mission to minimize work and effort and convince staff of the process
use a simplified property management solution – an online management platform streamlines your work raising efficiency, while enabling convenient services for tenants, and helping you avoid the losses of your bad business habits
keep your work and personal life balanced so you have quality energy
advertise your available units well on your marketing website — build its power to create visibility via Facebook and Google and show rental suites
market your business consistently and strongly for market leadership
establish a property management brand that says you offer the best property management company

A Passion for Excellence

Successful SMB owners have a passion for what they do. Their desire powers their intent to succeed and surmount obstacles. It gives them optimism to look at their firm differently to build their brand, serve customers well, and run the business better. It can help you turn the mundane, boring, tedious, and difficult into a catalyst to improve and take chances to grow.

With a new, better business model and attitude about efficiency and automation, you’re creating a company your staff will like too. That could solve your staffing issues. Happy staff do more and better work, and they learn faster.

Is there any one asset or tool that can help you run your business better? Yes, it’s called ManageCasa. Take a good look at this simple and powerful system for managing rental properties.