Introduction to Onboarding
Well, greetings. Robert Locke here. Thank you so much for hanging with us. This is the beginning of a series that we're doing on onboarding. Onboarding is kind of that process of getting new owner sign-ups.
It kind of started with the PM Grow Conference in Austin, Texas, in 2019, when I was asked to do a TED Talk, kind of a 15-minute version of this onboarding process. And it kind of reminded me that in Crown Realty and Management, that I did for 15 years here in Atlanta, one of the things we did really well was onboarding. We signed up 16 to 25 owners a month for many years, and ultimately sold the company with 1,000 houses to a Fortune 500 company. So we did it really, really well, and there are some things we didn't do so well at Crown, even though we'd done it for 35 years. But one of the things we did real well was onboarding, and we've got a great package we're putting together of collateral material for you to use.
And many of the ideas that we talk about through this series are going to kind of point to that package because we're a vendor. We've got tools that we want to put together to help you succeed in the business, and we did this onboarding thing really well. So let's kind of jumpstart into the series, and we'll bite it off, just kind of a six to eight-minute video on each one of them.
Challenges in Property Management
Two realities in this business when you're in property management, kind of realize that it's a difficult part of the business. One of them is that it's a nickel, dime, thin margin, penny ante business. In other words, like selling toothpicks or sponges, you got to sell an awful lot of them in order to make any money. And unlike sales, this took me a while to get through this. Unlike sales, where there are great big bucks, and it was a sales business, this is really a small penny ante business, and it's a service business.
It's very different than sales. And as a result, because it's a nickel dime business, we need volume in order to make it work. In other words, it's really hard to make a lot of money managing 20, 30 rental houses. You need to get the numbers up high enough to be able to pay you any kind of real money, take any money out of the business. And as a result, we've got to do this constant process of dealing with new owners, signing up new owners because of all the fall-off you deal with.
In other words, the first problem is it's a penny ante business, needs volume. The second one is there's constant fall-off, meaning if you've been in two or three years, you're going to start having a vacancy, and the owner says, "I'm going to sell the house," or, "I'm moving back in," or, "I don't want to be a property manager anymore, I'm going to give it to my brother-in-law." So this business has constant fall-off, and if you've got 100 houses at the end of this year and you don't do any new owner sign-ups, you're going to find out pretty quick that in the next year, you might have 70 or 80 houses.
Importance of Onboarding
Because there's a natural fall-off, you have to have a very well-developed system for onboarding, and we want to help you get that system in place so that you don't end up where a lot of companies have ended up, and that's the graveyard of property managers. We know a lot of managers in this town and around the country who ended up here because they didn't have a really well-thought-out and polished and put-together-well owner presentation and documentation and onboarding process. So we think that you ought to make onboarding a really, really high priority, and that's what this video series is all about, is kind of giving you that. Now, step number one is you need to have a plan.
You need a strategy. So many people in this business, when I ask them about what they're doing for onboarding, they kind of say, "Well, I talk to the owner on the phone, and then I send them some documents by mail. I might go out to the house and meet them and talk a little bit about what I do." There's no real strategy. There's no real sales pitch. There's no step one, step two, step three, and work your way through.
And that may be one of the reasons why you don't do a lot of signing up new owners, because you need a well-thought-out strategy, something that fits all the stages of the process. You need collateral material. You need to learn the sales process. Now, an awful lot of people in real estate are not good salespeople. I happen to be wired to be a salesperson, and I got in the life insurance business right out of college, so I learned selling, and it kind of goes
with my personality anyway, but I really know how to sell, and I know how to get people through the sales process. And so we've put together really, really good onboarding systems, and we had a new business development manager, Scott, that did that for us for about eight years, signed up a lot of owners that way.
Steps in Onboarding Process
All right, the steps. If you break this down, and you need to, you break this down, there are six steps in this process. So let's talk them through. Number one is the first call. Now, before an owner calls you on the phone, everything prior to that is prospecting.
SEO, keywords, good website, blogging, all the things that attract an owner to you is called prospecting. Onboarding has a starting point. It's called the first call from the owner. In other words, this is the call where an owner calls your office and says, "Hi, I'm Joe. I own a rental house, and I want to find out what you do to manage a rental house." That's the first call.
And you need to know clearly there's a beginning point and an ending point to the onboarding process. And so the first call coming in, that's step number one. Step number two is not running out and talking to them. Step number two is doing some research. We'll talk you through exactly what to do in that research process.
The third one is making a presentation. Now, that could be over the phone. It could be over the kitchen counter. It can be via website or Skype. There's a lot of different ways to make a presentation.
We'll talk through the different strategies for making a presentation, what your options are, and what kind of material you'll get in front of the owner to make that presentation and actually close on it. The next step is getting the management agreement and the housekeeping documents signed. In other words, there's a thing called closing. Some of you are kind of afraid of that idea. I get it.
The idea is get the management agreement signed, because leaving there and shaking their hands and crossing your fingers is not the right strategy. You need to know, as a property manager, just like selling anything else, there's a close. There's an opportunity to get the documents signed. Next one is lease the property. We're not going to spend a lot of time on that because there are a whole lot of processes in there.
You know how to do that. The last one is what you do with that owner for the first 90 days of the onboarding process. In other words, the onboarding process starts with the first call, and it ends 90 days after the first tenant moves in. And there's set steps. We're going to surgically go through them, break them out piece by piece.
We'll give you documents and information and dialogue that'll help you analyze this and think it all the way through. Okay, so this is the end of kind of like video number one. So we're going to close it out here, and in another week or so, you'll get another video, or as you walk through the online series. We'll be back in just a while.
Single Greeting
Thank you.
