From assisting our users to become $20 million franchise’s to helping the average property manager grow their portfolio, SnapInspect has an invaluable amount of knowledge when it comes to growing your business.

We often look back and offer advice to our readers, drawing upon our own experiences within the industry to help you during your property journey. Our rich experience means that whether you’re just starting out, or have a portfolio boasting several properties, we can offer advice that will elevate you to the next level.

Experiencing growth when managing a rental property portfolio is inevitable. It’s crucial that you can identify the changes you need to make when that time comes. If you already have a clear, actionable roadmap detailing the path you need to take to grow, you can experience a calming, smooth growth, minus all the stress, anxiety and crisis that many others like you face.

Woah! Relax 

The first problem small businesses run into when expanding is their staff wearing too many hats.

This is great on the surface level of your operation as it is clear that you are experiencing growth beyond your size. However, if you are not prepared for the influx of work your company will quickly deteriorate.

For example, if you have leasing managers handling maintenance requests and customer support on top of leases, it will spread them thin and negatively affect business operations.     

When you are small, you can get away with operating as a “startup” with various employees handling a variety of different tasks. Although once you reach a certain number of properties, it becomes an inefficient use of staff to carry out working as a start-up model. (one hat fits all)

It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective to have your most valuable staff members capped off at a certain number of properties/tenants. Failing to recognize when it’s time to spread the workload and employ more staff can have dire consequences for you and your business and is the most common way businesses end before they even get the chance to start.

SnapInspect suggests that role specialization is the key to controlled growth. Usually, the best solution is to outsource.

A prime example of a smart outsource is a property management call contact center. When you are initially growing, it makes sense to have your staff members answering phone calls prospecting leads, responding to clients and handling any customer service issues.

However, when you start to grow, your experienced staff become ineffective chained to their desk answering phone calls all day, doing tasks that could be outsourced and handled by a contact center that specializes in assisting property management companies.  

Not only does engaging with a call center allow your staff to focus on their primary duties, but it also skyrockets your customer service experience. When clients call your business, a member of the call center who specializes in phone customer service, not an overworked lease manager who wants to get off the phone as soon as they can answer the call.  

Same Page Strategy

Typically, New property management companies are made up of 1-3 individuals who split the tasks and often carry out all aspects of work themselves until they grow enough to hire.

When growth does happen, it’s normal that these individuals get tunnel vision for the particular area that they are covering, and have no interest in any areas that are not their own. Tunnel vision is dangerous for any company as it can cause you to lose sight of your company vision, goals and strategy.

To combat this, SnapInspect suggests having fortnightly or monthly meetings. Review what goals you want to achieve, what you have been doing to reach these goals, and discuss how each of your efforts builds towards reaching your companies goals. When your team has an aligned strategy, it means every member is working towards the same goal which breeds growth.  

When you’re all on the same page if you need to change directions you can. If you are unhappy about a particular aspect of the business, you bring it up in your strategy meetings.

Communication is crucial. If you are not all of the same pages how can you expect to grow? You need to have a high level of interaction between stakeholders to experience sustained, controllable growth.

Inspection Software Is Crucial

If you haven’t already, you need to be thinking of software solutions, like property inspection software that can help your business. It’s common for small companies to begin with a simple software solution that handles the basics. Then, when growth starts, they will add solutions from various vendors. The result is a messy, scattered process that not only takes longer than if they had one comprehensive software solution for everything but makes your staff onboarding process a lot harder.

Often we see decent-sized companies that generate a healthy amount of revenue, still using inefficient property inspection software, paired with generic software like excel managing 300+ properties.

Ironically, these companies enlisted the software to increase productivity. Now that they have grown the software no longer serves the same value. Once these companies review their structure and see that their software is letting them down, they quickly change to a single solution that covers all their needs, like SnapInspect.

Although if they had planned for growth, there would be no need for a software shake-up, and they could smoothly grow at the rate they dictate.

We all know that changing an entire companies software solution can become a nightmare. People become stuck in their ways and resentful of new solutions no matter how impractical their current property inspection software is.

To avoid this headache in the future, we suggest doing your research. Find the best property inspection software available. Ensure that there is room to grow and upgrade plans.

It may seem counterproductive; however, SnapInspect suggests enlisting the most feature dense software on the market from the beginning. This means that as you grow, you will be able to use more and more of the software, And you’ll eliminate any tedious learning processes as you will already have a basic understanding of the software.

It also means that you will never stop being productive and innovative. A property inspection software provider that is continuously updating their solution is a provider that cares about their user’s success and will enable your company to grow to new heights.