Here at Red Roof we are always trying to improve the service we provide to our owners. Let’s face it… the property owner is the one paying us for our service so we really should listen to owner’s needs if we want to succeed in this business.
Recently I sat down with my staff at The Lady Luck Cowboy Restaurant next to my office (the food is good there!). I laid a blank pad of paper on the table and asked them “If an owner could have anything for management, regardless of whether it was good or bad for Red Roof, what would they want?” I told them to put aside whether they thought an idea was possible or not and just get the thoughts out as they came. Here are some of the ideas that came up:
- Free or LOW COST management
- A “management buffet” – 2-3 different service levels to chose from at differing monthly prices
- More property inspections
- More owner contact – status reports
- Guaranteed rental income every month to the owner, even if the home is vacant
- Owner never pays for damages to property done by a bad tenant
- Owner can cancel the management contract at any time
- Completely worry free management
- The home is returned by the tenant in the same condition as when they first moved in
Once we got all ideas down on the paper we then discussed which ones were doable and how we could do them. It was surprising how some ideas initially thought to be impossible somehow got massaged into something that was possible. We are still fine-tuning “dream management” and plan on mailing all our property owners a letter after the first of the next year to announce some changes that have come from the experiment we conducted around a small table in the Lady Luck Cowboy Restaurant!
What ideas do you have for property management? If anything was possible, what ideas would you have? Would you share them with us please?
What’s on your mind?