In New Zealand, approximately 25-30% of residential investment properties are being managed by a property manager. The question for your business is how to convert the remaining 70-75% of residential investment properties onto your rent roll. From my experience, to win the DIY landlord you need to first catch their interest, make it easy for them to use your service and then once they have showed their interest, promote your business and its services to lock them in.

To catch interest, you need to think of ways to overcome the most common block for DIY landlords using property managers, that is, having to pay for your service. Perhaps you can offer a three month free management ‘trial period’. Certainly not something I would be offering to every client, but as a tool to show a DIY owner all the benefits of using a property manager – you can structure this so that fees are re-paid at the conclusion of the period so they ‘experience’ paying fees and it doesn’t loom as something that will happen once they commit to you. It is of major importance in this time period that the owner is communicated with at every opportunity – this shows the client how much work you are doing (and what is involved with property management) and in consequence helps to “bed” them into using your service.

You also need to make it easy for them to use your service, and to find out how to use your service. Does your office have listing or presentation kits for clients? These kits provide an easy to follow visual summary of all the things you do as a property manager and how to engage your services. A great technique I have used for years is summarizing what they can achieve with me as opposed to managing it themselves, both in maintaining their capital asset and with better tenant selection, securing tenants quicker and using more advertising media.

A point where many businesses fail on gaining DIY landlords is on their follow up. More often than not, business from a DIY owner is all too often achieved on the third or fourth bite. You should ensure that owner details are obtained from ALL enquiries; this is your avenue for follow up as it makes follow up phone calls, emails or newsletters easy to do. Make sure that you call these people to find out ‘how things are going’, perhaps create a list of potential DIY landlords and follow them up on a regular basis. A majority of DIY landlords will at some point seriously consider using a property manager – and if you are being diligent with your follow up then the conversion will be made.

These ideas will not cost the business much in outgoings – certainly three months’ free management fees will cost the business approximately one week’s rent, however, if that business is “not on the hook” then it is three months of nothing anyway isn’t it?……