The busy leasing season is coming to a close.

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How’d it go? If you’re like many property managers, you only now feel like you’re coming out of your leasing season stress.

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Here’s a good question to ask yourself as you come out of the leasing season: “Do I ever want to go through another leasing season like that again?”

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The answer might be yes. Maybe it went really well. Maybe you and your team felt completely on top of things and weren’t stressed by how much needed to be done. Maybe you weren’t constantly plagued by phone calls from irate owners or tenants. Maybe you got a bunch of glowing reviews praising the experience you provided. 

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Or maybe not.

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What to Do During the “Slow Season”

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Now the “slow season” is starting.

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This is the time to carve out time to work on your business during this time and guard that time jealously.

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Right now, the market is softening and vacancies are longer. That’s a different issue, but it also affects what you should be doing during this time to structure and strengthen your company and make it more resilient when market changes occur.

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The important thing to remember in all this is that property management doesn’t have to be so ridiculously stressful. 

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Now’s your chance to do something other than just run around putting out fires all day. What do you need to do over the next couple months to build a stronger infrastructure and capacity to manage the properties you have and the properties you want to gain in the next year? 

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Keep one word at the forefront of your mind. FOCUS. It is easy to look around and see how much you need to do, fill your plate to overflowing and then have all your projects and grand plans derailed by unrealistic expectations and unclear priorities.

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You need clear goals to move towards. You need commitment to those goals and clear steps and timelines to achieve them. 

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To get that clarity, you need information. What exactly happened during leasing season? 

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Then you need a framework to process that information into clear objectives. 

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Start by Collecting Data

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The first step is to collect information on how the leasing season went. You need to know where things fell through the cracks, both the stuff out in the open and obvious and the stuff that went under the radar.

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You need to establish your baseline so you can create goals to work towards next year. 

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A great place to start is with your four main leasing season processes: Lease Renewals, Move Outs, Applications, and Move Ins.

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You may or may not have these processes documented anywhere - as a policy, checklist, or process. If you don’t, it may be more difficult to pull any useful data about the processes, but that’s okay! Whatever you can pull becomes your baseline to build off of, and creating processes becomes one of your goals to the slow season.

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Pull as much of the following information as you can about each process:

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✅ Lease Renewals

• How many lease renewals did you run during leasing season? What percentage of your portfolio has leases ending during the busy season?
• How long did they take to complete? How does that compare to your desired completion speed for lease renewals?
• How many leases were renewed? How many tenants moved out and why?
• How many owners churned after tenants moved out? Are you tracking why they churned?

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🏡 Move Outs

• How many move outs did you and your team handle? 
• How many tasks were done on time? How many took too long to complete?
• Security deposit depositions - how many of these were completed on time? 
• Communication - was it predominantly proactive or reactive? You may not have quantitative data on this, but your goal should always be to provide information proactively, before it is asked for. Don’t wait until tenants or owners are calling you. 

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🏠 Applications

• Volume - how many applications did you process? What is the average across all your vacant properties?
• Communication - did you get complaints that you were not following up with applicants? 
• What were the repetitive questions you kept getting from applicants? What information is not being communicated well enough throughout the application process?

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📆 Move Ins

• How many move-ins did you and your team handle? 
• How many tasks were done on time? How many took too long to complete?
• Communication - just like move outs, was it predominantly proactive or reactive? There’s a huge opportunity here to automate and streamline the move in communication to provide all the info up front, and still include a human element (like incorporating video into your process!) 

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Next, Review Your Reviews 

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How many reviews did you get? How many were positive and how many negative? From owners? From tenants? 

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What were they about? What are the major themes you can identify?

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We won’t go too deep into this right here, but you can learn more about how to use your reviews to improve your company and how to get more reviews in this blog post.

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Where Would the Wheels Fall Off First?

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Okay, now it’s time to sit down with your team. Start by stating the goal: you are looking for things to improve in advance of next year’s leasing season. 

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Chat with your team about what stressed them out during the leasing season. What would they change? How much overtime or weekend work did they have to do to stay on top of things? 

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Which process took the most of your team’s time and mental capacity? How much overtime is connected to this process?  

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How valuable were the tasks that took up most of their time? Busy work that can be automated shouldn't be taking precedence over tasks that require human connection. 

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Finish by asking: if you were managing twice as many doors next year with the processes and resources you have right now, where would the wheels fall off first?

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It’s really important to identify whether these issues appear only during the busy season. Don’t hire into a seasonal problem - what will you do with the extra capacity during the slow times? You need to build systems that can endure the fluctuations - systems designed for a higher level of throughput than what you are dealing with today. 

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What Will Next Year Look Like?

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What do you want next year’s leasing season to look like? Set goals and measure them. Describe and write down the experience and the level of service you want to provide to your clients. 

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What do you need to do to make that happen? 

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First, you need to start tracking data points around your main issues that you’ve identified above. Start with your baseline, make a goal and then a game plan.

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Remember not to chase perfectionism - small, incremental changes are the ones that actually happen, as opposed to lofty goals with no clear path to achieve them. Also, it will never feel like the “right time” to start something. That mindset will hold you back. You definitely don’t want to wait until it feels like “I should have had this yesterday”.

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Get clear on the goals by identifying with your team (be sure to involve them in the process) three quick wins that you could make in their processes to streamline them. 

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If you don't have your processes documented yet, you need to start there. This is crucial. If you and your team don’t even know what is supposed to happen, how do you know that it is happening correctly or even at all? But be careful - policy and checklists won't cut it either. There's simply too many minute things to keep track of in property management. You need actionable, automated, living and breathing processes that are right there with you as you do the work. That is exactly what LeadSimple Operations is designed for.

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Once you have an established process, other ways to improve your processes are:

• Cutting out unneeded tasks or automating them
• Setting up basic automations throughout the process (like sending lockbox codes automatically)
• Finding ways to include human connection without the need for a human touch on everything (such as setting up an automated series of emails with informational videos throughout the application and move in processes)
• Cutting down on inbound calls and inquiries by providing information proactively (sending emails at key points in your processes) and enabling self-serve (documenting all the frequently asked questions and making them available to your clients)
• Automating data entry (see LeadSimple's integrations with the major property accounting softwares)
• Centralizing information in one location (make it easy to find)
• Setting up LeadSimple Autopilot to start your processes automatically

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Learn more about LeadSimple Operations - how we can help you create tenants who never leave and owners who never sell. Schedule a discovery call today!