Heidi Rosin, who has worked in property management for 25 years, founded Little Bird Properties in Canberra a decade ago, wanting property management to stand apart from sales as a specialty in its own right.
Speaking at the PM/ONE conference in Sydney, Heidi said the agency had grown organically to 800 properties over 10 years without paying for referrals or buying a rent roll. She said word of mouth became its biggest source of business as it built its reputation with no marketing budget.
Heidi said 82 per cent of the agency’s appraisals in the previous 12 months had come from direct referrals. With roughly 800 owners and 800 tenants, she described the business as having 1600 potential BDMs working for it for free.
She said the business is deliberately selective about who it takes on.
Heidi said clients who create ongoing difficulty for property managers and cannot be realigned are not kept on, because the impact on the team is not worth it.
Team leader Emily Clugston told the room the agency built its operating system around “care and compliance”, with checklist touch points built in for admin staff, property managers and the leadership team at different stages of a tenancy.
“The care is obviously really important for building those client relationships and then compliance,” Emily said, “obviously protects the business with the business model that we have.”
Emily reported a 99 per cent client retention rate and a 97 per cent client satisfaction rate, up from 90 per cent the year before.
Heidi said client feedback, including complaints, is treated as valuable rather than a problem to avoid.
“We don’t view a complaint as bad, we view it as a way to improve,” she said.
Heidi added that she personally makes check-in calls to clients despite running the business, saying the calls land differently coming from the owner rather than a property manager.
Heidi said clients are often surprised when her call turns out to be a simple check-in rather than news of a problem.
Property manager Zhanna Bowles, describing herself as the first “homegrown” team member at Little Bird, said the training approach focused on explaining reasoning rather than simply issuing instructions.
“I didn’t have people just telling me what I should be doing, but why I wasn’t,” Zhanna said.
“And that was so crucial because I wasn’t just doing the job at the end of the day.”
Zhanna said the business built in structured support so new property managers were never left to work through problems alone, with help, in her words, only ever a few desks away.
Actionable
- Decline clients whose behaviour is toxic to team culture.
- Build check-in touch points across admin, PM and leadership roles.
- Treat client complaints as feedback for improvement, not failure.
- Have senior leaders personally call clients, not just property managers.
- Explain the reasoning behind tasks when training new property managers.
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