For too long the high staff turnover rate of property managers has been something that has been widely accepted in Australia.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics noted job mobility rates in the real estate industry at more than 10 per cent in 2020 – one of the highest mobility rates across the board before the pandemic hit.
There were also reports out there that put the average time in a role for property managers at just 11 months, with them often feeling overworked, underappreciated and totally stressed out.
This state of play impacts everyone. Landlords are annoyed by inconsistency in service and communication; agencies are forced to spend time and resources filling constantly vacant roles; and the property managers themselves often leave feeling stressed by the demands of their workload and are completely burnt out.
Property management by its very nature is reactive. Property managers have to react to maintenance issues across an extensive property portfolio, they have to react to the demands of tenants, owners and suppliers, and the volume of work is high.
Add to this the fact that property management doesn’t get the same organisational priority as the sales side of the business does, so it often misses out on the right resourcing and support. It’s little wonder that property managers leave and the churn rate remains high.
These factors often put an incredible amount of pressure on property managers and can cause them to fall behind in their work and spend a great deal of time putting out fires because owners and tenants are frustrated. Somehow over time the industry has accepted that this is ok.
At Kolmeo we believe the key to fixing this problem lies in changing the systems and processes that the industry has been built on. We believe technology plays an important role in changing the way things have traditionally been done.
We want to address the complexities of the industry, remove the various pain points for everyone, and ultimately increase job satisfaction of property managers.
For Kolmeo, we bring this to life by giving property managers control over their day, allowing them to complete their job anywhere, to share their workload with colleagues and communicate with owners, tenants and suppliers effortlessly.
The transparency and control that the tech gives owners and tenants, takes the load of the property manager needing to manually manage extra communications and processes, and instead focus on better relationship building and the higher value work.
On top of that, tech shouldn’t be difficult to learn. Onboarding new property management teammates into a real estate agency shouldn’t involve taking your existing property managers off their job for weeks and months so that they can teach new starters how to navigate an archaic property management system.
With Kolmeo, one of our core design principles in building our software is designing tech that can be picked up by anyone to complete a task. For the owner and tenant, that might seem like an obvious goal when designing software.
But why should the property manager be any different? Onboarding a property manager to Kolmeo software should be as simple as picking up the latest social media app and working your way around it.
In addition to control and transparency, coupled with the ease of getting a job done on the system, we believe property managers need one more thing to start taking that heat out of the industry and instead start normalising a healthier and happier property manager role.
As we take away the pain points, give property managers more control with better tools and tech, we need to celebrate and highlight the value of this industry. There are many inspiring stories we need to bring to the fore, and many qualities to being a property manager.
Property management should be fun and fulfilling, and an aspiration for those deciding on their vocation. And Kolmeo will be there to support this change from where we are today to a more engaging, productive and fun experience for property managers.
