Want to know an undervalued component to saving time?

There are a tonne of hot quick time management tips I could write about here. Believe you me, I have found many a faster and easier ways to do things in order to remove as much stress as possible from our crazy property management worlds.

However in this instance, I want to focus on the importance of having a good relationship with your clients, and how taking a bit of extra time to build and work on those relationships can actually save us time in the future.

In particular the strength of our relationship with that client may a direct effect on the amount of time spent on dealing with difficult situations. We continually see that generally this 20% of difficult situations take up 80% of our time.

However the way I see it, the better relationships we have the more easily we are able to prevent issues, resolve disputes, settle negotiations, predict behaviours and effectively manage the people we are dealing with. This means, that the percentage of time spent on dealing with these situations, will minimise.

Of course we will still have what I like to call the soul ‘zappers’, where there is no winning, and we may need to make a decision as to whether we want to be in a relationship with that client.

I find we spend so much time at the beginning chasing and wooing our prospective landlords, building a relationship to win them over, however I cannot help feeling like often the landlord is left feeling like they are not getting what was promised to them in the courtship stage.

Because of this - resentment can build and it becomes much easier to fall into a dispute or argument, or we find landlord has a lack of trust in what we do making it harder for us to get the smallest of tasks complete without tedious backwards and forwards strain.

How can we spend a bit more time on building relationships throughout the tenancy not just at the start? How are we ensuring we are delivering what was promised? How do we need adapt our own personalities and behaviours to meet the needs of our clients when necessary to meet their needs? 

I would recommend to start with picking up the phone and having a conversation with your client on a regular basis, continuing to find out more about them and how to best deal with them. Next time you’re thinking of sending an email, pick up the phone and open a conversation, not just starting an email chain (which has its’ own time saving component in itself).

Food for thought...

- Hermione Gardiner