Property: Are you a Leader or an In-Betweener?

If you’re reading this article, you’re almost certainly a Leader or an In-Betweener. Do you know which you are? I can help you find out with a few simple questions. I’m a “systems” person, and looking at inefficient processes and finding improvements has always been a strength of mine. Which is probably why I find myself in the property industry.

The Leaders - They are the forward-thinkers who understand that there's always room for improvement.

The property industry, renowned for being steeped in traditional practices, with its core operations still relying on ancient methods and technologies, is often considered one of the last huge opportunities for digital transformation. As humans we are naturally programmed to seek comfort and resist change. However, it's crucial to remember that progress demands evolution and that evolution requires us to push beyond our comfort zone.

Just because something is functional does not mean it is efficient or optimal. In this digital age, with the proliferation of property management solutions, sticking to traditional methods could mean losing out on significant efficiency gains, potential cost savings, and the enhancement of customer service. And that is a big cost to pay for a bit of comfort.

Since starting COHO we identified three three categories of property managers:

The Leaders - They are the forward-thinkers who understand that there's always room for improvement. They're constantly on the hunt for more efficient systems, processes, and tools. They understand the need to adapt and evolve to stay ahead in this fast-paced industry.

The In-Betweeners - These individuals are usually so engrossed in their day-to-day operations that they hardly find time to explore new tools or technologies. Yet, they appreciate the need for digital transformation and are willing to take the leap if assured of quick, seamless transitions.

The Complacent - This group is perfectly content with their current systems and processes. They show little to no interest in digital transformation or in exploring potential improvements, mainly due to their comfort with the status quo.

Since we’ve almost exclusively spoken to in-bound leads at COHO, we mostly only ever encounter “The Leaders” and “The In-Betweeners”. The Leaders are great.. they’re the ones that track us down and draw out every improvement they can find. The In-Betweeners are usually eager to talk, and recognise the potential to change and improve, but tend to focus on the reasons they should keep doing what they’re doing.

But we don’t know what we don’t know. How do we know a process could be improved until we see someone else doing it better? Well, here are my questions to help you figure out how good your processes are, and as result which category you are in:

1. When you add a new tenancy, how much double-keying are you doing? Have you accepted it as “a way of life” that you need to enter the same data into multiple places, or have you actively looked for a solution?
2. How dependant are you on having to manually pull data from different systems to create usable reports that your business relies on?
3. How much do you rely on asking other team members for information that isn’t immediately available to you, such as being in their email, or WhatsApp.
4. How difficult do you find it to train new staff across all of your systems, and how often do they make mistakes? This is particularly important when you’re using lower-paid transient staff or VAs.

The Leaders will have already answered these, and looked (successfully or not) for solutions. The In-Betweeners will likely recognise many of these issues, but perhaps have decided there are other problems to focus on instead. The Complacent have either considered this an accepted part of life, or perhaps defensively consider they have no issues here.

As people in the property industry, we know it’s a pain to move house - between the conveyancing process, the moving vans, the renovations and finally just geting used to the life change. But we do it because it fits in our vision of where we are and where we want to be. Software is no different.

When we built COHO we focused heavily on trying to solve these problems… eliminating double entry, and bringing as many processes as we can to a single place under a simple-to-use interface. When all your processes work well together there is less training, fewer mistakes,more powerful opportunities for analysing data, but more importantly, no double entry.

If you haven’t already, take the first step in checking us out today on a live demo at https://coho.life. It could be the transformation you need!