“One’s perception is one’s reality” – It’s a common saying in life, and has a profound impact on the world of business as well.
Here’s the thing: Customers are only willing to pay a price for a product or service if it matches their perceived value of that item. If you truly understand their expectations, needs and risks, you are in a great position to meet and exceed those needs and expectations, and lower their risk. Possessing this insight, can be a powerful tool to communicate your real value and charge a premium fee for your service. This phenomenon is one of the biggest challenges that property managers face today, particularly when it comes to managing sectional title and HOA communities.
You see, in reality, trustees and owners hardly ever understand the significant amount of time and resources you spend on managing their community. They simply don’t understand or see the value that you are adding as a property manager. In their supposed absence of value, price often becomes an issues. This is a real threat to your business, your scalability and profitability as you are essentially putting a ceiling on the possibility to generate additional income.
In our experience of working with small to large property managers, the main reason for this situation is the lack of proper reporting by property managers to their communities. In most cases, property managers only report on the financial status of a community each month. This is, of course, one of the most important aspects of what is expected by the trustees, but there is so much more that property managers do – and so many more responsibilities that ultimately fall on trustees’ shoulders – that never get properly reported on. As a result, the Managing Agent never adds to the perceived value of his or her services.
So, why do property managers offer limited reporting to trustees and directors? There are two main reasons:
- Property managers use multiple platforms to perform their functions, making it very difficult to compile a single, comprehensive, and professional report.
- Compiling these reports manually is extremely time-consuming.
Most property managers use what they’ve got and make the best of what they’ve got. With limited tools and limited time, is becomes a huge challenge to communicate the real value you are adding to your client. By expanding the scope of reporting, and consistently providing quality data regarding a specific community, a property manager can communicate trends, threats and opportunities that really showcases their value as property asset manager.
So, what should a property manager ideally include in their monthly report?
- Key Financials, which should include
- Administrative actual vs budget
- Reserve fund actual vs budget (this report is a legal requirement)
- Balance sheet
- Debtors analysis
- Compliance Report – to better legal compliance and reduce risk of non-compliance
- Transfers conducted within a community – showcases asset value growth (or decline)
- Warnings and penalties issued
- Any tasks performed by the property manager
- Supplier payment approvals by Trustees
Ideally you would want to produce such a monthly report and send it to all your trustees across all communities with a click of a button. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say, “Check your inbox – I just emailed all those details to you,” or, “We provide that info via real-time reporting on the client portal”?
Unfortunately, if you’re using multiple platforms to perform your property management functions, that’s pretty much impossible. Thankfully, using multiple platforms isn’t the only way to do things. There is a better way!
WeconnectU Property Management Software Solution puts everything in one place
The WeconnectU Property Management software is the most advanced end-to-end property management solution specifically designed for the management of sectional title and HOA communities. With a custom-built financial solution as a backbone, fully integrated with all the key workflows of sectional title and HOA management, managing agents are now fully empowered to manage their communities with one, effective, central solution. Our real-time Business Report is a feature that our clients love because for the first time they can generate and send a customised, comprehensive, and professional Community Business Report every month. This Business Report is generated with a click of a button and gets sent via mail to every Trustee in every community, every month. How does this Business Report benefit you and your business? There are a number of significant benefits:
- It communicates all financial and operational KPI’s in a single report
- Saves time as the report in generated with a click of button
- Reduces time spent on emails as Business Reports get sent out monthly via automated, but personalised bulk emails
- Reduces the number of meetings, and reduces the time spend in meetings
- Trustees are kept informed and can log into a portal to view live reporting at any point in time
- You are communicating the value you are adding as a property managers
WeconnectU truly empowers managing agents to report on all the key aspects of successful community management every month at the click of a button. With the increasing responsibilities laid on trustees, it’s becoming more and more important to ensure complete transparency between them and their managing agent. It’s equally important that clients, trustees and homeowners have a complete understanding of their managing agent’s value and the massive number of hours spent on their community every month. So the only way to effectively achieve this is to ensure your clients receive a comprehensive monthly report or, even better, have access to detailed live reporting functionality like that provided by WeconnectU.