Quiet Quitting in Property Management | How to spot the early signs
When deciding whether to give someone a job, a manager will often ask the following two questions:
“Can they do the job?”
“Do they WANT to do the job?”
Only if the answer to both questions is ‘Yes’ should you give them the job. Because if the motivation is there without the ability they are going to be a strain on the business.
And the same applies in reverse, if they have the ability to do the job but don’t want to, the result will be just as disastrous.
They won’t go the extra step, they might cut corners, they more than likely won’t represent your business the way you would like them to.
But if the answer to both of those questions is ‘Yes’, then give the job!
Personal Tragedy
The problem is…things can change.
Something can change in a property manager’s life.
They could be cruising along, thriving at work, then suddenly out of the blue a family member gets sick, or they break up their partner and they just “check out”.
They stop doing things.
And then they might leave a month or two later.
In property management, a month or two is definitely enough time for a portfolio to become a mess.
A lot can happen in that time, so how do we pick up on that in our current systems?
How do we support Property Managers who might be going through personal tragedy?
How can we pick up on a Property Manager “checking out” before their portfolio gets into a mess?
How do we avoid the nasty surprise of only finding out too late that someone has dropped the ball?
Quiet quitting
It is not always a personal tragedy that causes someone to become actively disengaged, or “check out”.
It could be due to any number of reasons.
They might be burnt out, have another job lined up, or maybe just don’t care any more for whatever reason.
Recently, the media was full of stories about people “quiet quitting” and the “great resignation”.
“Quiet quitting“, a term that was originally coined in a viral TikTok video, refers to the trend of not outright quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond.
Of doing the absolute bare minimum so that you don’t get fired.
They might be certain jobs where this is not disastrous for the business, but not Property Managers.
Property Managers are at their heart relationship managers.
Quiet Quitting in Property Management can spell disaster. Angry tenants, bad reviews, landlords leaving.
Headaches.
So how do we pick up on this in our current systems?
Picking up the early signs with OneDash
Maintaining oversight over a large team requires more than just an attentive boss.
It requires a system.
A system that didn’t allow people to fall through the cracks.
A system like OneDash.
For one Brisbane-based property management company with a rent roll of 4,300, avoiding a scenario where their property managers became actively disengaged was crucial.
We spoke with their Head of Property Management about how he managed to maintain visibility over such a large team.
“Before OneDash, if I wanted to open my laptop and check every single task that is due in the business today, it would take me at least an hour and a half.”
“If I wanted to see where a property manager was up to with their renewals in PropertyMe individually, I’d have to go into each property and see where the correspondence is.
“That audit would take me way too long, so it generally wouldn’t get done, if I’m honest.”
“Now it takes me 30 seconds.”
“I can see every single task that my whole team needs to get by the end of today”
“I can see 75 tasks on applications, 68 listing updates due today. There are 95 rent arrears conversations, 60 routines, 109 vacates.”
“That’s across the whole business, but I can also filter it by Property Manager as well.
“So at the end of the day if someone on my team has a whole bunch of overdue tasks, I can pinpoint it straight away.”
“That’s when I’d give them a call and be like ‘Hey, what’s going on?'”
“They might have something going on in their lives, or they might need some extra support.”
“Either way I’m picking up on it early, before the tasks start to back up.”
They say that a week is a long time in politics. If that’s the case then a month is an eternity in property management.
